Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (2 page)

Before the tsunami, the great tragedy that everyone skirted in conversation in my Japanese family was World War II. On August 9, 1945, my great-uncle was out fishing in the Pacific, far enough away from Nagasaki, Japan, where he lived, that he missed the immediate impact of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans that day. My great-aunt was in their new house outside Nagasaki; the entire family had fled the city only a few days earlier because my great-uncle feared a repeat of the bombing of Hiroshima.

I heard this story many times during my childhood. Back then it made me feel that my great-uncle was a clever man. As an adult, I realized he was also very lucky, because cleverness alone cannot keep you safe.

I wondered if my family in Iwaki would also be lucky and smart.

I wanted to know, and I did not want to know. I kept dipping into the world of the Internet, with its videos of water raging over the farmland and crushed ferries, and then quickly backed out. Not looking at the videos kept reality at bay, because the images of
the coastline did not match the Japan that I knew and loved from childhood.

In the Japan that I knew, I boarded the J
ban Line train from Ueno station in T
ky
and traveled up the northeast coast to Iwaki. If it was spring, the
bent
stalls in Ueno station sold cherry blossom–themed meals to eat on the train: pink cakes made of
mochi
rice paste cut into flower shapes. The train would stop at Kairakuen, a park in the city of Mito that is famous for its plum blossoms.

Not long after leaving Kairakuen, the train curved along the tracks and began to hug the coast. Then I knew that I had entered T
hoku, the northern region of Japan where the goddesses and demons of legend seem alive and seafood is sweet. My Japanese grandfather was particularly fond of
mehikari
, or “flashing eyes,” a succulent fish that is an Iwaki specialty.

Often on this journey, I would switch to a local train to get off at Nakoso, a town famous for its inns and hot springs, and formerly a way station on the footpath connecting T
hoku to Edo, the old name for T
ky
. My favorite spa, Sekinoyu, is just yards off the beach, a vegetation-thick cliff at its back. The waves of the North Pacific crash right outside the windows.

I did not see how the spa could have survived the tsunami. Its Web site was eerily still online, with numerous photos of ocean views through the windows of the bathing room and the dining rooms; no status update was posted on its main page.

Now the J
ban train was not running any farther than Mito; past this, the tsunami had battered train tracks and highways, making passage nearly impossible. A section of one train was found on its side just north of Iwaki, the cars abandoned.

As a child traveling through Japan with my mother, I kept an illustrated journal of our adventures. In one entry, I was swimming in the waters off the beach at
arai, a town located on the T
hoku
coast whose name means “big washing,” which sounded romantic before the tsunami. Now
arai was covered with sludge. In another illustration, I was standing under the gigantic, chandelier-like ornaments of Sendai’s famed Tanabata star festival. But Sendai had been pummeled, and its airport closed. In yet another diary entry, my mother was knee high in dark blue water and holding an umbrella while I clung to her back. I remember laughing as my mother carried me to the safety of an elevated train platform, but we were also afraid. What if the flooding did not stop?