Facing the Wave Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Gretel Ehrlich

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Columbia University Press: Excerpt from Old Taoist: The Life, Art and Poetry of Kodojin by Stephen Addiss. Copyright © 2000 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press. • HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from “Die while you live!” from The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, edited by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker. Copyright © 1996 by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker. Foreword copyright © 1996 by Robert Aitken. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ehrlich, Gretel.

  Facing the wave : a journey in the wake of the tsunami / Gretel Ehrlich.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90732-5

  1. Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan, 2011. 2. Tsunami damage—Japan—Tohoku Region. 3. Tsunami relief—Japan—Tohoku Region. 4. Disaster victims—Japan—Tohoku Region. I. Title.

  CG222.J3E47 2012 363.34′94095211—dc23 2012020400

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Ben Wiseman

  Maps by Mapping Specialists

  v3.1

  For Neal

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  The Swimmer

  June June

  Uncle Kazuyoshi

  Radiation News

  Every Cove

  Ishinomaki

  At Ishinomaki Where Matsuo Bashō Once Wrote a Poem

  Ookawa Elementary School

  Night

  Shodo Harada Roshi’s Newsletter

  Three Temples

  Night

  The Van

  Two Waves

  Radiation News

  Mushiatsui

  Miyako

  Hirayama Masayuki: The Idle Blog of a Fisherman

  North Miyako Bay

  On the Road Again

  All Sentient Beings

  Abyss-san’s Mountain Home

  Shunyata

  Volunteering

  Evening Ash

  Islands in the Streams of Story

  Mori

  An Apprentice Shaman

  Nobiru

  Night

  Sorrow

  Hirayama’s Blog

  Radiation News

  September September 11

  Ishinomaki and the River

  Autumn Equinox

  Great-Uncle and Great-Aunt

  Sendai

  Kayuko, Grandmother, and Kazuyoshi

  Great-Uncle Satoru and Great-Aunt Satsuko

  Typhoon, or an Ocean of the Streams of Story

  Hirayama’s Blog

  After the Typhoon

  Hirayama’s Blog

  Floating Island and the Fukushima 50

  December December

  Miyako

  Abyss-san’s Mountain Home

  Ito-San, the Geisha

  Ofunato

  Rikuzentakata

  Radiation News

  Hirayama’s Blog

  Ocean

  Morning Sun

  Shounji

  On the Road Again

  Ikoji

  Epilogue

  Persons (In Order of Appearance)

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  There are two journeys

  in every odyssey, one on worried water,

  the other crouched and motionless, without noise.

  —DEREK WALCOTT

  The Swimmer

  Mizu no michi. The Path of Water. How one swims in it and what it teaches along the way. A wave rises from a seismic rip in the seafloor. It spreads out low and travels at jet speed, mounding up as it hits shore. In Kamaishi, Japan, a forty-year-old fisherman is caught by the first thirty-foot-high tsunami wave to enter the narrow harbor after the 9.0 earthquake that hit northeastern Japan that March 11 day.

  Kikuchi-san was driving when his car was almost shaken off the road. Six minutes later, he turned toward his parents’ house to rescue them, knowing that a tsunami would come, but his father was going the other way, bicycling toward the harbor.

  “Don’t go there,” Kikuchi-san yelled out, but the elderly man didn’t hear. By the time Kikuchi-san caught up with him, his father had climbed the seawall and was clutching a steel ladder, facing the sea.

  Kikuchi-san remembers a roar. Water was receding, surging backwards until the ocean floor lay exposed. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Kikuchi-san yelled, but his father didn’t move.

  The roar intensified. A white line appeared at the horizon. The wave was coming fast. As Kikuchi-san climbed up to get to his father, water came at him. His father shook his head, refusing to budge. One last look, then the young fisherman jumped off the wall. When he turned back, his father was gone. “My father chose to stay, and in that second I accepted it, and thought it would be the same for me too.”

  Water towered over him. He saw a nine-ton squid boat teetering on the wave’s crest, its glass attractor lamps swinging and shattering. The Wave swept him into the river that splits the town of Kamaishi in half. He climbed onto a metal roof, but the water caught him there too, sucking him backwards, pulling him out to sea. The water roiled. It was black with diesel and gas, sewage, dirt, and blood, and Kikuchi-san rolled and thrashed inside its debris-marbled night.

  The collapsed wave took the fisherman all over the place. Heavy house beams and pieces of boats slammed into him. He grabbed a breath, went down, and shot up again. Shattered roof tiles skittered by. Water surged and retreated. Another wave drove him deeper, then tossed him sideways and up. He remembers seeing two concrete pillars zoom by as he was pulled under the bridge. His head broke water: he could breathe.

  A piece of plastic buoy appeared and he grabbed it. “Retreating water took me back out and another wave carried me in again,” he told me. Dead bodies were floating, parts of houses catapulted, cars tumbled, a floating roof banged into a bridge and flipped on its side. The present was splintered. He was lost in a lost world.

  “The wave came into the river behind the station. I must have been swept up from the ocean into it, past the petrol station.” As the first wave flattened out, the roaring stopped. He remembers silence. Because he could hear, he knew he was alive, not dreaming. “I was stranded in the debris. I couldn’t go anywhere. It was so quiet, I heard a dog whimpering somewhere, but couldn’t see it. It was so sad.” He was brokenhearted, and like the dog, thought he would die.

  There was a roar. He looked: a wave was coming back again. Water covered him and he was driven toward one of the bridge pillars. He saw a rope dangling. “I barely got to the pillar before the ocean began dragging me back, so I reached for the rope and grabbed it. My lower half was submerged. Debris was being pulled out, but I kept holding on. As the water drew away, my legs were pulled out in front of me. I was holding tight, floating on my back with my head up. At first I wasn’t worried about losing my grip, but then, my hands got very cold.”

  Water came in false tidal sequences. Between waves, he remembers another period of stillness. “The sea was a lagoon. A log floated past. I climbed onto it.” Sitting astride the dead tree he could see the extent of the destruction for the first time. The entire port had been demolished. Fishing boats had been hurled onto the tops of buildings. He lost his boat. Almost every house was gone, including his own. A beam floated by: he was swimming in the remnants of his past.

  As the water retreated, he lay on top of the log and paddled toward land. With mud and debris under his feet, he stood, and realized the wave had taken his pants: he was naked. “There was nothing I could do,” he said. He saw people standing on a huge mountain of coal and climbed up to join them. A woman yelled, “There’s another wave coming.” He thought he would die this time, but the water never reached them. He remembers standing there, shivering, for a long time.

  Finally he saw that the Kamaishi Port office building was still standing. “The third floor looked okay, so I went that way. I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. I saw another sweater sticking out of the window of a wrecked car, so I tied it around my backside.”

  Kikuchi-san swam and stumbled through rubble. He doesn’t remember how long it took. In a town of more than 39,000 people, 935 had already died. He crawled into the third-story window. There were 40 people inside. They tried to warm him. He was hypothermic and bleeding; they administered first aid and pulled a pair of gloves over his feet.

  A woman he knew came to his side. They didn’t speak. Together they watched the sky grow dark. With no city lights on they saw bright stars. Someone lit candles. Desks were pushed together so he could lie on them. The night seemed peaceful; the tsunami, a dream. But the continuous aftershocks jolted him into an understanding of what had happened, and he wondered if his family was alive. When he woke, it was morning.

  Up on the roof he looked out on a flattened city. He knew he had to join the throngs wandering through the debris. It was hard to move b
ut he found a stick to use as a cane. Back across the rough plain of wreckage, he climbed up to the bridge. His wife passed him and their eyes met, but she only nodded. When she spoke it was to tell him that their sixteen-year-old daughter was still missing.

  They set off to look for her. A few hours later, a fisherman stopped them, and said he’d seen the girl, that she was working with the city firemen who were giving first aid to tsunami victims. For the first time since the disaster, Kikuchi-san cried.

  Later, he found his mother at an evacuation center. He kneeled in front of her and quietly told her that her husband had been washed off the seawall. She shook her head and said nothing.

  In the next two days, Kikuchi-san went to find his father’s body. Fierce aftershocks continued. He dragged his aching body across the ruins of the town. His house was gone; he had seen only a few other fishermen. Many had taken their boats out to sea. He didn’t know who was dead and who was alive.

  A temporary morgue had been set up in a school gym for unidentified bodies. Kikuchi-san found body #59, and a written description of his father. He unzipped the body bag. His father’s watch was still ticking but the man’s lungs had filled with seawater, and his heart had stopped. He was sixty-nine years old.

  “He spent his whole life on the water,” Kikuchi-san said. “And even though it took him, I love the sea; it’s all I have.”

  June

  The more I lose the happier I am.

  —KAZUYOSHI OTOMO

  From under a thin futon on tatami that no longer smells like grass, I hear the rattle of shoji screens until a seismic wave carries the house forward and upward in a hard jolt—a slice of contained chaos—and drops it again, down the face of a geologic wave to Earth’s uncertain crust.

  Masumi’s cell phone sounds an alarm. “Jishin!” she cries out—earthquake—and rushes fast for the stairs. There’s a thud and the roaring noiseless noise that follows, drilling deep inside the ear, deeper than touch, almost beyond hearing. A dog barks. In the distance the tsunami-warning siren sounds. It’s dawn on the western outskirts of Sendai.

  By the time Masumi, her parents, and I gather downstairs the shaking has stopped, but Kazuko, Masumi’s mother, is still holding the kitchen cabinets shut with one outstretched arm. Since the big quake and tsunami on March 11, which devastated almost four hundred miles of Japan’s northeastern coast and caused the cooling apparatus of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to fail, resulting in three hydrogen explosions and the massive nuclear meltdowns in four nuclear reactors, she’s replaced broken dishes three times and now keeps the house stocked with bottled water and extra food.

  “It wasn’t much but …” Masumi begins. Her mother finishes the sentence: “It’s still scary.” She dispenses green tea from a large thermos into small cups. We drink in silence. Tectonic plates are always locking up, warping Earth’s crust and moving, and a prediction has been floating around that another big earthquake is coming, and Japan’s northeast coast, called Tohoku, will be ravaged again by a tsunami.

  Upstairs I roll up my futon. The smell of green tea, coffee, rice, and fried eggs wafts through the small house, mixing with the savage beauty of geological violence that continues to take place. There have been over eight hundred aftershocks greater than 4.5 since March, and it’s only June now. In the hallway Masumi confides that, so far, she’s been unable to take photographs of the destruction.

  Masumi is thirty-five, long-limbed and high-strung; she came back to her parents’ house after a ten-year stint in western Canada to get her doctorate in photography. “I should be taking pictures, but it feels like an invasion, like going somewhere I shouldn’t go,” she says.

  Another aftershock comes. Masumi braces herself, and flees downstairs. This is my first time staying in a modern Japanese house with neon lights and a living room full of Western furniture, and as things rattle, I long for the recesses of dark rooms and deep eaves, where the shaking of Earth is also the shaking of shadows, where what Jun’ichiro Tanizaki called “the laws of darkness” are stirred.

  * * *

  On March 11, 2011, Japan’s earth-altar broke. The descending oceanic plate—a slab of lithosphere—slid under the overlying plate that carries the island of Honshu. Pulling and grinding, the subduction zone was pulverized. Its topmost plate bulged and dropped, and a rupture occurred: an undersea rip, 6 feet across, 310 miles long, and 120 miles wide.

  Friction is stress; stress is energy. The earth moved. A wave was born. Three sorrows: quake, tsunami, meltdown. In the quake’s “seismic moment,” the total energy released was two hundred thousand times the energy at the earth’s surface, equal to six hundred million times the energy of the bomb dropped at Hiroshima. In six shaking minutes the northeastern coast of Japan was torn off its roots with an undersea roar that could be heard on hydrophones in Oregon.

  Seismic waves are not tidal. There is no moon-pulling or wind-pushing involved. They occur when ocean-floor earthquakes displace seawater at the fractured fault line. The first thing to reach the coast is the trough, what might be called “the emptiness aspect of the wave.” The drawback is severe: the ocean floor is bared. The backed-up water is a fist ready to spring, and when the waves finally arrive, their kinetic energy packs a punch equal to, say, seventeen hundred pounds in the face. Forward-rolling, they drag bottom all the way. Upon entering shallow water, they slow suddenly, the water behind piling up, and grow to a tremendous height.

  Legends about tsunamis describe them as “whirling waves of foam.” This wave was a mist-spitting, white-crested monster that pulled back fast and drove forward, breaking its own legs, and collapsing onto more than three hundred miles of shore.

  The curtain in Masumi’s living room fills with wind and empties out. “Have you noticed that jishin—earthquakes—usually come when there’s changing weather?” Masumi asks. Outside, the sky is a pale sheet veined with radioactive rainclouds. They are gray, layered with black, and hang over the sacred mountains to the west, then darken the Sendai Plain with a tattered fringe. A hefty downpour begins.

  In the origin myths of Japan, Izanagi and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven looking down. They are lonely. His swinging phallus drips; her oceanic vulva opens and they are joined. The progeny of their union is at first terrestrial: the eight large islands of Japan. Then gods appear: the goddess of the sun, the god of the moon, and the emperor. Divine creatures lived in an undersea palace with pillars of jade and gates of pearl, carpets of sealskin and silk, its spirit-filled, imperial beginnings seemingly inviolate. Many earthquakes, wars, and tsunamis later, this island nation felt its vulnerability.

  Tohoku, the northeastern region of the island of Honshu, was affected by the tsunami from Sendai north to Hachinohe, about thirteen hundred kilometers. Its “bridge of heaven” was clobbered by a wave, its furnishings and population ground down to fantastic shapes. Every morning I wake to the unfamiliar: wave-like aftershocks rise to the second floor of the house. Every morning I wonder where I am. The constant jolts and shakes remind me that this isn’t my country, my culture, or my disaster. Yet, since my first trip to Japan in 1968, I’ve returned many times. When I heard about the tsunami on the radio, I came as soon as I could, though I’m not sure why. Maybe, just to walk Tohoku’s charnel ground; to meet those who faced the wave and survived.

  Soft rain falls on Kazuko’s garden shrine, a miniature Shinto temple glazed red with a curved tile roof. Two cups have been placed on its tiny veranda: one for water, one for salt. Water to make the household harmonious, salt to scare the bad spirits away. With so many dead and missing—approximately twenty thousand so far—Tohoku is swarming with ghosts.

  The list of Japan’s seismic events dates back to the year 684. Japanese ideas about religion, architecture, theater, and literature are based on wa and shunyata—concepts of plentitude and uncertainty, of togetherness framed by impermanence. “Every time there’s an aftershock, a tremor, my grandmother’s mind shakes into coherence, into wisdom. Every time the earth shakes she gets better,” Masumi tells me.

  * * *

  Masumi was driving when the 9.0 earthquake hit. After the early warning alert on her cell phone sounded she turned on her wide-screen GPS, also a television, and watched the tsunami as it was happening. A police helicopter filmed the Sendai coast where the Natori River empties out: she watched her old neighborhood wash away. “I saw waves coming,” she said. “I saw my uncle’s rice fields disappear, and the trees at the coast break in half. I saw where water had pushed my grandmother’s house until it came apart. I saw the roof floating.”