Ghosts of the Tsunami

Richard Lloyd Parry

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Katherine May

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I first came across Richard Lloyd Parry’s writing in a journal someone sent me about the darker aspects of Japanese life that sit under all the kawaii cuteness and the wonders of robot technology. The essay was taken from his book Ghosts of the Tsunami. In it, he explores the impact of the tsunami of March 2011 on the communities in the direct path of the disaster and how that relates to Japanese society as a whole. It was such a compelling article I knew I wanted to read the whole book, which I did, a couple of weeks ago.

In the introduction he makes an attempt to explain the scale of what happened in terms so big I had to read the paragraph three times to even begin to wrap my head around it.

‘It was the biggest earthquake ever known to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth six and a half inches off its axis; it moved Japan thirteen feet closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, more than 18,000 people were killed. At its peak, the water was 120 feet high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes. Three reactors in the Fukushima Dam-ichi power station melted down, spilling their radioactivity across the countryside, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210 billion of damage, making it the most costly natural disaster ever.’

For months, Lloyd Parry travelled backwards and forwards from Tokyo to the Tohoku region, reporting on the effects of the tsunami. He went inside shattered nuclear reactors, hospitals lit by candles, ships in city streets, washed in on the devastating tide, he saw packs of feral animals roaming the countryside with nobody left to manage them. He knew that he wanted to write about the disaster but he didn’t know how. He kept coming back to the central conundrum of events like these. Something described by the writer Philip Gourevitch; how do you go about the job of getting to grips with something like this when there is always, 'the necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real?’

In the end he found himself returning again and again to the small town of Okawa one of the places that had taken the full force of the disaster. In Okawa, the local primary school had been engulfed by the tsunami. Of the hundred pupils who attended the school only a handful of children and one teacher survived. In the weeks and months after the tragedy, it became apparent that something had gone awry with the school’s disaster plan. There had been a tall hill behind the school and the news of the encroaching wave came in with enough time for the teachers to lead the children to safety, but for some reason they didn’t. This would be the focus of Lloyd Parry’s exploration of the impact of the tsunami at both a personal and national level.

I knew I wanted to write about the book, but I couldn’t quite grasp why to begin with. Was I just a rubber necker at the scene of a horrifying accident? Could I not stop thinking about it because it was unimaginably terrible and my brain was just repeatedly trying and failing to come up with a way to understand such a massive thing? What was it I wanted to capture?

I was thinking about Thomas Hardy when it came to me. I was thinking about the way Hardy uses landscape in his novels as a character and a signpost and to create a heightened sense of drama. His characters only make sense in the land in which he puts them. In a tragedy like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for example, we know how things are going for Tess through her surroundings, and how we perceive her in them. Her fate is foreshadowed and sealed through geography, time and space. Her very human smallness against the vast indifference and beauty of a land in which she will wander as an exile gestures not just to her doom, but the carelessness of the rest of the world to it. There is a sense of mythic inevitability against which you can struggle but which you cannot outpace. This is what Lloyd Parry harnesses so powerfully in Ghosts of the Tsunami.

The Tohoku region is ancient, barely populated land on which generations of the same families have farmed and fished for centuries. The modernity of Tokyo, 220 miles away, is not just another place, but another time. This is a land of brutal natural forces that have carved into the land, where the majority of boundaries are tenuous in the face of earthquakes and tides. The old myths and traditions hold firm and where the land flexes and gives, behaviours are rigid an unbending. Disasters, of which there have been many, are met with a sense of bleak fatalism and a drive to return things to the way they were as quickly as possible. This is a population that is largely overlooked by the rest of the country and which relishes that unlooked for privacy. They are used to finding ways to survive in the most inhospitable landscape. There are great rewards when things go well, but always a sense that some kind of significant, energetic trade is taking place. The price isn’t always worth paying.

This is a book completely in command of the disaster it describes. Where chaos and tragedy erupts on a mythic scale, this book contains it. The interplay between human nature and the natural world is balanced by the way the narrative is constructed. The remote geography of the area makes tragedy inevitable and human folly all the more unbearable. Like Tess, these people are tiny in the face of such a disaster, but like Tess it does not diminish their suffering. Lloyd Parry’s account offers moments of nobility and terrible beauty that spark against the darkness like jewels.

The narrative lens widens and narrows instinctively in line with what we can bear. One woman recounts going to identify her daughter’s body in the school gymnasium. She kneels beside her, cleaning her of the earth that had engulfed her. When soil seeps from her eyes, the woman cleans it away with her tongue. This small, intimate gesture is something we can only bear to look at for a moment. The narrative pulls out just in time, shifting the focus to the failures of the government, as meeting after meeting is convened to make it all go away. But you know what you saw and you cannot unseen it. The earth keeps leaking through.

The most fascinating chapters deal with the explosion of hauntings and possessions that grip the community in the months after the tsunami. Exhausted priests called to pray over women who bark like dogs, men who after years of obedient citizenship run wild and smash up houses. Weary firemen who answer the phone to put out blazes in houses that are now lost to the waves. Lloyd Parry logs hundreds of instances in the months of his investigation.

What do you do when the physical evidence of lives lived and people loved is gone, but their memory remains? What happens to you in a country that deals with disaster by making it disappear and moving on as if nothing happened? What happens when the world you knew is washed away but nothing steps in to take up the space left behind? What do you do in a rational, atheist country which is underpinned by an ancient, rich mythology of ghosts that can’t be contained once the earth cracks wide open? You meet your demons. That’s what happens.