Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (4 page)

Photographs taken by a high-school girl in Rikuzentakata document the first minutes of destruction. Early frames show water moving up the river that runs through the town. The river in the picture is swollen, but looks less than capable of causing widespread destruction. A few frames later, the water is wilder and about to wash away a small bridge. Before the first tidal surge could recede, another wave sloshed over the tsunami wall, increasing the volume of water. It was later reckoned the wave reached forty feet as it raced up the valley. By now, the photos show uprooted wooden houses, their tiled roofs still intact, carried up the valley as if in a stream of molten lava. An entire Mos Burger restaurant, Japan’s equivalent of McDonald’s, floats across the valley like some unmoored boat, its red roof and ‘M’ logo distinctly visible as it sweeps towards the hospital. By the time it gets there, it has been ripped in two. Now the water looks like raging mud. Another set of photographs, these taken by a volunteer fireman who had clambered to the top of an antenna, shows what looks like the high seas during stormy weather. The only clue that this is land is the incongruous sight of the town clock peeking out from the boiling waves.

As water churned back and forth, in and out of the cove, it dragged with it the deadly debris it had collected, hurling boats and houses and cars and factories and nails and glass at everything – and everyone – in its path. Neither wood nor concrete, nor bones nor teeth, were spared these waterlogged missiles. Whole tree stumps and mangled steel beams crashed through the third-floor windows of the Maiya shopping centre. At the public hospital, scenes of horror were unfolding. Water rushed into the fourth-floor ward, where many elderly patients lay immobile. They floated up on their mattresses on the rising water. Some were dragged to safety on the roof. Others drowned where they were in their beds. The survivors, sopping wet, were wrapped by staff
in black bin-liners to protect them from the near-zero temperatures. Most spent the night on the rooftop. In the dark, the waters raged about them.
⁸

Similar desperate struggles for survival were playing out all over town. At the city hall, government employees scrambled to the fourth-floor roof. From there, they scanned the ocean with binoculars and saw the first wave slop over the tsunami defence wall. Within a matter of minutes, the water was all around them, lapping over the top of the roof itself. Those who could, hauled themselves and others onto an elevated section of the roof, just out of the water’s reach. From there, Futoshi Toba, the town mayor who would later achieve national fame, stared out at the elementary school where his two children were studying. ‘I knew my children were at the school and that the teachers were looking after them,’ he said.
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He was more anxious about his wife. She had most likely been at home when the earthquake struck and, from his rooftop vantage point, Toba could see that his house had been inundated. All the phone lines were down. There was no way of checking on her safety until the following morning when the water had receded. Toba felt torn between his duties as a government official and those of a father and husband. ‘I am also a human being,’ he said later. ‘And worry is worry.’ In the event, his children survived. At Takata Elementary School, his son, twelve-year-old Taiga, had been told by a teacher to make a run for it. Later the boy told a reporter, ‘It was like Godzilla. You could see the wave coming towards you, knocking down the houses. It was quite slow, but very powerful.’
¹⁰
Taiga’s mother, the mayor’s wife, was less fortunate. She was one of the more than 1,900 people washed away that terrible day.

Across town at Takata High School, the swimming team was missing. Before the earthquake struck, the ten or so members had set off on a half-mile walk to their practice at the city’s brand-new indoor swimming pool. The B&G swimming centre bore a sign reading: ‘If your heart is with the water, it is the medicine for peace and health and long life.’ Neither the team, nor their young female coach, were seen again.
¹¹

More than seventy people had taken refuge in the gymnasium, one of several official evacuation centres. The experts who had produced
tsunami hazard maps had judged the building beyond the reach of even the hugest wave. When people heard the first wave had breached the defence wall, they rushed up to the gymnasium’s second-floor seating, where spectators from the town had, over the years, watched countless basketball matches and
taiko
drumming competitions. Water rushed into the building, where it became trapped, swirling around the domed interior as if in a washing machine. Sasaki later used the Japanese words ‘guru, guru, guru’ to describe the sound. Terrified people tried to clamber onto the metal girders arching along the gymnasium’s roof. A few managed to hang on, but altogether sixty-seven perished there that night. The clock high above the second-floor seats stopped at 3.30 p.m., marking the moment when water neared the ceiling. At some point, the tidal force became such that it broke through the gymnasium’s back wall and spilled out to continue its destructive journey. Locals call the ghastly, gaping hole it left in the gutted building the ‘devil’s mouth’.
¹²

As these terrible scenes were playing out, Sasaki was watching the inundation from his hillside vantage point. He too was frantic about the fate of his wife, 57-year-old Miwako. With mobile networks down, he couldn’t reach her by phone. He watched awestruck as water poured over the defence wall. The ghostly smoke rose as buildings crumpled under the tidal force, sending powdery debris into the air. It was then that he witnessed something he had thought he would never see. The pine forest of 70,000 trees gradually disappeared before his eyes as waves knocked down the towering trunks like so many matchsticks. It was a sight as unlikely as the marching forests of Dunsinane in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
. ‘I was dazed and couldn’t really understand what was happening,’ Sasaki recalled.
¹³

His wife must have been making her rounds delivering soba noodles when the earth started shaking. By the time the tsunami siren sounded, she would have been trying to drive back to the family home, about a mile-and-a-half from the shoreline. She didn’t make it. A firefighter, one of the first emergency workers to enter the city, described the scene he encountered. ‘People in the high places were crying, in shock, with their mouths hanging open. Along the river, we found no one alive, not a person.’
¹⁴

By the time those few minutes were over, virtually the entire town
of Rikuzentakata had been annihilated. There is no other word for it. Nearly one in ten of its population was dead or missing. Four-fifths of the buildings had been turned to matchsticks. Even the town’s few sturdy concrete structures, including the Capital Hotel, were gutted, as debris-carrying water smashed through their interiors. As Sasaki had witnessed with his own disbelieving eyes, the 70,000 pines that had symbolized the town for hundreds of years had vanished in a few instants, swallowed by the raging flood. Even the beach on which they had stood was churned up and partially washed away. The very topography of the town had been altered, its coastline ripped and torn. Some of the land along the shoreline had sunk by nearly three feet.
¹⁵
Nothing was as it had been. Except, that is, for one thing. Almost miraculously, a single, straight pine stood, its 100-foot-high trunk – surrounded by shorn-off stumps – defiantly pointing skywards. The people of Rikuzentakata, those who survived that is, called it simply the Lone Pine.

Bending Adversity

As the near-empty aeroplane slid through the piercing blue towards Tokyo’s Haneda airport, I craned my neck to take in the scene below. In my mind’s eye, Japan was no longer a solid island rooted to the earth’s crust. Instead, it was a deeply unstable chunk of land erupting with orange flames and atomic explosions, a thin layer of earth floating on a boiling sea. But from this height at least, the runway looked perfectly normal and the land perfectly affixed. It was a beautifully clear afternoon. Around 150 miles to the north of Tokyo was the crippled nuclear plant at Fukushima, where the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl was unfolding. About 100 miles north of that lay Rikuzentakata. Tokyo had escaped the tsunami altogether. Yet the megalopolis of some 36 million people was still being thrown about by mammoth aftershocks, at magnitude 6.0 or above, big enough to cause huge damage in less well-constructed cities. The date was 15 March.

On the day of the earthquake itself, I had been working in Beijing. A couple of people I met that day swore they felt the earth tremble even there, 1,300 miles away. Yet when I received a call from a colleague telling me there had been some kind of earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast, my first reaction was ‘no big deal’. I no longer lived in Japan, but during my time there I had become inured to earthquakes, having felt many come and go with little consequence. Only when my phone vibrated again and I was told that a massive tsunami was heading for the Japanese coast did I rush back to my Beijing hotel to find out what was going on.

On the hotel TV I watched disbelievingly the footage that has now become so familiar. Few, if any, natural disasters of such magnitude can have been relayed live on television. When I first saw pictures of
soupy water, thick with what appeared to be toy cars and matchsticks, I couldn’t work out what I was seeing. Subsequent images revealed molten water choked with flaming houses sliding up the beach; whole ships crashing into buildings or caught in whirlpools out at sea; an airport runway disappearing under a blanket of water. One television channel showed before-and-after aerial shots of a town in Iwate prefecture, Minamisanriku. In the first shot the town was there. In the second it just wasn’t. Most frightening of all were the images of an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, sending shreds of concrete wall high up into the air. A subsequent explosion was accompanied by a fireball and a plume of smoke.

But the two video images that stuck with me longest were on a smaller scale altogether. One showed supermarket staff at the moment the earthquake started. Instead of rushing for cover, employees ran to the shelves as they writhed and wobbled. Using their hands, arms and even bodies, the neatly uniformed staff tried to prevent bottles of soy sauce, cartons of orange juice and packets of noodles and miso soup from toppling to the floor. Mostly their efforts were in vain, but the dedication of Japanese to their work, it seemed, held good even in moments of extreme danger. In the second clip, a television crew had found a young woman walking in a daze around a field. She had been out riding, yet there was no horse to be seen. The landscape had become a wilderness without distinguishing features, save for a few mangled trees. Still wearing riding breeches and a tight-fitting riding top, the woman stared at the nothingness around her. ‘The things that are supposed to be here are not here,’ she said as if speaking to herself.

In the following few days, as the story clarified, the scale of what had happened became apparent. The quake had been so powerful that the earth was knocked slightly off its axis, altering its spin and shortening the length of the day, if only by 1.8 millionths of a second. The death toll was still officially in the hundreds, but tens of thousands were missing. Perhaps half a million more had been evacuated. The Fukushima nuclear plant appeared to be out of control. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the operator, denied there had been a meltdown, but the company had decided to flood the reactors with seawater in what seemed like a desperate attempt to bring the
situation under control. The government said radiation spewing from the plant was 1,000 times its normal level and ordered a two-mile evacuation zone around the site. That quickly widened to six miles, then twelve. People just outside the zone were warned to stay indoors.

Before I flew to Tokyo, I had tried calling Japanese friends. Some had fled to other parts of Japan, away from the jolting, unnerving aftershocks and the spreading fear of radiation. Those who remained were clearly shaken, their voices strained, even fearful, over the phone. One employee of a trading house told me the people from Tepco were doing their best. ‘I have heard the French are telling everybody to evacuate. I don’t think you should come,’ he said. I’d contacted another friend, an adventurer and photographer called Toshiki Senoue, to ask if he would be prepared to travel north with me to the disaster zone. He replied by email that he might be willing to go. But please, he asked, could I bring a Geiger counter.

•   •   •

Tokyo was profoundly changed. It was also the same. At Haneda’s stylish new international terminal, the escalators and moving walkways had been halted to save electricity, but an announcement still trilled in the high falsetto used on public address systems, exhorting passengers to hold on tightly to the moving handrail. My taxi driver was wearing the familiar white gloves and bowed as I approached the car. Across the back seat was spread the usual white cloth doily. Once I was seated, the door glided shut on its own. As we drove noiselessly away, the driver explained there had just been yet another big aftershock. The streets were virtually empty as we slid through a picture-perfect Tokyo. The sky, on this crisp spring day, was a lovely powder blue.

At my old office building, a black-glass skyscraper on Uchisaiwaicho, not far from the moat and monumental stone walls of the Imperial Palace, the lobby was dark and deserted. The Starbucks was closed. The shelves of the in-lobby convenience store, usually crammed with rice balls,
bento
lunch boxes, dried octopus snacks, cream buns and rows of green tea cartons, had been picked bare. In the bathroom, the hand driers were switched off, covered with a paper sign reading
setsuden
 – ‘energy saving’. The toilet seats were still heated (some little luxuries you cannot do without). Yet in the next weeks, as the
gravity of the post-nuclear-accident energy shortage became clear, even this most Japanese of basics was sacrificed. This was
setsuden
Tokyo, low-wattage Tokyo.

In the
Financial Times
bureau on the twenty-first floor, I found Mitsuko Matsutani, the loyal office manager, and Nobuko Juji, the long-serving secretary, still visibly shaken. They described how, on the day of the earthquake, the skyscrapers had careered towards one another, as they lurched from side to side. They had run downstairs, all twenty-one flights, and gathered in Hibiya Park, a European-style garden opposite. When a massive aftershock struck, they thought the tower block would surely topple. Now, a few days later, their work commutes were difficult. Trains that normally ran to the minute, if not the second, were subject to lengthy delays. Besides, it was frightening to venture underground with the earth still shaking. There were rumours of rolling blackouts to come and still worse disruptions to the transport system. Authorities had warned that another massive quake was likely within days. Perhaps this would be the ‘Big One’ for which Tokyo had long been braced. When I left the office for my first appointment with an old acquaintance, Kaoru Yosano, the 72-year-old minister of economic and fiscal policy, Matsutani handed me a hard hat. I didn’t know whether she was joking or not.

At the old ministry building, a brick construction of utilitarian style, the mood was just as subdued. Two receptionists sat huddled under blankets to keep their knees warm. The heating, along with most of the lighting, had been turned off. Yosano, who usually wore a well-tailored suit, arrived in a blue boiler jacket and long rubber boots. That was now the official uniform of the cabinet, which had adopted the attire and demeanour of wartime. Naoto Kan, the prime minister, had warned that this was Japan’s worst crisis since the Second World War: ‘Whether we Japanese can overcome this crisis depends on each of us.’

Yosano slowly removed his boots and flexed his feet. His office was large but short on pomp. When I asked him if this disaster could galvanize the nation, he looked at me in silence before making a small, defiant fist. The minister answered questions about the extent of the damage and the likely economic impact. Since the ministry’s offices were said to be particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, each time
there was a tremor – and there was more than one during our hour-long encounter – his staff looked anxiously at the creaking ceiling and the swaying fixtures. Yosano, who had recently recovered from throat cancer, used the lull in the conversation to light up another cigarette.

I didn’t know it then, but at virtually the same time, Emperor Akihito, the 77-year-old monarch, was making a televised address to the nation. It was the first such broadcast of his twenty-two-year reign. His father, Hirohito, had famously made a declaration, spoken in hard-to-fathom imperial language, on 15 August 1945. In a voice unfamiliar to his subjects, who considered him a living god and had never heard him speak, Emperor Hirohito had told his subjects of Japan’s unconditional surrender, though he never used the word. The war ‘had not necessarily developed to Japan’s advantage’, he said in his archaic, roundabout Japanese. The people should prepare to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. That statement had been prompted by two nuclear bombs, which had made Japan’s surrender, and subsequent occupation, inevitable. More than six decades later, his son was confronting both a natural disaster and a nuclear one in similarly sombre tones. Dressed in a dark suit with black tie and seated before a wood-and-paper screen, Akihito spoke for six minutes. Coincidentally or not, that was the length of time the earth had shaken. ‘The number of people killed is increasing day by day and we do not know how many people have fallen victim,’ he said. ‘I pray for the safety of as many people as possible. People are being forced to evacuate in such severe conditions of bitter cold, with shortages of water and fuel.’ As to the gathering nuclear catastrophe, he professed deep concern. ‘I sincerely hope that we can keep the situation from getting worse,’ he offered.
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The situation behind the scenes was even more desperate than the emperor had let on. That morning, while my plane was still in the air, there had been a hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima plant, the third blast in as many days. Kan, the prime minister, a former social activist, marched into Tokyo Electric’s headquarters in central Tokyo. An investigation into the nuclear crisis later concluded that Kan had reacted with fury at suggestions by Tokyo Electric that it might abandon the plant altogether.
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In an angry confrontation with the
company’s president, Masataka Shimizu, the prime minister demanded ‘what the hell is going on?’ So dangerous was the situation that Kan began to discuss a worst-case scenario with his cabinet. If Fukushima Daiichi were abandoned, the plant might spiral out of control, forcing the evacuation of nearby plants and risking further meltdowns. Yukio Edano, the down-to-earth-looking chief cabinet secretary whose regular television appearances made him the face of the crisis, privately warned his colleagues of a ‘demonic chain reaction’ that might force the evacuation of the capital. ‘We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,’ he said, referring to two other plants. ‘If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would lose Tokyo itself.’
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There was certainly a sense of buttoned-down fear in Tokyo, though no one at that point knew anything about the panicked deliberations going on inside the cabinet. Later there were rumours that some people with close government connections had quietly been tipped off to slip out of the city. Tokyo at night was stranger still than in the day. It was, as a colleague of mine wrote, like a city ‘operating on the lowest dimmer setting’.
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Of all the cities in the world, Tokyo in normal times burns perhaps the brightest. The fashionable avenues of the Ginza and the teeming streets of Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Akasaka are a blaze of neon. The roads are jammed with yellow, green and red cabs, the pavements clogged with swaying salarymen, office ladies and dolled-up bar hostesses in evening gowns. Now, they were shadowy and deserted. The sushi bars,
tonkatsu
pork cutlet outlets, the high-end and low-end restaurants, the holes in the wall, the noodle shops, the
izakaya
pubs, the clubs, the jazz bars, the karaoke lounges and the drinking establishments of this, the most bedazzling of night-time cities – all had closed up the shutters by eight or nine o’clock. This in a city that usually thrums until two or three in the morning. But in
setsuden
Tokyo, a few days after the quake, people hurried nervously home before the power failed or the trains stopped running. In one less than brightly lit subway carriage I spotted a man wearing a miner’s hat, with torch attached, the better to read his newspaper. Even the lights of Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower lookalike that is a symbol of the city, were turned off. The antenna at the top, it was said, had been bent by the earthquake.

That night, I telephoned an old friend, Shijuro Ogata. He is a charming man with impeccable English and a lively, liberal mind. Though he was once deputy governor for international relations at the Bank of Japan, a job of not inconsiderable prestige, he has none of the pomposity that sometimes attaches itself to important men in Japan. On the phone, Ogata was his usual cheerful self. He was fine, he said. He had hardly left the house since the earthquake, only venturing out to pick up a few essential supplies from the neighbourhood shops. He had been impressed with the stoicism of his fellow Japanese, many of whom had battled to get to work on time in spite of the chaotic train system and fears of a second earthquake. Where he lived there had been very little hoarding, he said. People had restricted themselves to one carton of milk, one packet of tofu.