Facing the Wave (8 page)

Kazuko, eyeing Abyss-san’s long ponytail, asks me if I’m going to be all right. I assure her that I’ll be fine. She cries as we drive out of the station.

It’s a hippie van with a bed in the back and a solar panel thrown onto the dash to keep cell phones and MP3 player charged. The windows are down and music is playing loud. Abyss-san is small and agile, with thinning hair at the top of his head. Earlier, when he opened the passenger door for me at the station, he gave me a half-bow with a knowing smile, then told Nikki she’d have to sit on the bed in back.

Now he wheels the old van into the throngs of traffic—mostly policemen and volunteers—with ease. To the south is Fukushima Daiichi, the wounded nuclear power plant still leaking
and steaming, melting and fusing; we head north as it gets dark, up the ravaged coast of Tohoku.

A tropical flush of humidity pushes into stifling summer heat as we weave between small trucks with cranes mounted in back, ambulances, and police cars. The old van holds us in its ramshackle confines. In the back, Nikki makes instant soup with hot water from a thermos and checks emails on her cell phone. Abyss-san says that when he’s not volunteering, he makes drums and sells them at a summer festival. To be a hippie in northern Honshu means taking a political stand; he is an outsider and a radical, and unlike so many in Japan, an activist. Nikki, who stands at the fringe of several worlds, sticks her head between us, giving simultaneous translation as Abyss-san tells his stories:

“After the tsunami my mother came to live with me up in the mountains for two months,” Abyss-san says. “For forty-eight years I’d caused trouble for her because of the way I live. But after the tsunami, we became close for the first time. Living together was an opportunity to have deep conversations. Then two friends from Kyoto came to help volunteer, and we all lived communally. Once she experienced it, she began to accept me. She liked this way of living. We cooked together, slept in small tatami rooms, used the outhouse, and bathed in the
ofuro
, the wood-fired bathtub. It was more like the way life was when she was a girl.”

Patches of blue slide by and are overtaken by radioactive mist. Abyss-san says the government should give everyone a Geiger counter. “The radiation is not just at the coast,” he tells me. “It’s up in the mountains where I live too. It’s everywhere.”

Earlier he’d given us a list of dos and don’ts to avoid radiation contamination:

For two months after the tsunami, Abyss-san used his van to transport food and supplies to anyone in need. He’d pull up to a center, open the back doors, and say, take whatever you need. He recalls that he got almost no sleep. Friends from distant places showed up and pooled their money to buy toilet paper, diapers, rice, tea, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and carrots for the refugees. “People were hungry,” he said. “Some gave what little food they had to their children. I tried to make sure that everyone had something to eat.”

His van runs on biodiesel and can also run on propane. When gasoline ran out in every Tohoku town, he could still get around. “If the government had told people about running their cars on propane, some lives could have been saved. The politicians care too much about order and normalcy. That’s our Japanese flaw. It does no good to suppress fear and cling to conformity. We have to meet the truth. There is no order now.”

Koinobori
—cloth fish—flutter from bamboo poles, seemingly taller because everything around them is gone. We drive through Kesennuma, Abyss-san’s hometown, where the new baseball stadium, completed just before the
jishin
, is now charred. One lamp pole was left standing, its light twisted and bent around as if peering into someone’s ear. The squashed steering wheel of a
truck has been pushed to the side and hangs out of the driver’s opened door.

A line of blue-uniformed policemen lift the roof of a house that’s grounded in deep water to retrieve the dead body of one of the town’s hundreds of missing. A few damaged houses have signs that read: “Please don’t demolish; there are still important things inside.” We pass a “three-up”: a house on top of a convenience store on top of a ship. Rubble has been shoved and shaped by bulldozers into a mountain range that mirrors the mountainous spine running north and south through Honshu. “Another version of the Japanese Alps,” Abyss-san quips.

As we leave town Abyss-san says, “The tsunami was an incident within prediction boundaries. I knew it would happen someday so I moved from the port of Kesennuma to the mountains in a place with good water. I chose to live this way because I’m not satisfied with the ‘normal’ world, and as small as I am on the planet, at least I can start being a part of a change. There’s so much to be done. I continue to be active in helping now to pay respect to those who died in the tsunami.”

A tow truck with a red Ferrari in back zooms by. Nikki flakes out on the bed in back and quickly falls asleep. Three policemen hover over a hole in the ground. We pass a mountain of coal, a dam holding milkshake-brown water, a stone lantern store, a rack of used clothes for sale by the side of the road, an overturned truck, a makeshift used-car lot, a muddy rice field, a boat jammed into a shrine.

A Japanese Rail employee checks the twisted tracks. “During the tsunami whole trains disappeared, buried in mud, passengers still aboard,” Abyss-san says. Police cars with lights flashing pass us. It’s “rush hour”—a rush away from this painful scene.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic as we pass a house split in three parts atop a damaged overpass, a crushed semi, a tin roof, a bent guardrail dangling. The road is gravel and mud. “The river
was the highway the Wave took,” Abyss-san says. “All along this coast there were famous beach resorts. Now it’s all a ‘last resort!’ ”
Laughter
. “I sometimes wonder if it’s worse to survive,” he says softly.

I ask Abyss-san if he has a girlfriend and he shakes his head no. “But I’d like one,” he says. Down by the ruined port he tries to find the spot where his former house once stood, but he can’t figure it out. Except for warehouses, there are no buildings left at all, as if the world had been taken back to a blank slate. “If there are no clues, no reference points, how can I know where I am, if I exist?” he asks.

One last look at the ocean. “Every time the tide goes out, more bodies are found,” Abyss-san says. Rain beats hard on the roof of the van. “The radiation is much worse when there’s rain,” he reminds us. “It carries the airborne particles down to the ground.”

A woman in a long black funeral dress, carrying an umbrella, runs on a narrow bank across a rice field.

On the way to Abyss-san’s mountain house we stop on a hill. The view of Kesennuma is of a flattened city. “Just after the tsunami I sat here,” he says. “Fuel tanks all over the port were exploding. One fishing boat caught fire. Then it got loose from its moorings and drifted. Everything it touched burst into flames. Soon, hundreds of trawlers were burning. It was dark, night, snowing. Fishing boats were pieces of fire floating. They lit the harbor; they were the only lights. The entire world was on fire.”

A tsunami wave is born from displacement, not wind, and does not travel over the ocean’s surface, but rises suddenly from the rupture zone and drags bottom all the way to shore. As it comes into shallow water, the wave mounds up, and its height increases dramatically. There are stories of fishing boats going out too late and flipping. They faced the Wave and died. None of their crews were seen again. On shore, the Wave plowed through harbors, ports, parking lots, houses, stores, temples, graveyards, and schools. Spilling over bridge railings, it was not a wave, but a black waterfall.

The Wave lifted up and became a mountain. The mountain was water moving, annihilating itself in a crescendo of striated, dissolving foam. I thought it was only one wave, surging and recoiling, but images from the satellite called GRACE recently revealed that “the Wave” was actually a composite.

Two seismically generated wave-fronts merged, deflected from different undersea ridges and troughs. As they moved forward, they came together to form a single wave that, when focused by a narrow harbor, had run-up heights as high as 133 feet.

When news of the tsunami came over the radio, the Greenpeace ship
Rainbow Warrior
turned from direct-action, antiwhaling protests to radiation monitoring off the coast of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Their mission is to get at the truth of what has been called by marine biologists the “worst marine radiation contamination in history.” TEPCO and the Japanese government have been accused of falsifying numbers and the extent of the marine and airborne radiation pollution during and after the reactors’ meltdowns.

“Radiation is a core issue for Greenpeace,” Wakao Hanaoka, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, says. He’s in his thirties, with short-cropped hair and a big belly. His eyes sparkle with enthusiasm as he talks. “We worked on radiation issues in Kamchatka, at the bombing sites. It’s one of our strengths.”

Many of the local fishermen in the Fukushima area now welcome the Greenpeace campaigners—the very people they’ve been fighting in southern whaling waters. “They need to know how contaminated the water is, and we help them find out,” Wakao-san says. Fishermen are donating samples of seaweed, sea cucumber, oysters, mussels, anchovies, and a variety of fish to Greenpeace, which, in turn, sends the samples to certified nuclear labs in France and Belgium to be analyzed. So far, Wakao-san tells me, fourteen of the twenty-one samples recently sent are over the limit for cesium isotopes and high concentrations of iodine, which indicates liquid discharges from the reactors.

“We need clear guidelines from the government both for the
fishermen and for the consumers. So they know what they’re eating and where it came from,” Wakao-san says. “We need to study the whole marine ecosystem, the food chain of the fish, the water itself, and the mud and sand at the bottom, because that’s where radiation sits.”

The entire fishery from thirty to sixty kilometers south of the Fukushima power plant is highly contaminated, including seaweed and oysters. Bottom-feeding fish such as rockfish, flounder, and greenlings have been found to be five thousand times more toxic than they were before the tsunami.

Every morning at dawn, Wakao-san goes to the Tokyo fish market to test for radiation. “They’re getting used to seeing me there. When the government tests, they wave a dosimeter over the top of the fish as they come off the boats, but that doesn’t work. You have to cut the fish open. I’m getting very good at handling the knife,” he says, laughing.

Wakao-san looks for the bright side of the disaster, and sees it as an opportunity for Japanese citizens to become activists. “We must use this chance to raise our voices because the Japanese government no longer ensures our future. For Japanese people the ocean is a factory for seafood. Fish is mostly what we eat. My parents, who are older, think they don’t have to be careful, so they eat the
most
contaminated fish in hopes that the less contaminated fish will be there for younger people.”

When I ask Wakao-san, who has two young children, if he’s still eating fish, he smiles, and says: “I’m Japanese. Maybe not as much, but yes.”

Morning. Fickle June weather: cloudy, windy, rainy, misty, but mostly hot and humid
—mushiatsui
. In old Japan, weather watchers invoked rainfall by cutting off the head of a swan and throwing it behind a waterfall. In the town of Kuji, near the northern extent of tsunami damage, a swan that lost a wing has been rescued and given a home.

I pick through a pack of Hana Fuda cards, a simple Japanese card game printed on mulberry paper, based on the seasons, and try to see how people here hinge themselves to the natural world: caring for miniaturized alpine rock gardens, growing flowers, living in the play of light and shadow through paper doors.

Pine bough, flower, insect, bird,
o-sake
, and
o-mizu
are the shuffled emblems of seasonal shifts and transience, of luck, life, plentitude, and perishability. June’s card features “Peony (for beauty and medicine) with Butterfly (for transience and change).”

We take a torturous coast road that is tree-shrouded and buckled when it exists at all. The ocean view is intermittent because of the trees. The scenes below, when we can see them, resemble a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: you can count the dead and missing; you can see how a hill functioned as a knife slicing oncoming water; you can step through what’s left after the Wave. In one place, a Mitsubishi F-2 fighter jet banged into a damaged building. The steel ribs of a fish factory are bent over shredded rubble that resembles combed hair. Nikki gets a Tweet
about the Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who donated a million dollars to Tohoku’s disaster relief fund.

Losing altitude, we pass through the remains of towns and villages. Half of the town of Otsuchi was flattened, its marine research lab destroyed. It’s here that Dall’s porpoises are slaughtered for food. Members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have tried to stop the capture and killing of these cetaceans, but since being caught in the tsunami, they’ve become volunteers, helping other survivors.

The ocean is roaring. Waves are stacked and sucking in whatever had seemed permanent, throwing it forward again like an uncaught ball. Old men, teenagers, children walk the roads, sit on seawalls, crouch on broken tree trunks in the shade, stunned by summer heat and disbelief, stilled by grief. Seawalls were built in front of these big northern coastal fishing towns at the expense of an ocean view. “How strange to live on the ocean and not see it,” Abyss-san says. “And then have the thing that blocks the view turn out to be ineffectual.”