Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
He starts the engine and we putt-putt across a narrow strait to a tiny island: “I’ll wait for you,” he promises. Houses are built closely together here and, because the ground has subsided, water splashes in and around their foundations. The village seems deserted, then we hear a sound—a woman’s voice—and we walk toward her. The first floor of every house holds a few inches of water. We come to a door that opens onto a flooded living room. The furniture is in disarray, and beyond, another door opens to the bay.
We hear the voice again and go through. A lone woman is talking to herself. She squats on wet cement cleaning oyster shells. Small waves splash water over the wall. This whole island is wet.
Wearing traditional work clothes, she looks up, surprised to see us, but her hands never stop: “I’m supposed to be putting the seed of the oyster into the shell,” she explains. “But now we missed the crop, so I’m seeing which of these old shells can be reused and which cannot. I clean each one and string them together.”
She works alone. Her house is still habitable, she tells us. There is electricity and water, but at high tide, the first floor fills with water. A minor inconvenience, she says. “Every day the tide comes up five feet. I work until it comes in, then I must stop. But the second floor of the house is okay. I want to stay living here, but in the fall the tides will be higher, and this house and all of them along here are sinking.
“We were fifteen families here. Now there are only nine of us. I wasn’t on the island when the
jishin
hit, and couldn’t get here. There was no ferry for twenty days.” She stops to light a cigarette. Her face is wind-chapped. After a few puffs, she flicks the
cigarette into the water. Finally she smiles, squats down, takes up a gray shell, scours the inside, and lays it in a heap with thousands of others.
Mori is waiting for us when we return, his bald dome shining in the sun. “Thirty-three years ago there was a tsunami but it didn’t damage the houses. This used to be an island where lots of visitors came, and we always had fun. Island people do, you know. But now … there’s no one … It’s too quiet,” he says, his cheeks going bright red.
Back on the island he offers to drive us up to the evacuation center. “We can borrow one of the pickup trucks. They all have keys in them. Pick one!” I point to one of many small white Toyotas. “Okay. Let’s see if she starts.” It does, and we climb in back. He drives us up the hill. But the shelter is empty. “I guess they’ve all gone to the
matsuri
—the festival on the small island over there,” he says, nodding toward an arm of land across the water. “I’ll take you there in my boat.”
It’s a short ride. The school celebration consists of relay races, the awarding of trophies, and student speeches given over a microphone on a raised podium. In some towns there have been arguments about whether it’s appropriate to have festivals so soon after the disaster, but the islanders here seem to have a sunnier attitude. Why not? Mori says, smiling sheepishly.
I sit on a rock wall under a tree by a man who has a dog on a leash. From there I have a view of the judges’ stand where Utsumi, our friend from Katsura Island, looks suave in a pink oxford shirt and a blue blazer. A young girl about to receive an award breaks down and begins sobbing. It’s hard to tell if she’s faint from the heat or overwhelmed with grief. I ask, but no one around me seems to know.
At the end of the day the school song is sung; then everyone stands and sings the Japanese anthem. After, they raise their fists and shout an enthusiastic “Banzai!!”
Jin is not a shaman’s apprentice, but an apprentice shaman with wildly radiant eyes, a sturdy body, and a Leica slung around his neck. His images are striking; his shaman-work is coming along. He trained in western Honshu, at a shrine between Nara and Wakayama.
His training was in the old Japanese style: a mixture of Buddhism and Shinto in which the ancestors and
kamisama
—the gods—are one. “The gods are everywhere and divinity lives inside everything. Even those who die are gods,” Jin tells me. He also studied an ancient shamanic practice performed mostly by women, the Yuta, of Okinawa. They taught him about curing illnesses and predicting the future. They are the ones who gave him the name Jin.
“When he takes photographs, he uses his given name,” Masumi says. “The gallery people who show his work don’t know about his occult side. There are lots of people like him around here. It’s a quiet network. He doesn’t tell people what to do. For us, he’s a person who takes the ghosts away. And if I have a problem, I ask him how to resolve it.”
Earlier Masumi called Jin from the car as we drove back to Sendai. Her voice was hoarse. He told her it’s because she’s carrying ghosts on her back, and he will come to Sendai to exorcise them. “He can see into us,” Masumi says, wide-eyed. “He helps me identify the powers that are influencing me—a ghost or some kind of karma. I am a person who attracts ghosts. Not everyone does. So Jin helps me. He’s the person who takes the ghosts
away. He invited me to take photographs with him, and I did. Now I’m getting my doctorate in the history of photography.”
Jin carries two old Leicas wherever he goes and shows his work in Kyoto galleries. After the tsunami he plied the coast. Now he wants to take us to the area called Nobiru. “It’s just as it was the day after the Wave came,” he says. “There has been no cleanup. I want you to see it. It’s important to understand that kind of loss.”
But first, the ghosts. Masumi lies on the floor of her parents’ house and he kneels beside her. Eyes shut, face contorted, he is intensely concentrated. Sweat pours off his forehead, his clothes grow wet. Back straight as a ramrod, he lifts one strong arm above her shoulder, takes a deep breath, expels a loud grunt and a yell, and gives her a soft hit between the shoulder blades. Then another indrawn breath, a raised hand, a hit, a breath, a deep, sonorous exhalation, and the ghosts are gone. As well as the hoarseness in her voice. He is paid the equivalent of $100. After, we drink sake and eat dinner.
“What would you do if you went home and everything was gone?” Jin asks as we drive to Nobiru. “The taxi brings you to your address but there is no house. Your dogs are dead, your horses, and your husband. You find their bodies far away. Your car is crushed. Your library destroyed—all the books strewn, and your work, your notes, and papers. Everything in your world has vanished. You have no money, no job, and no hope of finding one. That’s how it is for thousands of people here. Please don’t forget that feeling.”
We stop and walk. Jin leads the way through abandoned houses. Windows and walls are torn out; bedding and furniture, tatami mats, and frying pans spill from one house into the other. A wall-sized mirror stands in the mud, unbroken. A broom, a pink purse, a calculator, a desk out on the road with all its drawers opened and filled with sand. Two palm trees stand by a ruined house, green fronds beating the air. They survived because they coevolved with tsunamis.
A metronome sits on the sidewalk, its ticking flag bent by the beat of the Wave. Broken plates are scattered. A Seiko watch stopped at 3:45, just after the tsunami hit. There’s a tin box marked “Disney Resort,” one shoe, three more, a life jacket, a small sake bottle, a CD encased in mud.
Swallows dip and fly. They are mud-lovers, mud-builders. They don’t know that this mud is radioactive, and reeks of dead fish, humans, and animals.
Two thousand people died here. One house has fallen sideways
into the river. The train tracks at Nobiru railway station are twisted. No trains have come north of Sendai since March and will not do so for a long time. We step carefully between ghosts. We’re told that someone in the next village dove down into the water and found three houses completely intact on the ocean floor. No one knows why the cleanup crews have neglected this place.
On a hill above a ruined schoolyard, a well-dressed man says hello. When he finds out I’m American, his face brightens: “Please thank the American Navy for me. They came here right after the tsunami and provided food, clothing, and water to us all. We are way out here and no one else was able to get here because the roads were out. They came from the sea. Our whole town went under the wave. It is upside down now.”
We stop at the evacuation center to see a friend of Jin’s. “I lost my boat,” he tells us. “Some of the fishermen from here were able to drive their boats out. The wall of water was coming at them and they had to move fast. They took their boats up the face of the wave. It was steep and they had to use all their power. The ones who went out too late died. One boat climbed the wave and ran out of gas, but the fisherman just ahead threw him a line and the bigger boat pulled him that way. They both made it. Life or death—it all depends on your destiny, on
kamihitoe
.” He looks at my notebook: “The thinness of the paper you are writing on, that’s all that separates any of us from death. The wave here was sixty-five feet high.”
Driving again, Jin goes fast. His face resembles a storm. Dark clouds pass over, and sun, then a roiling front creases his forehead and triggers his unsettled mind. I ask about the cast on his arm. “The ligaments in my wrist tore from the bone, just like everything here. Nothing is solid.”
Inland from the coast we drive through villages of close-knit houses, still standing but ripped open by the wave. “Look,”
he says. “The buildings were destroyed but the rock gardens remain. Only the human-made things succumbed to the attack.
“Is Japan worth rebuilding?” he asks. “The spokesman for the government said the radiation will not affect us right away. That’s because they won’t be in government when people start to die.”
On the far coast pink and purple hibiscus line the road. At the very tip of Nobiru, we come upon the village of Tsukihama. A group of people are standing in the middle of the road talking excitedly and hardly notice that we’ve joined them. They crowd around a man holding a map and pointing at numbered rooms in barrack-like structures. These are the temporary houses the government has built to get people out of the evacuation centers. Once a family has made an application, the houses are doled out by lottery. We’ve arrived at just the right time: the lottery is
now
.
A middle-aged woman screams in delight. “I just found my house!” she cries out, and runs down the walkway holding her lottery ticket, grabbing my arm to make me run with her. She stops at #206B, looks at her ticket, looks at the number, and screeches: “This is it. We’ve been waiting three and a half months wondering which house we could have!” She peers in the window and beckons to me to do the same.
“Beautiful,” I say. But I can’t really see in. When she doesn’t open the door I look at her questioningly. “We can’t go in yet. We don’t have keys.”
The “houses” are 550-square-foot apartments in newly constructed barracks, each with a new refrigerator and TV. The apartments are free, but living expenses are not, which might seem easy enough, unless you’ve lost your means of making a living.
When we rejoin the group, six people start talking at once, all trying to tell us their tsunami stories. Masumi shakes her head, laughing. “I can’t keep up with them.”
The head of the community, a middle-aged man with a kind face and a slight belly, takes charge and gives us the village details: “No one here died. We’re happy because of that. We were always trained to run to high ground after an earthquake. No matter what. It was getting dark when the tsunami came. It was so cold and everyone gathered together to stay warm. The first wave was only seven meters. The second wave was much bigger, maybe twenty meters, but we didn’t see it—we were running.”
He continues: “At midnight, there was another tsunami because of an aftershock, but we were still on high ground and safe. We had three evacuation points. We went to the lowest one first, then to the highest. Some people from our village had taken their cars, but they had to abandon them and run. We lost all our possessions but we all survived. Life is more important than those things.”
A fisherman groans. Maybe not for him. How will he be able to buy a boat again? The narrow cove where the few village houses and a
minshuku
, a B&B, once stood is completely nonexistent, or at least, nonsensical: a thatched roof lies on the ground, smashed open by two fishing boats that now perch on the open ceiling. Where a house once stood, there’s only a spiral staircase left—a corkscrew silhouette leading to nothing.
“Water came from the northwest. Used to be a harbor with lots of boats. The harbor disappeared and the boats sank.” Pointing at the strewn timbers of boats and houses, he says, “Nothing will fit together again.”
At the top of the road we are met by a gregarious man who introduces himself as Suzuki Kazuo. He looks at the wrecked harbor. “I had gasoline intended for my boat’s engine, so after the tsunami we used it to make a fire and cook and stay warm. We owned the small inn in the village. People from the city who wanted to fish came and stayed with us year after year. Now our former customers have been supporting us. It’s strange because
I never felt as if I’d been helped by anyone in my life. But now, so many have sent food and money. Such goodness is beyond what I imagined could be. My dream is to build a small house and invite all those who have given to us. I’m sixty-four. Please come back sometime and we’ll have tea.”
On the way home we are silent. An odd-shaped cloud rises in the north. “Look,” Jin says. “That’s an earthquake cloud. I’m afraid of the next
jishin
. It will be big and might come soon.” If so, will anyone survive?
Finally he smiles. “You have to work hard to change your luck.” He stops the car at an evacuation center so we can use the portable toilets. The women are all wearing knee-high rain boots. I ask why. “High tide is coming in. It floods the whole area here. You better hurry up, or you won’t be able to get out. You’ll have to live with us then!” Laughter. Jin looks at me: “You can’t just wait for luck to happen.”
We ease back into the evening heat of Sendai, weaving through the usual clotted traffic. The visible past has been erased and the invisible future is an unknown. Water has fiddled with time. The Wave washed into outdoor clocks and softened their mechanisms of precision.