Facing the Wave (4 page)

Another beer and it’s time to leave. As we stand, Kazuyoshi hands us four fresh tomatoes, just picked from his tiny garden. He shows us a single head of lettuce: the one that Masumi and I saw near the entrance to her grandmother’s house. Kazuko takes an outer leaf and lays it on her tongue—a green wafer emblematic of a lost life. She chews and swallows—it’s all that’s left of the farm where she grew up.

“Everything needs rescuing,” Kazuyoshi says, laughing. There is no mention of the radiation wafting up the coast from Fukushima Daiichi. Reluctantly, Kazuko accepts one of the tomatoes. “This is absurd. You have nothing and you’re giving us food,” she says. He stares hard at her: “The less I have, the happier I am.”

At 2:46 on the afternoon of March 11 the epicenter of the earthquake occurred forty-five miles east of the Oshika Peninsula at a shallow depth of 19.9 miles, where it damaged the cold-water supply systems at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Fifty-one minutes later it was hit by a forty-nine-foot-high tsunami wave. Within a week, 580 workers from all over Japan, plus 140 U.S. Marines, were on site, working fifteen minutes at a time inside the buildings, trying to keep the six nuclear reactors from exploding. They failed. Later, the workers told journalists that the buildings moved and jerked so hard, that pipes began coming apart immediately.

Not all waves are made of water. The workers described the earthquake as coming in two intense waves, and by the time the second one started, the pipes inside the Daiichi nuclear power plant that regulate the heat of the reactor and carry coolant to it were bursting open, though TEPCO claimed it was the tsunami that caused the circulatory destruction.

Oxygen tanks exploded, and the wall of the turbine building in reactor 1 cracked. A tangle of overhead pipes buckled. Others jerked away from the walls. Minutes later, but before the tsunami wave hit, the walls of reactor 1 began to collapse. A radiation alarm sounded and white smoke was seen coming from the top of the reactor.

After the first tsunami wave hit the power plant, all the electrical and cooling systems failed. Six hours after the earthquake,
radiation levels rose to 0.8 millisieverts—a measure of radiation exposure—every ten seconds: more than a twenty-minute exposure for a human would be fatal.

Five workers died from internal injuries. The Wave bashed the side of reactors 1 and 2 and flooded the basements of the turbine buildings, cutting off all power, including the emergency diesel generators. Though additional backup generators had been installed in watertight hillside buildings, the switching stations that connected backup power to the cooling systems were not watertight, and they failed.

Temperatures rose. Reactors 1, 2, 3, and 4 experienced meltdowns. Water levels dropped in the fuel rod pools stored precariously on top of the reactor buildings. Overheating occurred. Residents of areas within twelve miles of the plant were evacuated. The workers at the power plant stayed, despite repeated exposure to higher levels of radiation than the Japanese government and TEPCO admitted.

Workers attempted to open ventilation valves by hand but failed. One worker heard what he called “an eerie, deep popping noise” from a structure at the bottom of the reactor, and when he propped his foot on it to open the valve, his rubber boot melted from the heat.

That evening, Masao Yoshida, the fifty-six-year-old plant manager, made a decision against the wishes of the TEPCO officials. As a last resort he began pumping seawater into the reactor core, but it was already too late to cool the reactor: hydrogen explosions were about to take place.

Aftershocks kept coming. Workers laid cable in an attempt to restore power, all the while wading in knee-deep water. Fires erupted. At 3:36 p.m. on March 12, a day after the earthquake and tsunami, a hydrogen explosion occurred in reactor 1, blowing away the side walls, leaving only the steel frame. Later, there were explosions in reactors 3 and 4.

Four workers were injured and a fifth was taken to the hospital.
Everyone inside and outside of the plant was exposed to extremely high levels of radiation. Daiichi plant chief Masao Yoshida, who kept pouring seawater into the burning heart of the reactors, said: “Many times I thought I was going to die.”

“There has been no meltdown,” Edano Yukio, a government official, famously announced. But the workers inside, later known as the Fukushima 50, knew otherwise. Requesting anonymity, they said that inspections and repairs to the forty-year-old power plant had not been carried out systematically, and two-year-old reports of water pipe deterioration had been ignored. TEPCO officials later blamed the meltdown solely on the tsunami so as not to appear negligent, but the cover-ups kept coming.

The GE-designed nuclear plant was programmed for a maximum tsunami height of only twenty-one feet, and even that eventuality was not taken seriously. Even at that wave height, seawater might have flooded to a height of forty-nine feet. The shaking of the 9.0 earthquake and the wave that followed exceeded every design specification.

Later reports claim that Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant released twice as much radioactive material as the government revealed: 35,800 terabecquerels of cesium-137 were emitted during the disaster, not 15,000 terabecquerels as Japan’s nuclear regulator announced.

A becquerel (Bq), named after a Frenchman who won the 1903 Nobel Prize in nuclear physics, is a unit of radioactivity, and refers to the activity of a specific quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second. A terabecquerel is a multiple of a Bq. One terabecquerel = 10
¹²
Bq.

Earthquake damage to the plant may have exacerbated the release of cesium-137 from the pools used to store spent nuclear fuel rods. There was a release of xenon-133 immediately after the earthquake and before the tsunami.

* * *

Evacuations have been expanded from a ten-kilometer-wide perimeter from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to a twenty-kilometer perimeter referred to as the “no/go zone.” Anyone entering will be removed and fined 100,000 yen. Over two hundred thousand residents have been sent to live outside the zone.

One peta = a million, billion becquerels. In thirty years, only half the area’s radioactivity will be lost because cesium is a slow-decaying element. Radioactively contaminated rainwater in the runoff has entered the sea.

Emergency response was deemed by the media as “chaotic, slow, inefficient, and peppered with denial and untruths.”

Fukushima Daiichi continues to falter. After the plant manager tried to cool the reactors with seawater, one petabecquerel of cesium-137 leaked back into the ocean. It is considered the worst maritime contamination disaster in recorded history.

On the Pacific Ocean a single current line moves: a flattened compass needle rides over the cardinal directions as if they didn’t exist. I grew up on the other side in California, facing Japan. When the tide pulls out a curtain of gray shakes off light. Asleep or awake, the mind skates. No surface is real.

We’re on a family trip—Masumi, her parents, and I—following the highway north to visit the devastated coastal cities north of Sendai. After, Saburo, Masumi’s father, insists that we visit a family-owned house in the mountains where Matsuo Bashō once stayed the night. “It’s important to keep things in balance,” he says. “Too many depressing sights are bad for your health.”

A convoy of policemen, lights flashing, passes us. It’s a constant sight on every Tohoku road. They have been brought from Hiroshima, Kobe, Tokyo, Shizuoka, Kumamoto—from all over Japan to help with the effort to find missing bodies. Going the other way are vans full of volunteers, some of the 6,600 who have been trained by Peace Boat (among others) to distribute food, shovel mud, and repair graveyards. A dog that had been floating on debris a mile out at sea is rescued; and a baby, swept from its parents’ arms, is found alive and reunited with its mother and father. There are four hundred thousand evacuees living in shelters.

As we drive, Saburo tells me about two young cousins, both boys. They were riding in a family car that was swept off the road by the tsunami. The boys swam out of the vehicle holding hands; the parents who were driving did not make it. When a torrent of water separated the cousins, the newly orphaned boy was placed in an evacuation shelter; the other boy made it to his mountain home where he rejoined his family. The orphan had no idea that his cousin was still alive. But in the weeks that followed their separation, his cousin searched for him. Two months later, he found the boy and took him home to live with his family.

We exit the highway and follow a winding coastline of exquisite beauty—as breathtaking as California’s Highway 1 in Big Sur. There are almost no other cars. An itinerant priest hugs the side of the road carrying a walking stick, counting the beads of his
juzu
in his right hand. The hem of his robe is covered in mud. He wears white socks and black tennis shoes—no straw sandals for this pilgrim. He’s been to Ookawa Elementary School and two Buddhist temples, Kannonji and Shounji, where many of the dead were taken. Now he’s walking in the direction of the port town of Ishinomaki, where more than four thousand people died and 80 percent of the houses in the fishing port were destroyed.

The coast is jagged with high rock cliffs. Every cove bears marks of disaster: broken trees, overturned skiffs, and bits of broken houses. Thick forests of
sugi
and
matsu
—cedar and pine—come down to the water. Around another corner we see an entire pulverized village. Behind, in the trees, there’s a thirty- to forty-foot-high trimline made by the Wave, a brown watermark, a shadow-line of the wave that killed them.

Every cove. Ravaged, clogged, and tangled with rubbish. A woman’s dress hangs from a tree.

* * *

We stop to eat a picnic lunch. “How lucky we are,” Masumi says, “to have food.” High cliffs, pine-studded rock islets, crashing surf: “
Kanpeki
,” I say. Perfect. If we just stood here and didn’t move north or south, we might be able to forget. But each bite means we’re ingesting radioactive food and air.

To sever all this from the mind—how easy it sounds, delicious in fact; then life would be sweet again, wouldn’t it? Or was it ever that way? But it’s too late. We’re alive and death is real. Like the Buddhist priest who is walking the coast, we too are on some sort of path. No getting off now.

North to Minamisanriku, only eighty kilometers west of the quake’s epicenter, a fishermen’s town of seventeen thousand where over ten thousand people died. A twenty-four-year-old city worker, Miki Ando, voluntarily took over the public announcement post and on the loudspeaker urged people to go to higher ground. She stayed at her post too long. The Wave was coming fast; at the last moment she climbed to the roof of the building, but it washed her away. Her body was not found until April.

We enter the town in silence. Saburo says, “We need to see it because this is one of the towns that was wholly destroyed.” The car transports us but the body carries the eye. We drop down from the coast to a crenulated sea-lane and cross a makeshift, one-lane bridge. The lifeless realm before us has a cockeyed look: a boat on top of a house on top of three crushed cars. We almost laugh, but tears leak from our eyes.

We drive down a stark avenue. On either side there is only rubble. Please slow down, I ask. We’re going too fast. It’s too difficult to take all this in. But there is no speed slow enough to comprehend.

* * *

A small river winds out of the mountains through a green valley. It leaks, rubble-choked, into this town. We cross a crudely made temporary bridge. From the sea, it was said that the town looked like it was sinking, but down on the flats, the opposite is true: the height of the rubble is as tall as the Wave.

Masumi and I get out of the car and walk. The red steel frame of the city building where Miki Ando died still stands, but nothing else of it remains. Only the mayor survived: he climbed the cell phone tower atop the roof; tried, but couldn’t save the others. Beneath his feet, thirty-three coworkers, including Miki, were swept away.

Closer to the harbor is a four-story hospital where the Wave blasted through the first-, second-, and third-story windows and doors. An X-ray machine dangles from an opening, as does a nurse’s uniform. Two hundred people were rescued from the roof, but the rest of the patients, doctors, and nurses died. The Wave turned a place of safety into a killing field, squandering needed medicines and erasing all records of what had happened to whom and when and why. A fishing boat is perched on top of the hospital’s second-floor terrace.

We turn from the hospital and look out on a plain of chaos, a monstrous collage that no eye, no painting could truly capture. No one object is whole and no city remains. All is a broken scramble, the sum total of which is an intricate blank. Blank because it no longer carries the constructs of everyday life, of a functioning town.

It’s oddly quiet. Wind pushes radioactive dust into our eyes. The crushed and the silent and the surreal. Two hundred days ago it was a thriving fishing port; one hundred days ago it was a horrific theater of disaster. From north to south, from Hachinohe to Hirono, roughly 365 miles were taken by water; over two hundred thousand buildings destroyed. Now there are only twisted remnants. No matter how I look at it, there is nothing and everything for the eye.

* * *

Water is heavy. After being displaced at the rupture site it becomes a moving mass whose fluidity is like something solid. Yet it slips and slides, shoves and gathers. It splits the ends of things, fills and empties them, and carves new shapes that are blunt, tipping, and as sharp as knives.

At the port of Ishinomaki a fisherman stands in front of his boat, its bow piercing the second story of a house. A piece of tatami juts out from the front door. Broken dishes lie in the street. His arms are folded. He stands and stares. Around him, the sky darkens. Then a curtain of black rain begins to fall. It pours down on him. He doesn’t run for cover. More than three thousand people in this city died in one day.