Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
Geophysicists say that space-waves caused by the 9.0 earthquake altered Earth’s alignment. I lie on the futon with my feet off to one side, misaligned. Other major earthquakes—the 8.8 quake in Chile and the 2004 quake in Sumatra—have shifted the axis around which Earth’s mass is balanced. “Earth is always shifting and wobbling,” a geophysicist says. “Nothing stays the same.”
Music is time ritualized. From aftershocks, Earth-music erupts: the noise of the crustal rupture under the ocean is a New World symphony whose surfaces seethe with (M
e
) of 1.9±0.5×10
17
joules, its crescendo finally released in a series of flaps and lurches, early jolts and mental stresses, and drenching rains.
At the coast the high tide’s exuberant wind-waves shatter on rock. There’s news of elderly couples committing double suicides. As if to cover the shame of surviving, the ocean reseals itself; its shining surface coheres. Some days I too feel stricken: I can’t go back to the coast, I tell myself; I can’t look any more. No, that’s wrong. I can’t
stop
looking.
Dreams wake me: whole forests of the dead roll in at high tide until the mountains of Japan are denuded. I hear the tree trunks’
cracking thuds. The real looks unreal. Dreams of disaster cascade through the psyche, as if trying to prop up what has been flattened.
Another mild shake and piano music fattens my ears. A friend of Masumi’s says: “In downtown Sendai, we were like dogs on all fours in a big room with twenty grand pianos when the earthquake came. The walls cracked and all the windows broke, and the pianos were rolling around banging each other, making piano sounds. The roof collapsed. We were crawling under pianos in the dark. They were playing the music of seismic chatter.”
In a dream I scratch dirt like a dog, panting and frantically working my paws, but the ground is hard-packed and refuses to open. As I travel around Tohoku, I try not to armor myself, but tell me, is there a way to catch grief and tear it open, examine the contents of its stomach? Death stalks us with its internal rain, shed from the same confining canopy that shelters sorrow.
* * *
Morning. Breakfast is being made: coffee,
ocha
(green tea),
gohan
(rice), green salad, and scrambled eggs with a red squiggle of ketchup on top. After the tsunami, a woman who routinely brought farm vegetables to the Yajima house appeared at the door. She apologized that she had only one orange to give. “I was so shocked to see her, I didn’t know what to say, so I gave the one orange back and told her to go home. ‘You have a child,’ I told her. ‘We’re only adults here. You will need food.’ ”
Yet the woman returned faithfully each week. There had been an earthquake and a wave and a nuclear meltdown; Tohoku had been ripped apart. “People have to do something,” Kazuko explained. One week, cheerful as ever, the young woman bought
snacks at the convenience store to give to Kazuko, thinking she had to have something in her hand, because there were no available vegetables at all. The week after, as things in Sendai became more desperate, she came to the door on schedule, empty-handed.
Shoes on, I go out and stand in the middle of the street. There are no cars. An empty lot opposite the Yajima house is alive with tall
susuki
grass waving its blond plumes. Cupping my hands to my ears I hear birds sing and a barking dog moan and go silent. I’m restless and walk the streets back and forth. The noise of this morning’s earthquake is the sound of post-disaster Tohoku: stirred sounds rising from embryonic space—lush, chaotic, compressed—yet having no tempo or direction.
What were we not hearing before, during, and after the earthquake? What have we failed to comprehend? I try to pinpoint the event as if that might give me clues, and I prick up my geologic ears, but there’s only city noise—cars and trucks on a distant highway, and a siren blaring. Under the epicentral region is the 25,300-foot-deep Japan Trench, where the deepest living fish,
Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis
, is found swimming among mountain ranges with pointed peaks and narrow valleys. So many worlds we don’t even see: the airborne one of radiation; the undersea realm of mountains, meadows, and deep valleys lined up like fins on the neck of a dragon. Wave after wave …
Some physicists believe that the cosmos is constantly splitting into a multiverse in which quantum objects are broken and unbroken at the same time. As quantum objects interact with the environment, information “leaks away” in a process called “decoherence,” and the human is left with a single view. But where does information about the multiverse leak to? In such a world, is a flattened town in Tohoku also unflattened simultaneously? Are the dead also alive?
* * *
On the path that leads back to the house, sunlit spider webs hit my face and burst, and something inside my head opens. Thinking goes
puuuffff
. Boundaries, like seawalls, crumble. A morning moon shines. At the coast, tides do not ebb. Kazuko puts her head out the door and calls me in for breakfast.
In Okayama, far south of the quake’s epicenter, Shodo Harada Roshi, the head priest of Sogenji, a Rinzai Buddhist temple, tried to contact affiliated Rinzai temples in Sendai after the disaster, but had no luck. In his newsletter, forwarded to me from a monk in San Francisco, he wrote: “Although we could not communicate directly with them we were able to leave messages.” On television the monks were able to glimpse the destruction: “We saw cities burning, we saw a car hanging from a telephone wire, every last thing pushed completely up against a mountain, all fallen over in every direction. We saw people reaching for heavenly help.”
Shodo Harada Roshi desperately wanted to help out at Zenoji, where, many times, the abbot there had sent rice and straw sandals to the monks at Sogenji. He wrote: “In any way possible I wanted to go there and support them.” The monks worked hard, collecting money in the city, performing
takuhatsu
, an ancient ritual of begging. Loaves of bread were baked—as many as possible before their departure. They gathered candy, cooking oil, shoyu, noodles, chopsticks and bowls, and a kind of gum that cleans the teeth. They brought cases of bottled water and hot packs for children and the elderly, because it was still very cold.
Getting to Sendai took time. The Shinkansen, the bullet train, all local trains, and bus and car traffic had come to a stop. It was not until March 22 that Roshi and two older monks (he did not want to expose younger ones to the radiation) made their way north by car to Kyoto, and by night-bus from there to Sendai.
At Zenoji Temple, the cemetery’s sixteen hundred gravestones had all toppled. Roshi and his two companions helped repair them. As monks, they were allowed to travel on closed roads to help out at other temples. Many Shinto and Buddhist temples within range of the devastated coast became unofficial shelters and temporary morgues. At Furinji, 200 refugees were living on the grounds; at Zuiganji, there were 385 refugees and 16 monks who cooked and cared for them.
It was the invisible that affected Roshi most deeply, the radiation—iodine, cesium-137, and strontium—that was spewing from the Daiichi reactors. In his newsletter he wrote: “Now is the usual time for planting the next rice crop, but it is forbidden by the government. In the whole area radiation has been spreading, in the air, in the things growing there, the vegetables raised there, all of the things nearby are being found to have high levels of radiation. It is impossible not to wonder about this. Today, all over the world, the biggest problem is this … the earthquake and tsunami’s challenges will be taken care of, but the results of this nuclear power plant will not go away. We can’t be deceived by what we see and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. In each and every era we have to see from out of a truly opened eye which is seeing the truth, and not deceive ourselves. This is Zen and this is the harvest of our training.”
ZENOJI
“Everyone got fat after the tsunami,” Masumi’s university friend Sachiko says. She’s my driver today while Masumi teaches a class, and wheels her tiny car between traffic jams as we search for Zenoji Temple, clutching the steering wheel with fingers so thin, I find them alarming. “At first we didn’t have food,” she continues. “Then, when we did, we ate a lot.”
Sachiko was at Tohoku University when the earthquake hit, standing in a corridor between classes. “I asked a professor what we should do. He said, ‘I don’t know.’ We couldn’t think of anything. Books were falling and computers, and all the lights went out. The shaking didn’t stop. I thought maybe it would keep shaking, maybe that’s how the world would always be.”
We find Zenoji in an old Sendai neighborhood lined with rows of bamboo and tiny kitchen gardens jammed against the front doors. The temple’s graveyard, with its broken headstones, is imposing. Up the grand stairs, a young priest, the son of the abbot, greets us.
Temples are affiliated and in times of disaster, they help each other in their service to the greater communities around them. The priest remembers when Shodo Harada Roshi and two monks arrived loaded with food to give away. “He wanted to go everywhere, but it was still hard to get around. It was shaking all the time and we were scared, so he helped here, repairing the
graveyard, making the wooden sticks—the Toba—and cleaning up the garden.
“We have a thousand people in our
sangha
, our community of practitioners, and only six hundred are accounted for so far. We decided to send postcards with return envelopes. If they were alive, they could send the card back. Only half have done so.
“The roads were still broken but finally we got through to some temples in Ishinomaki, where things were very bad, and eventually got food and clothing to the people who had lost everything there.”
The young priest’s father, the abbot, appears. Small and white-haired, he sits on the couch facing us. In his presence, the son goes silent. The abbot says: “In our z
azen
practice we try to let go of fear. Whatever happens will happen. We are ready for it. There was another big earthquake the second night Harada Roshi was here so we sat z
azen
. One of the monks—he was a Frenchman—got stuck with his legs crossed. He was so scared, he couldn’t move! [
laughter
] Yes, I shall never forget Harada Roshi’s visit!”
IKOJI
After making a small offering to help with the refugees, we continue on. Sachiko drives warily on quake-rumpled streets into a maze of ruins, her CD playing “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things.” A curved arm of land stretches north from Sendai and holds Matsushima Bay in its embrace.
Wandering among soggy rice fields, we become lost; we back up and try again. At the far end of a narrow track in a secluded valley, we see an upside-down truck, its chassis twisted, lying submerged in mud. Beyond is the entrance to the temple, Ikoji.
The village name, Shichigahama, means “seven beaches,”
though here, there is no view of the sea. Instead, a line of scalloped hills loops across the horizon, a supposed protection from tsunamis.
The temple is low and wide and is situated between the lane and the forest, not on a hill as many temples are. We poke our heads in, looking for the abbot. Instead, the half-rebuilt hall is full of carpenters laying down wide pine planks for the floor. “The abbot is not there, but his wife is in the kindergarten,” one of them says.
His wife, Mrs. Watanabe, greets us warmly and invites us into the brightly lit, modern school for young children. Tall and big-boned, she’s talkative and funny. She explains that just before the tsunami, a complete renovation of the temple had been completed by master carpenters from Akita, a town on the west coast renowned for its artisans. “It was scheduled to reopen on March 16. But the Wave took it away. Those same carpenters have come back!” she says, smiling at the irony. “We start all over again.”
“This temple was supposed to be an evacuation center!” she exclaims. “Can you believe it?” She shows us where water came to the ceiling. “But we always practiced for tsunamis with the three-, four-, and five-year-olds, and thought we were well-prepared, and would be safe.
“No one expected a wave to come here. As soon as the earthquake was over, people from the neighborhood arrived at the temple door. Some ran, some came by car, and the big bell, the
bonsho
, began ringing all by itself!”
A piece of land can be a knife, slicing water in half. “The wave came from two directions,” the abbot’s wife says. She moves around as she talks, gesturing with her hands dramatically. “The hills on the other side of the rice fields split the water. A wave came in, flowing past the kindergarten and temple. We had fourteen children that day.
“There are two kinds of tsunami warnings and the first one had sounded. Water was everywhere. We put all the children and teachers inside the bus. Then the second warning sounded, meaning another bigger wave was coming, so the staff drove the children up the hill.
“I waited for the woman who had gone back to her house, and sat, ready, in the car. She didn’t appear. My husband came running and said he decided that we must go without her. By then about fifty people had joined us.
“At first the car wouldn’t start [
laughter
]. Then finally it did, and as I started up the hill, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the second wave come right toward us. It was big, about seventeen or eighteen meters. It came over the hill and mixed with the water that was already here. It slammed against the fence and went through the temple and the school. Water hit the
bonsho
and it began ringing again. It was really snowing hard. We had closed the doors and windows of the temple, and the heavy shutters, but water and mud made its way in and covered everything. We saw the tatami from the meditation hall floating out in the rice fields.
“We stayed there overnight. The little hill had become an island in a sea of wreckage. Water covered everything below. An oil tank exploded nearby and there was a bright orange light. More explosions and a helicopter flew over, but didn’t see us. My husband went back down the hill to forage for food and blankets.