Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (11 page)

THREE

T
HE
G
REAT
P
ARTING

S
EVERAL TIMES A WEEK,
the Zen Buddhist priest Kaneta Tai
heads out in his pickup truck with a small group of helpers to visit one of the dozens of temporary housing shelters on the T
hoku coast. Kaneta calls himself “Café de Monk.” The term is a pun; the Japanese love puns. Kaneta is a priest, which he says is a kind of monk. The word “monk” also sounds like
monku
, which means to complain, and one of Kaneta’s jobs since the tsunami is to try to listen to people’s complaints. But the word “monk” is also a reference to the jazz artist Thelonious Monk, whose music Kaneta plays whenever he sets up his cafés.

“Monk,” he says, “has a groove, which keeps things lighthearted. But there is tremendous sadness in his music. Monk is the perfect soundtrack for what we are experiencing today.”

Kaneta is from the town of Kurihara, where he runs a four-hundred-year-old temple called Ts
daiji, or “Temple of the Great Way.” Kaneta’s temple is located inland, which meant that after the devastating earthquake, he found himself on his feet for hours and hours, day after day, reciting sutras for the dead, as bodies were recovered and cremated in his local crematorium. He did not know most of the people whose cremations he conducted, but he saw his job as necessary and important because it is at the cremation that
people must experience something which the Japanese call
owakare
, or “the great parting.”

In Japanese,
wakare
(wa-KA-ray) means “parting,” and the word can be used in many contexts. When I take a guided tour of, say, a formal Japanese garden in Ky
t
, I am usually told at the end of the tour, “And here is our
wakare
.” Here is our parting. This is a signal that I will now be on my own. When you add the prefix “O” in Japanese, you automatically elevate a word so it takes on a sense of honor.
T
san
is “father,” but
ot
san
is “honored father,” as in your own father and not the general concept of father. The word
daiji
is used to ask someone to “take care,” but “
odaiji
” is “take care greatly.” So it is with parting. There are many partings in life, but the great and most honored parting, the
owakare
, is the most significant of all, because it is permanent. Ushering the body of the dead into the crematorium is the
owakare
, and it requires the presence of family and a priest for it to be handled with dignity.

O
NCE THE CREMATIONS
finally came to an end, Kaneta was moved to do something else to help all the survivors. He started by taking some udon noodles to the survivors of the tsunami in the town of Togura, who belonged to the Buddhist temple Kaiz
ji, which is run by his second cousin, and where fifty
danka
, or parishioners, had died in the great waves. But the noodles didn’t feel special enough. The next time, Kaneta brought a selection of cakes from a bakery in his hometown and served them with some strong coffee. He intended mostly to provide a little cheering up, but was surprised by a tremendous outpouring of grief and emotion. The mostly female participants drank their coffee and ate their cake and cried as they told and retold their stories of survival. One round of coffee and cake was not enough.

The stories of terror continued well after the tsunami passed.
Survivors had nightmares. They saw ghosts. Some of them wanted to see ghosts, as the ghosts were comforting. Some of them were possessed by ghosts and needed help relieving themselves of the ghosts. One afternoon when I visited Kaneta in his home, he told me about a female medium who phoned him in the middle of the night because she was suicidal. So many spirits of the dead inhabited her body that she had lost the will to live. Kaneta asked the medium to come to his home straightaway and met her in the evening. For the next three hours, he spoke with twenty-five different “entities,” almost all of whom were lost and confused. “You are dead,” Kaneta informed each entity. “There was a tsunami and many people died. You are one of the dead. And now you must leave the earth and go toward the light.”

Kaneta began to visit survivors regularly, always arriving with cake, coffee, and Thelonious Monk. First he visited people in shelters, but after temporary housing communities were established, he began to make rounds there. One by one, the temporary communities reached out and asked for him to come and visit. For over two years now, Kaneta has been going out several times a week to meet with survivors and to listen to their stories. He is accompanied by a faithful group of volunteers and is often joined by new priests, who come and go as time permits. The day I met Kaneta, it was in the company of a group of priests who were undergoing grief-counseling training at T
hoku University.