Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (8 page)

Because Takahagi had only been at the Eiheiji Betsuin part-time—most students study full-time and are unable to leave the confines of the temple until graduation—he had taken it upon himself to buy chocolate, magazines, and other treats from the secular world not allowed on the monastery grounds. Takahagi had done this to raise the morale of his fellow priests-in-training, but he had constantly gotten caught and been punished accordingly. Mostly he’d been made to sit in silence for six hours at a time, something he learned not to mind too much because
he became adept at napping while sitting up. Takahagi said that even at the Betsuin, which was not nearly as remote as the main monastery of Eiheiji, the training was very hard, and half a dozen boys were unable to take the pressure and escaped. One by one the boys who ran away from the Betsuin went straight to the police—monks-in-training have no cell phones and no money—where they phoned their parents. A day or so later, the parents would arrive sheepishly and pick up their sons’ belongings. “I hear there are easier places to train,” Takahagi told me, “though I don’t really know anything about places like that.”

Takahagi now lived in an apartment with his wife and commuted most days to the temple to help with overflow work. He also picked up freelance jobs from other temples in the surrounding area when they needed an extra hand. Even though young people are increasingly not interested in taking over family temples—indeed many temples are closing down due to either a lack of support from young people or a fading local population, or both—there are temples that have an overflow of parishioners but not enough staff. Over the years, Takahagi had received several offers from temples who wanted him to marry their daughter and take over their temple. He had always rejected this arrangement. The only temple he ever wanted to run was his own.

In his twenties, Takahagi had chafed under his role as spare to the heir. He knew the names of all the
dankasan
, how to flirt with the women, and how to make the men laugh, while his older brother, Daisuke, hid inside the family house. But Takahagi, as the second son, was not the designated heir.

Daisuke had gone full-time to Komazawa University, where he had received a bachelor’s degree. After school, Daisuke went on to spend a year at S
jiji, which along with Eiheiji is the head of all the S
t
Zen Buddhist temples in Japan. Daisuke’s education, for a Buddhist priest, is akin to a physician going to Harvard for an undergraduate degree and Stanford for medical school.

But Daisuke did not have Takahagi’s social ease, his flair for mixing black clothing with silver jewelry, or his success with women. Daisuke could tell you the origin of every Buddhist deity and the proper sutra for every education. But he also liked to stay home and play with his PlayStation, unlocking game achievements while keeping an eye out for future game releases. He was particularly fond of RPGs, or role-playing games, which empower a player to act as the lead character in a fantastic story. An occasional gamer myself, I once tried to engage him in a conversation about what he was playing. He waved me away. He knew more about the video game Zelda than I could ever hope to. My grandfather, before he died, thought that Takahagi ought to inherit the temple, and he unabashedly said so to anyone who listened. His brutal honesty made for uncomfortable visits.

Takahagi had been at Nakoso enjoying the spa waters the day of the big quake. He was already on his way home when the tsunami started. What should have been a twenty-minute drive took nearly four hours.

Not too long after, the funerals started. Empukuji did not lose any
danka
, or parishioners, as a direct result of the disaster, but nearby temples did, and Takahagi had been asked to help with the overflow of work.

“Did you go to the evacuation centers?” I asked.

He lit a cigarette. “What I most remember is the smell. It was terrible.” He exhaled. “I’ve put on four kilos [about nine pounds]. We don’t go outside.”

Did any priests run away? Takahagi laughed and told me about a priest who fled Iwaki for a hotel in the south, though he later claimed that he had only done so to work out a deal with the hotel owner so his
dankasan
could stay there too.

“After the tsunami, people kept coming by here,” Takahagi explained. “Especially older people. It was like—they wondered
if we were here.” He took another puff. “They would joke about how they were eighty years old and not afraid of getting cancer. We couldn’t leave. Everyone was watching.”

“Did you want to leave?”

He smiled shyly, apologetically. “Marie, we needed water. You can’t do much without water.”

Most of my Western friends have the impression of Japan as being a technological wonder of a country, with people at once so anally efficient as to be repressed. They report, confidently, of the news stories about panties being available in vending machines and robots that do everything from museum curatorial work to the duties of stand-in girlfriends. But the Japan I remember from childhood is practically pre-technological. Well into the 1990s, there were still plenty of people in T
hoku, particularly farmers, who lived the old-fashioned way, heating their baths and drawing water from a well.

After the March 2011 quake, the water supply in Iwaki and other parts of T
hoku had been cut off for nearly a month, but some people retained their access to water because they had never converted from a private well system to modern piping. Once a day, Ry
ko went over to the neighbor’s and dredged up water from a well. She filled up tanks and transported them back to the temple for basic cooking. There was no water to spare for bathing.

“I was obsessed with water,” Takahagi said to me. “I didn’t have time to think about radiation.”

All at once, we heard Ry
ko’s high-pitched voice cry out: “Okay, so Oniichan [older brother] is going home now. Bye bye! Everyone say bye bye!” I leaned against the railing to say goodbye. From within the house, I heard my mother moving to the doorway. Japanese houses are like this—light and airy so you hear movements from far away.

Daisuke gave a perfunctory wave, his mouth in a half smile,
as though embarrassed and annoyed by the attention. He climbed onto his bicycle and rode off to the apartment where he now lived; Daisuke had been urged to move out of the temple home by his parents, who hoped their oldest son might learn some independence.

“How was he?” I asked Takahagi. “During the . . .”

“Exactly the same,” Takahagi shook his head. “You know he hates to bathe anyway. He just rode his bike around. Came here every day.”

“Didn’t he worry about the radiation?”

“But you know. You can’t see it.” Then he added matter-of-factly, “It’s good you didn’t bring your son here. Who knows how much radiation is out there? I’ve stopped listening to the reports. My brother reads the reports every day. He can tell you what the numbers are in every location and how they are changing and where the wind is blowing.” He paused. “I’d like to have a child. But it wouldn’t be right to bring a baby into this world now, would it?”

S
EMP
OFFERED TO
drive us to the water’s edge where we could see some of the damage from the tsunami. We went out to the coast and down a little hill to a small harbor by the shore. There were no boats. The concrete seawall had cracked, and in places the landing had been lifted up. “I haven’t been here until now,” Semp
said, almost shyly, a look of wonder on his face. “We try not to go out because of the radiation.”