Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read online

  I clambered down a steep embankment to find out what the old man was doing. He appeared to be bagging up little mementos, any small item he could salvage from the salt and the mud. The thing that struck me most was his sense of purpose. Everything was so wrecked and mangled and waterlogged, there seemed little point to his activity. It was like trying to tidy up a municipal rubbish dump. But Sato had somehow summoned the will to go about his task. ‘Gambarimasu,’ he said, when I asked him what he was doing, employing the ubiquitous Japanese word. ‘We must struggle on.’

  Sato was eighty-two years old. Aside from his hard hat, which gave him an almost comic appearance, he was wearing a bluish windbreaker and purple rubber boots. He was blind in one eye, the result of a construction accident forty years before. It didn’t seem to have inconvenienced him unduly. He had gone on to be a volunteer fireman. One of the items he had salvaged from the wreckage was his peaked fireman’s cap. He removed his hard hat, put the cap on and saluted. It was full of water, which trickled down his face, even as he kept his pose. Sato’s living room smelled of seawater. I gingerly stepped over the threshold and onto the debris-strewn floor. I was still wearing my shoes, an affront in normal times. These were not normal times, though, and Sato, too, was wearing his boots. He pointed to a solid-looking shrine of gold and black lacquer that he had built for his mother, who had died the previous year. It was a treasured item, and miraculously the only piece of furniture in the house that had survived the onrush of the sea.

  I returned to Ofunato twice after that initial encounter to find out how Sato was getting on. The first time was in August 2011, five months later. He was standing in the street, bent over something, with a drill in his hand. It turned out he was making a screen door. Better than buying one, he said. He was wearing a yellow towel around his head to soak up the sweat. He had on shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and scruffy leather shoes with the backs trodden down so that he might slip in and out of them more easily. Sato had moved with his wife and daughter into a little house at the top of the steep embankment, a stone’s throw from the destroyed house where I had first met him. All the debris had been removed. The government paid the rent on his new home, he said. He could live there for two years. It smelled of freshly laid tatami. The old tatami flooring, drenched in seawater, had been thrown out. With the help of a few neighbours, Sato had somehow managed to drag the heavy butsudan shrine, the one built for his mother, up the embankment and into his new home. It was a bulky item and it overwhelmed its new, smaller surroundings. ‘Only two people in this area managed to save their butsudan,’ he said. On the wall hung a picture of the Showa emperor, Hirohito, and a certificate of thirty years’ service as a volunteer fireman.

  Sato took me to his allotment in the hills above the town. He rode up the steep path every day on his little Honda CD Benly. (Benly, or benri, means ‘convenient’ in Japanese.) It was a large piece of land and on it he grew an amazing variety of plants and vegetables – persimmon, daikon radishes, tomatoes, onions, shiso plants, cucumbers, peppers, mikan oranges, potatoes, aubergines, edamame, soybean pods and corn. He had put up netting to keep the crows away and a wind-catcher in the shape of a Japanese plane with a Rising Sun flag. A scarecrow in one corner was dressed in a crash helmet rather like the one Sato had been wearing five months before.

  I came again the following summer. It was June 2012 and Sato was still going strong. He had just laid a floor in a nearby house. When I arrived, he was pottering around his tool shed. I had never once seen him sit still. Sato had featured in a magazine article that I’d written and he had kept a copy in a special wooden box with the magazine’s cover – a picture of devastation – glued to the lid.2 ‘It’s my tsunami treasure,’ he said, carefully taking the magazine out and flicking through the pages. Ofunato, Sato said, was less badly damaged than Rikuzentakata in the next valley. ‘They’ve got nothing. Here in Ofunato we are able to eat rice and we have temporary housing,’ he said. ‘After the war, people picked up tin from the rubble to build their houses. These days people complain if they don’t have heating or air-conditioning.’ He snorted at how soft Japan had become.

  Ofunato had indeed begun to stir slowly back to life, as Sato said. Most of the seafront area was still bare land, though all the rubble had been cleared away. A little set back from the water, a ‘temporary high street’ had been erected, an area of prefabricated buildings on a couple of ‘streets’ on raised wooden decking. There were shops selling electronics, cosmetics, books, CDs and cakes. There was the Chou-Chou Apparel Shop – what self-respecting high street, even a temporary one, could be without? – and a beer and gyoza fried dumpling restaurant. I had come to see one particular establishment: Hy’s Café. It was run by Hiromi Shimodate and Yasuko Kimura, the two women I had spotted, all that time ago, walking like refugees along the railway tracks after the tsunami. The original Hy’s Café had been destroyed, but here it was again, resurrected.

  On that day by the twisted railway tracks, the two women had been sifting the wreckage. Hundreds of yards from where her café had once stood, Shimodate had found a tiny sieve. After I’d left, they discovered more items in the rubble. There were parfait glasses, miraculously intact, and a frying pan good enough to use. There was an espresso machine and an electric ice shaver to make kakigori, a dessert, though both were broken beyond repair. They found wooden furniture shredded by the force of the water and some steel chairs still intact. ‘They were perfectly fine,’ Shimodate said. ‘I put them to one side for the next day, but when I went back for them they were gone.’

  The new Hy’s was cosy. There was a blackboard with a chalked menu. The noodle salad came recommended. I ordered a ‘French press coffee’. It seemed surreal to be sitting there drinking it with the women I’d seen picking through the rubble on that bleak, freezing day. Shimodate had moved into temporary housing, a compact prefab. Before that, she had been staying with her older brother who runs Shimodate Auto Body Shop, but the house had begun to lean at a worrying angle after a series of aftershocks. These rumbled on for months and, with each new tremor, the house tilted a little further. Shimodate decided it was best to move. She started volunteering. She helped distribute care packages sent from other parts of Japan. She had an actress friend in Tokyo who had collected clothes from her acquaintances and sent them to Ofunato. Soon the fishermen’s wives were parading around in outfits worn by Tokyo’s fashionable thespians. More than anything, Shimodate said, everyone wanted to eat fresh fish again. Some months after the tsunami, they were overjoyed to see the lights from the squid boats flashing in the bay at night. ‘But we felt guilty about eating things from the sea. All those people had died because of the sea. Everybody felt it would be better to wait the hundred days,’ she said, referring to the Buddhist period of mourning.

  The name of Hy’s Café was taken from the first initial of each of their names, Hiromi and Yasuko. Shimodate had worried that people would have neither the will nor the money to eat out, but the little restaurant had been doing brisk business since it had reopened a few months before. Both women were in good spirits. ‘We probably looked really poor that day you saw us walking along in the cold, looking at the ground,’ said Kimura. Now, without her facemask, she looked like a different person, pretty and nicely dressed. A tiny pink teddy bear hung from her phone strap.

  Ofunato had got back on its feet quicker than some of the other towns along the coast. Rikuzentakata, which was more severely damaged, hadn’t yet been able to build a temporary high street, Kimura said. Even so, Ofunato’s population had shrunk since the tsunami, if only slightly. People had drifted away looking for work in Sendai, the centre of what had become a ‘reconstruction boom’, or in Tokyo. The two didn’t know where they were supposed to live once they moved out of temporary housing. There was discussion about building homes in the hills, but nothing had been decided. ‘There’s not much suitable land to build houses higher up,’ Shimodate said. ‘They could flatten the mountain and
build apartments, but I think it would be hard to persuade people to move. So the city itself may have to be rebuilt here,’ she added, by which she meant exactly where it had always been. ‘They may have to bring in soil to make it higher.’ Up and down the coast, the land had sunk by up to five feet, making it more dangerous than ever before to live by the water. Even if suitable land could be found, Shimodate didn’t know if she could afford to build a new house. Some people were still paying mortgages on homes that had been washed out to sea.

  On the wall of the café was a concert poster. The star act was a rap band by the name of Deftech, the support a local band called Lawblow. The concert would be held that July. Lawblow had made a video of their song ‘Ie ni kaerou’, ‘Let’s go home’. It featured ordinary people from Ofunato walking through the debris-strewn streets, but singing of their wish to start again. It was pure schmaltz but, when people heard the song, they cried, Kimura said. A couple of customers came into the café, two young women who fancied an evening out. They ordered a glass of draught beer each, and a Caesar salad, fried potatoes and a portion of edamame to share. Shimodate went off to prepare it. The coffee, she said as she vanished into the kitchen, was on the house.

  There were signs in Ofunato of a community coming together, building something that resembled a town from the rubble and the vacant lots. But Ofunato was far from normal. Someone told me that one of the town’s taxi drivers continued to wait outside the train station even though the small building had been entirely washed away. The story reminded me of Hachiko, the dog who waited for his master outside Shibuya station each evening. One day the master died and so did not appear. Undeterred, Hachiko returned to the station the next evening to wait. Every evening for nine years the dog went back to wait until it too eventually died. I couldn’t help but think of Ofunato’s loyal taxi driver in the same terms, waiting for non-existent passengers to disembark from a non-existent train.

  • • •

  In the year or so since Kazuyoshi Sasaki showed me around the gutted interior of the Capital Hotel a lot had changed. For starters, Sasaki had become a city councillor, elected overwhelmingly with 1,400 votes. The Capital Hotel still stood empty. But there were plans to build a new one in a different location sixty feet above sea level. Construction was due to begin in August, with funding of several hundred million yen provided by the government. Yoshimori Oyama, the manager of the old hotel, said it would be about half the size of the original. It was due to be finished in the spring of 2013. Oyama had wanted to rebuild the hotel on its original site. It had been designed to withstand a tsunami, he said, and the wave had indeed crashed through leaving the basic structure intact. He argued his case, but others disagreed. Hotel guests, they said, would be nervous sleeping by the water. They would prefer the safety of somewhat higher ground.

  The flat valley floor where Rikuzentakata once stood had been cleared of debris. Where the wreckage had been, thin grasses had sprung up, reclaiming the land for nature. I arrived on a cool summer’s evening and from a vantage point just above the flat, empty valley I heard birds twittering and the sounds of children playing baseball. About a dozen structures remained of what had been a town of 23,000 inhabitants. Even they were gutted. The people who once lived here were in temporary housing, or with friends and relatives in the hills around. Some had left altogether, perhaps never to return. More than 1,900 had died. A few cars crawled along the valley floor, tracing the roads that formed the grid of a town half-remembered. Beyond was the sea, flat as a pale blue mirror. It was hard to imagine it boiling up to devour the buildings and the people. There was still a smell of pine in the air from the densely forested hills around, though the 70,000 pines by the seashore had gone. I was standing near a stone pillar, a few feet tall, engraved with the date 3/11. The small municipal monument marked the highest point the water had reached. Like the ancient stone markers scattered along the coast, it stood as a warning to future generations.

  Boats were everything for many people in Rikuzentakata. On 11 March, after the earth had stopped shaking and when the water in the bay started stirring up in muddy pools – a signal that a tsunami was coming – many fishermen rushed to their vessels. Sixty-year-old Shuichi Kanno was one of them. Despite his daughter’s objections he headed not for the hills, but for the water. ‘Without a boat, I can’t think about my life,’ he said. He decided to save the biggest of the three vessels he owned by sailing it out into the incoming tsunami, a survival technique fishermen had learned over generations. ‘I wasn’t at all afraid. My only thought was to protect my boat. That’s what we did in the Chile earthquake too,’ he said, referring to the 1960 tsunami that had swamped Rikuzentakata after an earthquake halfway around the world.

  For those who lost their boats, life had been hard. Government compensation had been slow and insufficient, said Sachiko Kanno, Shuichi’s 62-year-old wife. ‘There’s no money and there’s no shipbuilding companies to make them anyway. It may take years and we’ll all be grey by then.’ Kanno was a tough, bright-eyed woman. Clothes pegs were hanging, ready for use, from her apron, which she wore over a housedress and tracksuit bottoms. ‘Those without boats are collecting seaweed. It’s famous in these parts. Or they’re working on construction sites, or in the rice fields. Some of them aren’t doing anything at all.’ Now it was uni season, she said, when fishermen gathered the prized sea urchin that fetched high prices around Japan. They used poles, several metres long and fitted with mirrors, to hunt for the spiky creatures on the ocean floor. But many of the poles had been washed away and an argument had broken out among union members. Some were saying it was unfair to let those with poles fish while those without could not. There had been a meeting about it to thrash out a compromise.

  That morning I met Councillor Sasaki. He took me back to the Fumonji temple, where the remains of unidentified bodies were being kept in wooden boxes wrapped in muslin cloth. Just twenty-three boxes remained compared with nearly 300 when I was here before. The others had been identified from their DNA and claimed by relatives. There was one new box. That April, there had been a typhoon. It washed a body up on the beach more than a year after the tsunami had claimed it. ‘We’re 95 per cent sure we know who it is,’ Sasaki said. ‘Now we just need the DNA evidence.’ The body washed ashore had been wearing the remnants of a Capital Hotel uniform. Sasaki said it must be one of his colleagues, missing since the day of the tsunami. ‘We escaped by bus, but she went by car to take her mother to the evacuation centre.’ He gulped and fell silent. ‘We feel that she’s come back to us,’ he said eventually.

  Offerings sent by people from around Japan had been placed on rows of shelves by the altar: cans of sports drinks, jelly sweets, marshmallows, Hokkaido biscuits. The priest, in a blue cassock and purple bib, pointed out the temple roof beam, made with a single piece of wood twelve ken in length, or about eighty feet. ‘You can’t find a piece of wood this long any more,’ he said. ‘It must have taken a year to prepare a piece of wood like this.’ The temple was founded in the thirteenth century, but was rebuilt away from the coast in the early sixteenth century, presumably after a tsunami. In an alcove, among Buddhist deities, was a statue of a ferocious-looking, half-naked demon, sword in one hand and some kind of sling-shot in the other. The scowling figure was riding a wave, which reared up behind it in the form of a halo. ‘It’s called a nami kiri fudo, a wave-killing god,’ the priest said. ‘From ancient times this temple has offered protection against tsunamis.’

  The god’s powers had not been sufficient in 2011. Unlike Ofunato, which was slowly creeping back towards the water, Rikuzentakata had been so destroyed it might never be rebuilt in its former location, people said. The whole town, which in the 2010 census had a population of 23,302 inhabitants, could end up being shunted away from the coast towards the hills. That was assuming people stayed at all. Sasaki worried that, unless businesses restarted soon, there would be little choice but to drift away in search of work. The number of regi
stered residents had already fallen to 19,000 and was shrinking with each passing month. As in Ofunato, there were plans to put up a temporary shopping street, but the location had not yet been decided. Reconstruction money was pouring in from Tokyo – Sasaki said the town’s budget had increased seven-fold – but there were too few people to deal with it. About one-third of the town’s 300 government officials had been killed in the tsunami, leaving a deficit of knowledge and expertise. There were plans to build a sea wall, twice as high as the one knocked down, and Sasaki was betting that people would eventually move back into the town proper. ‘Right now people have to live on the higher ground, but after a while they’ll move back to the coast because they love and respect the sea,’ he said. ‘They know that one day they’ll get hit again by a tsunami, but they just can’t help it. That’s their culture.’

  Some rebuilding had already started. Sasaki took me to a house-raising ceremony on the outskirts of town to celebrate the completion of a municipal canteen. The money had been donated by people from Zushi, a city in Kanagawa prefecture outside Tokyo. Representatives of Zushi were here. Carpenters in their traditional jika-tabi boots were milling around. At one end of the field was the frame of a new barn-sized building. At the other, marquee tents had been erected and volunteers were cooking yaki soba noodles and cabbage. There were giant bottles of sake lined up ready to drink. Children were being taught to pound mochi rice cakes in a giant wooden mortar. With each swing of the enormous pestle, the crowd shouted out encouragement. On the offbeat, an old lady sloshed water into the mortar with her bare hands, removing them just before the heavy pestle came thundering down again. Inside the frame of the newly constructed house sat a little ‘god-shelf’ with offerings of rice, rice cakes, a pineapple, bananas, an apple the size of a bowling ball, a bottle of sake and a bream, which was considered a lucky fish.3 On the roof, carpenters were hurriedly nailing the final pieces of plywood into place. The atmosphere was how I imagined an Amish barn-raising.