Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 5
At the old ministry building, a brick construction of utilitarian style, the mood was just as subdued. Two receptionists sat huddled under blankets to keep their knees warm. The heating, along with most of the lighting, had been turned off. Yosano, who usually wore a well-tailored suit, arrived in a blue boiler jacket and long rubber boots. That was now the official uniform of the cabinet, which had adopted the attire and demeanour of wartime. Naoto Kan, the prime minister, had warned that this was Japan’s worst crisis since the Second World War: ‘Whether we Japanese can overcome this crisis depends on each of us.’
Yosano slowly removed his boots and flexed his feet. His office was large but short on pomp. When I asked him if this disaster could galvanize the nation, he looked at me in silence before making a small, defiant fist. The minister answered questions about the extent of the damage and the likely economic impact. Since the ministry’s offices were said to be particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, each time there was a tremor – and there was more than one during our hour-long encounter – his staff looked anxiously at the creaking ceiling and the swaying fixtures. Yosano, who had recently recovered from throat cancer, used the lull in the conversation to light up another cigarette.
I didn’t know it then, but at virtually the same time, Emperor Akihito, the 77-year-old monarch, was making a televised address to the nation. It was the first such broadcast of his twenty-two-year reign. His father, Hirohito, had famously made a declaration, spoken in hard-to-fathom imperial language, on 15 August 1945. In a voice unfamiliar to his subjects, who considered him a living god and had never heard him speak, Emperor Hirohito had told his subjects of Japan’s unconditional surrender, though he never used the word. The war ‘had not necessarily developed to Japan’s advantage’, he said in his archaic, roundabout Japanese. The people should prepare to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. That statement had been prompted by two nuclear bombs, which had made Japan’s surrender, and subsequent occupation, inevitable. More than six decades later, his son was confronting both a natural disaster and a nuclear one in similarly sombre tones. Dressed in a dark suit with black tie and seated before a wood-and-paper screen, Akihito spoke for six minutes. Coincidentally or not, that was the length of time the earth had shaken. ‘The number of people killed is increasing day by day and we do not know how many people have fallen victim,’ he said. ‘I pray for the safety of as many people as possible. People are being forced to evacuate in such severe conditions of bitter cold, with shortages of water and fuel.’ As to the gathering nuclear catastrophe, he professed deep concern. ‘I sincerely hope that we can keep the situation from getting worse,’ he offered.1
The situation behind the scenes was even more desperate than the emperor had let on. That morning, while my plane was still in the air, there had been a hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima plant, the third blast in as many days. Kan, the prime minister, a former social activist, marched into Tokyo Electric’s headquarters in central Tokyo. An investigation into the nuclear crisis later concluded that Kan had reacted with fury at suggestions by Tokyo Electric that it might abandon the plant altogether.2 In an angry confrontation with the company’s president, Masataka Shimizu, the prime minister demanded ‘what the hell is going on?’ So dangerous was the situation that Kan began to discuss a worst-case scenario with his cabinet. If Fukushima Daiichi were abandoned, the plant might spiral out of control, forcing the evacuation of nearby plants and risking further meltdowns. Yukio Edano, the down-to-earth-looking chief cabinet secretary whose regular television appearances made him the face of the crisis, privately warned his colleagues of a ‘demonic chain reaction’ that might force the evacuation of the capital. ‘We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,’ he said, referring to two other plants. ‘If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would lose Tokyo itself.’3
There was certainly a sense of buttoned-down fear in Tokyo, though no one at that point knew anything about the panicked deliberations going on inside the cabinet. Later there were rumours that some people with close government connections had quietly been tipped off to slip out of the city. Tokyo at night was stranger still than in the day. It was, as a colleague of mine wrote, like a city ‘operating on the lowest dimmer setting’.4 Of all the cities in the world, Tokyo in normal times burns perhaps the brightest. The fashionable avenues of the Ginza and the teeming streets of Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Akasaka are a blaze of neon. The roads are jammed with yellow, green and red cabs, the pavements clogged with swaying salarymen, office ladies and dolled-up bar hostesses in evening gowns. Now, they were shadowy and deserted. The sushi bars, tonkatsu pork cutlet outlets, the high-end and low-end restaurants, the holes in the wall, the noodle shops, the izakaya pubs, the clubs, the jazz bars, the karaoke lounges and the drinking establishments of this, the most bedazzling of night-time cities – all had closed up the shutters by eight or nine o’clock. This in a city that usually thrums until two or three in the morning. But in setsuden Tokyo, a few days after the quake, people hurried nervously home before the power failed or the trains stopped running. In one less than brightly lit subway carriage I spotted a man wearing a miner’s hat, with torch attached, the better to read his newspaper. Even the lights of Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower lookalike that is a symbol of the city, were turned off. The antenna at the top, it was said, had been bent by the earthquake.
That night, I telephoned an old friend, Shijuro Ogata. He is a charming man with impeccable English and a lively, liberal mind. Though he was once deputy governor for international relations at the Bank of Japan, a job of not inconsiderable prestige, he has none of the pomposity that sometimes attaches itself to important men in Japan. On the phone, Ogata was his usual cheerful self. He was fine, he said. He had hardly left the house since the earthquake, only venturing out to pick up a few essential supplies from the neighbourhood shops. He had been impressed with the stoicism of his fellow Japanese, many of whom had battled to get to work on time in spite of the chaotic train system and fears of a second earthquake. Where he lived there had been very little hoarding, he said. People had restricted themselves to one carton of milk, one packet of tofu.
Ogata was less thrilled with the officials at Tepco, who, he believed, had little handle on the nuclear crisis and appalling communication skills. ‘They are very clumsy and don’t seem to be so knowledgeable about what’s going on,’ he remarked in his understated way. But overall, he thought Japan would pull through its latest crisis. ‘My wish is this,’ he said. ‘I am hoping this may awaken the Japanese spirit, which was demonstrated after the war to rebuild Japan.’ Then he used a Japanese saying that I had never heard before: wazawai wo tenjite fuku to nasu. After I put the phone down, I looked it up. The dictionary rendered it, rather prosaically to my mind, as ‘make the best of a bad bargain’. I thought about it and settled on a more literal translation – ‘bend adversity and turn it into happiness’.
• • •
I had been here before. Except that no one had been here before. Four years earlier, almost to the day, I had come to this little fishing town of Ofunato on Japan’s northeast coast about 250 miles north of Tokyo. Tohoku is Japanese for ‘northeast’ and that is what people call the region where the tsunami struck. Back then, I had come to research a story about how mackerel, amberjack, blue-fin tuna, spear squid and dozens of other types of seafood are brought from these teeming fishing grounds to sushi counters and supermarket freezers around the country. Early one morning – very early one morning as I recall – I went out on a boat with one of the crews. We had left in the dark and returned to port after several bitterly cold hours of fishing. We drank homemade liquor together in the boat’s cramped mess and slurped down fish stew as we steamed through the darkness to the fishing grounds. I ate a piece of grilled meat that turned out to be dolphin. We watched the huge nets go down empty and come up alive with a silvery thrashing. It was a memorable experience and an insight into the sa
lt-bitten lives of the men who catch fish for their urban countrymen. Now I had come again. Except the fishing boats had gone. And Ofunato was no longer there.
In the days after the quake, there was no easy way of getting to Ofunato – or rather the place where Ofunato had once been. Sections of the roads leading north from Tokyo were virtually impassable. The airport at Sendai, the biggest city in the north, was flattened and buried in mud by the tsunami. Flights to other airports in the three most affected prefectures – Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, where I was headed – were fully booked with volunteers and rescue workers bringing supplies. In the end I flew to Akita, a northern city on the opposite, Sea of Japan, coast about 100 miles from Ofunato. There, I met Toshiki, my photographer friend, for the drive down. Toshiki had studied in America and had a wild side to him. He was taller, more rugged and more unkempt than the average Japanese man, certainly those who put on suits and work for its big companies. He loved motorbikes and cars and sleeping in the wilderness. Still, he had needed some convincing to head into the disaster zone. We were to leave the following morning. The first thing I had to tell him was that I didn’t have a Geiger counter.
That night, I watched television in my perfectly arranged, but coffin-sized hotel room. On one channel a woman was reading a never-ending list of names, of those missing and those found, in a slow, respectful monotone. After each name, read out with the family name first in the Japanese style, the announcer added the respect term san: ‘Sato Yoshie-san, Takahashi Michiko-san, Suzuki Mitsuko-san’. The Chinese characters that the Japanese use can be read in different ways and it is not always obvious how to pronounce unfamiliar names. (Yuko, a common first name, can, for example, also be pronounced Hiroko.) So sometimes the announcer was obliged to offer alternative versions of the names of people feared dead or missing. ‘Kawano or Kono-san,’ she said. ‘Kiyonari or Kiyoshige-san.’ Not only were people missing. Their very names were losing substance.
I switched channel. Tokyo firemen in orange outfits were saluting before being sent in to douse the smouldering Fukushima nuclear reactor with their tiny hoses. As they marched unhesitatingly towards the plant, still gushing radiation, I thought of the kamikaze pilots sent on doomed missions in the final months of war. Another channel had turned a variety show into a fundraiser. Doraemon, a blue-and-white cat-like creature with capacious pockets from which he extracted useful and whimsical items, had been recruited to the cause. He was urging viewers to send in money. After an hour or so, I switched back to the original channel. The woman was still reading out the names of people in her respectful monotone. ‘Ono Megumi-san, Uchiyama Tomoe-san, Uchiyama Mitsuo-san.’
The next morning we set out for Ofunato. We loaded the car with food and water since both were said to be scarce on the tsunami-afflicted coast. We needed a few extra provisions, Toshiki said, including protective boots for clambering over the rubble. The hardware store had posted a sign on its automatic doors specifying all the unavailable items, sold out due to panic buying. It was not a short list: fuel containers, batteries, radios, flashlights, portable heaters, gas canisters, mobile phone chargers, water, tea. Toshiki said that the disaster had revealed what was elemental: ‘Water, fire, communication.’
The drive to Ofunato was uneventful. The roads were virtually empty. We had managed to wangle an emergency pass and only cars like ours were allowed to buy petrol. Tolls were waived. The landscape was mountainous, with trees stretching to the horizon. Snowy fields, small hamlets, fir trees, a tin-metal sky. We passed occasional convenience stores, most with their lights dimmed and signs proclaiming: ‘We have boxed lunches.’ They didn’t appear to have much else. Just a few miles from the coast we passed the Maruhan Pachinko Parlour, the sort of place where the Japanese play noisy arcade games involving streams of metal balls. Toshiki shook his head at the sight of the car park full of vehicles. So near to tragedy, the people inside were in a sea of cigarette smoke and clanging machines. A few minutes later we rounded the corner and entered the valley that was once Ofunato.
• • •
For those who haven’t seen it with their own eyes, it is practically impossible to imagine the devastation left behind by a tsunami. A colleague of mine described it as like walking into a photograph of Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb. I wrote in my notebook that it was as if the man-made world had vomited up its innards. The things that were usually hidden – piping, electric cables, mattress stuffing, metal girders, underwear, electricity generators, wiring – were suddenly on full display, like secrets expelled from the intestines of modern living. Amid the shreds of wooden houses, twisted steel and old soy sauce bottles, one of the first things I noticed was a deer on its back, its glazed eyes staring up blankly at the sky. Next to it were a stoat, its snarl fixed in death, an eagle, an owl, a peacock and a second deer. It took me some time to realize what I was looking at. This must have been someone’s taxidermy collection. The hooves of the deer and the other animals were attached to a green baize board.
These were the things that were not meant to be here. Those that were – houses, streets, shops, factories – had mostly vanished. Even solid concrete buildings were reduced to frames, doll houses with their walls ripped off by an explosive force, their shredded contents flapping like paper in the wind. Then there were the mangled cars, perched in trees, or on their side, or on their back or even, by some fluke, the right way up. A coil of green mesh sat on top of a collapsing balcony, like some metal python surveying hell. There was an oil truck, nose down in the ground as if flung from the sky. Scattered in the mud was a collection of salacious magazines showing half-naked women emerging from the shower. There were dead fish washed far inland. The smell of sea salt hung on the frigid wind.
Suddenly, amid the rubble, I spied two tiny figures, picking their way along a twisted train track, bound uncertainly for a train station that was no longer there. There was something faintly shocking about seeing life stirring on the dead valley floor. I thought of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father and son moving their way through a charred, post-nuclear landscape. As the figures drew nearer, I saw that one woman was carrying a red cane. She wore a blue woollen hat and scarf, a sweater, jeans and a pink backpack. Her cheeks were red from the bitter cold. Her companion was younger and slimmer. She was wearing spectacles and her mouth was covered with a white facemask. She was also carrying a backpack. The two were staring intently at the ground as they inched along, occasionally raking the rubble with the cane or stooping to examine something more closely.
I approached and asked what they were doing. I felt as though I had encountered fellow travellers in the desert. They bowed slightly, their politeness out of place in these surreal surroundings. Hiromi Shimodate, the red-cheeked lady, explained they were searching for possessions, something from the café she and her friend ran together. ‘We are looking for anything of ours. Just something, a chair, anything,’ she said. Just a week before, they had both been in the café when the earthquake started. Shimodate waved her hand in the direction of the shore, indicating an area of rubble indistinguishable from the other rubble around it. On the morning of the earthquake, she had gone to the city hall to file taxes. She had returned to the café with some packages just as the last two customers were leaving after lunch. ‘I was with Kimura and I thought: Maybe we should get something to eat,’ she said, indicating her companion with the facemask. ‘That’s when the shaking started. It was very unusual. It lasted such a long time. I had never felt anything like that before.’ Even before the motion had stopped, Shimodate ran outside to check on the elderly couple who were the landlords of the café. ‘They were huddled behind the house, next to the train tracks, holding on to each other.’
When the tremor stopped she had gone back to find Kimura. ‘We went to the parking lot. Only my car and Kimura’s car were there. There’s a small river. Usually, there’s several feet of water. But it was only a few inches deep, and it was black and filled with
fish thrashing about. We thought: This is definitely bad news.’ Water was seeping out of the tarmac in the parking lot, which had liquefied. They made it to their respective vehicles and drove off. Kimura’s car went to the left and Shimodate’s to the right. Shimodate immediately ran into traffic, all of it heading for the hills. So she took a detour. If she hadn’t, she thought, she would not be alive today. After she had reached her sister’s hilltop house, she looked back down into the valley. A massive wave was already surging on to the shore.
Shimodate fell silent. Yasuko Kimura, her companion, brought out her mobile phone and showed me a photograph of the café. It had a pink interior and framed pictures on the wall. It had been taken a few days earlier, in a different era. Shimodate said the tsunami had altered the shoreline. ‘I was born and brought up here. My family has always been here. A lot of people here have always been here,’ she said. ‘We all know it. The landscape that we saw everyday has changed. The water is definitely higher than it was before. Everyone says it. The sea has come closer.’
Suddenly, she let out a shriek. ‘Look, there’s something.’ She darted forward and retrieved a silvery object from a pile of crumpled wood a few feet away. Once she had brushed it off, it became clear what it was – a flat metal sieve with a simple wire handle. It was the sort you might use for straining scum from boiling soup, or for lifting tofu from hot water. She held it up, half in delight, half in regret for the lost world it evoked. ‘I knew it was mine straightaway. It’s something I used every day,’ she said, rubbing her fingers along its familiar handle and metal grid, not much bigger than the palm of her hand. She looked up to contemplate once more the destruction around her, the broken buildings, the mangled cars, the flattened houses. Then she looked anew at the sieve, a small, familiar object in the midst of desolation. ‘It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it?’