The ceremony was held at a funeral home – actually it would be more accurate to call it a “hall” – in a part of Ishinomaki that was not too much further inland than the neighborhood where his home had stood. This area too probably took on water – most of the city did – although it looked like the hall had been restored and reopened for business for a while by this point. Funerals halls were in demand in Ishinomaki, as they were all along the eastern seaboard of Tohoku.
I made my way to the second floor, where the Abe family’s service was to take place. I was almost an hour early, but there was already a fairly steady stream of guests making their way into the hall. At the top of the stairs, Takumi, his mother, and his son Hiromu stood, greeting the guests and accepting their condolences. I did likewise, and they thanked me for coming from so far to attend. There wasn’t really time to talk here, though; Takumi directed me toward the reception desk and told me that we’d talk afterward. Then he went back to his post in the greeting line.
I signed the registry and handed the attendant my koden-bukuro – a special kind of decorated envelop used on occasions like this to present a monetary gift to the bereaved family. Funerals are expensive in Japan, so most families use these gifts to help them cover the various costs involved. I then entered the hall, a surprisingly large room, with an ornate altar painted in gold at the front. On either side of this stood large arrangements of flowers, bearing the names of those who had presented them to the family in memoriam – also a common sight at Japanese funerals. Placed in front of the altar were the three portraits Takumi had shown me at the temple. Before this there was a small incense burner with a box of powdered incense next to it. I offered some to the repose of the three souls that had waited so long for this day, bowed, and then found a seat somewhere toward the middle of the room. Aside from Takumi, there was no one here I knew, so it didn’t matter much where I sat. I was surprised again at the size of the room – there must have been 400 chairs lined up in row after row, facing the altar. Even so, as the time of the ceremony drew near and the place filled up, I noticed attendants rushing to put extra chairs at the ends of these rows. Takumi’s father had worked in a local business for his entire adult life. Takumi was of course a middle school teacher, and his wife had worked at a nursery school. The turnout attested to how many people knew them through these and other avenues of life. There were also many students in attendance, dressed in their school uniforms – friends and classmates of Kanon’s. So many lives touched.
The head priest of Saikōji arrived and recited the order of the service in a beautiful baritone voice that filled the hall. He chanted various sutras and the nenbutsu prayer. He also led the guests in a call-and-response incantation (printed in a small pamphlet each guest received at the reception desk) that struck me as almost Christian in form – if only because the only place I had ever encountered such a service before was in church, long ago.
After these religious observances, the memorial portion of the service began. One of Kanon’s friends stepped up to a podium at the front of the hall, to the right of the altar, and spoke of her friend, and what a wonderful, caring, and giving person she had been. She spoke of her smile and laugh. Then she began to talk about the last day they saw each other – “that day.” As she continued, I became aware of a tension rising in my throat, but also in the room as a whole; the sound of someone struggling hard to suppress sobs came to me from somewhere at the back of the room, and then from other rows as well.
It was the same for the next person to speak: a co-worker of Yoshiko’s who described what a caring and loving person she had been to the children at the nursery school, how helpful and supportive she was as a co-worker, and how she always lit up a room with her personality – until “that day.” The strain of holding it in was too much; many people gave themselves up to sobbing openly.
I looked around me and came to the realization that most of these people – if not all of them – had been through this ordeal repeatedly in the months since “that day.” The phrase itself – ano hi – suggested a shared experience that needed no further description. Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also used the term to refer to their own specific days, although different for those in each city. There as here, though, “that day” marks more than just a date on a calendar: It marks a moment in life when things changed forever, almost instantly, for everyone who experienced it. It also designates a point at which a new kind of community was born, although the survivors had no way of knowing it on “that day,” or even soon afterwards. This may not be a community that always stands together – of that I have no way of knowing, so I will assume that among the hisaisha of any hisaichi town self-interest and the paltry animosities of everyday life may be just as prevalent today as they normally are anywhere else – but they all share knowledge of what it was like to be there when the black water rushed into their city and swallowed up their homes, business, friends, and loved ones. This too is a kind of bond; a community of sorts in which certain things are understood without needing to be described in full.
The next speakers to take the podium were Hiromu, and finally Takumi himself. Hiromu read a letter he had written to his grandfather, thanking him for twelve years of love and the kind of wisdom that only a grandparent can share. More tears and sobbing filled the room as he spoke. I was by no means a dispassionate observer of all this, but in the midst of it, what struck me was how clear and steady this twelve-year-old boy’s voice was as he read his letter to his grandpa, yet at the same time what a powerful effect it had on us all, especially the adults. I would have expected Hiromu to be the first to break down. Here again was the resilience that I had seen in Takumi, the same kind of fortitude that probably many others in the room could muster if they were telling their own story of “that day.”
Takumi spoke with it was well. I only recall hearing his voice falter once, but he drew a deep breath and continued in a measured tone filled with a certain kind of dignity. “We can never forget suffering, but we can overcome it,” he told his guests as he drew to a close. I know he hasn’t done so entirely, at least not yet, but as with his son I sensed a quiet strength in that moment; if anyone in the room had a reason to break down, it was Takumi, but precisely by not doing so, he helped all of us through our own grief at the tragedy that had befallen his family.
With the service concluded, the guests left the room, to once again greet Takumi, his mother, and son. Takumi asked me to stick around for the reception afterwards. “Really, we’ve got more food than we can eat – we need your help.” I of course obliged.
At the reception, I met Takumi’s cousin Jun, who taught English at a junior high school in Fukushima Prefecture. His town had not been significantly damaged by the quake nor had it been touched by the tsunami. It hadn’t escaped the third disaster, however; the area was showing elevated radiation levels due to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown, and had recently been designated as a “voluntary evacuation” area by the government. If the terms sounds vague and confusing, it is because the concept behind it is far from clear itself. Areas designated as such lie outside of the government’s initial zone for mandated evacuation – a 30km perimeter around the crippled plant. In spite of this, they contain areas of radioactivity higher than the normal background rate, measured in microsevierts per hour. As it turns out, the idea behind the initial mandated zone was flawed to begin with. Radiation doesn’t stream out from a central source, like rays of light do – or at least it doesn’t over a wide area at levels that pose a problem. Rather, radioactive isotopes, particularly cesium 137, were spewed out of the plant in the days following the malfunctioning of its coolant system in steam released to relieve the pressure that threatened to crack the containment vessels and expose the reactor core. This cloud of radioactive matter was carried by the wind across a wide arc of the island of Honshu. As rain fell here and there through the radioactive plume, the cesium was carried to the ground, thus creating “hot spots.” Jun’s town contained many such spots.
Rather than revising its initially policy and designating all hot spot areas mandatory evacuation zones, the government has decided to let individual residents in hot spot areas make the decision for themselves. Should they choose to leave, they will be eligible for certain kinds of government funding, by dint of leaving an areas designated as such. This has led to tremendous confusion and animosities between neighbors –some who refuse to leave the neighborhood out of fear that they’ll never be allowed to return; others who want out immediately, but are seen as forsaking the community by those electing to stay on. There has also been no shortage of criticism for the government, of course, which many see as adopting this voluntary policy as a means of avoiding the issue of what really should have been done in these areas in mid- to late-March, including the question of whether the residents were knowingly put at risk of exposure.
Jun had reluctantly made the decision to leave, and for good. He told me that he had applied for teaching positions in Miyagi Prefecture – even ones that were part-time – and bid his students farewell as of the end of the spring term. This was not easy to do, and he confessed a tremendous sense of having forsaken the town and his students. But he had kids of his own to think about, and being a father came before being a teacher.
After the reception was over, I headed back to my hotel for a bit of a nap. I wondered what the JEN group was up to today. With no work to do, time moves slowly in a place like this. Takumi called me at seven to say he was on his way to pick me up for dinner.
We went to a yakiniku place and were soon joined by three of Takumi’s friends from Ishinomaki, all of them teachers at various schools in town. The grilled meat and tripe tasted excellent, the beer was chilled to the point of producing an ice cream headache if you downed it too quickly, and the conversation – mostly in Ishinomaki Japanese – was quick and lively. After the meal, we made our way to a typical karaoke bar, where hostesses were paid to serve their mostly male clientele drinks (usually highly-diluted scotch or shochu on the rocks), act interested in their conversations, and join them in the occasional duet – certainly not the most enviable job in the world.
The setting was familiar: I’d been on the yakiniku/karaoke tour many times before; but there were a couple of things about this specific outing that I observed, in light of the place and the occasion, that are worth noting.
The first is the extent to which the people who actually witnessed the tsunami – including people like Takumi, who lost so much – still talk about “that day.” Takumi and the three others who joined us all had stories to tell, and they did so voluntarily, without any coaxing at all. Nor were there any tears, even though some of the things they mentioned – witnessing people washed away or coming upon dead bodies after the water pulled back – must have been horrible to see. Even the women working at the karaoke bar, who have probably heard enough stories like these from customers to write an oral history of Ishinomaki on March 11 and after, had their own stories to share. This wasn’t the only thing we talked about that evening, but it was a subject we came back to again and again – and each time we did, no one seemed to object, nor did anyone break into tears under the weight of memory. I would have thought that after four and a half months, people in Ishinomaki would want to move on, especially when talking amongst themselves. But apparently not so: true, they did not wallow in sorrow and self-pity – in fact, most of their stories were told in a tone that suggested a lingering sense of awe for what they had seen – but I got the definite sense that these conversations were important to them. They wanted to discuss these things; maybe they even needed to. Whatever, their motives, though, no one seemed to want to change the subject. March 11 – “that day” – was still worth talking about.
I found out later, after returning to Sendai and then again after leaving Tohoku, just how much this preoccupation with March 11 set the hisaisha apart from others. Once back in Sendai, I found that people still talked a lot about the quake and tsunami, where they were at 2:46pm on March 11 and the difficulties they faced in the days and weeks that followed, but not with the same kind of frequency or intensity that people in places like Ishinomaki did. These people were still hisaisha, but of a different kind than those in areas directly affected by the tsunami. Outside of Tohoku, though, most people seem to have found other things to talk about. Where they were on March 11 and how much the quake disrupted their lives were still occasional topics of conversation, but for the most part, discussions of the disaster, when they occurred, had moved on to the question of how much the reconstruction would cost, and how much the government should raise taxes to pay for it.
The other impression that I took away from that evening out was a fairly obvious observation on the importance of last rites for the living left behind. At the very beginning of the evening, as we walked to the yakiniku restaurant from his apartment where we had parked the car, Takumi told me what a sense of relief he felt – “release” might even be apropos in this case – now that he had finally held the funeral for his family members. He repeated this more than once in the course of the night’s conversations. The funeral opened a path to move ahead with his life, and his son’s as well. They would never forget those they had lost, of course, but Takumi could now give himself permission to make plans for a future that didn’t include them. Takumi admitted that part of those plans might even include leaving Ishinomaki altogether and moving to Sendai at some point. With no home left in the town and the high probability that the government would eventually buy all the land in Mitsumata close the area to residential use, there really was not much of a reason to stay. The bereavement payments from the government and the money he collected from his wife’s life insurance policy also made the idea of buying property in Sendai feasible. It was a bitter trade-off – and given the choice, he would rather have his family back, of course – but the living had to continue moving forward with their lives.
Kawabiraki
On the 31st I returned to Watanohaus. Some of the same folks were still there – Cat, Yama-chan, Naho-san (who had arrived a day or two after I did), and Lucas (although I arrived just in time to say good-bye to him) – but most of the others had left. They had been replaced by new arrivals: Kuwabara-san, who worked in the communications department of the French Embassy in Tokyo, and two other French staff people, who I had no time to really talk to, since they were on their way home as well. I learned that on the two nights I was gone (which happened to be a Friday and Saturday – the ever-popular weekend slots), 30 people had been staying at the house. In this way, there was constant turnover, and fluctuations in the number of folks volunteering with JEN. There were also returnees to Watanohaus. Kuwabara was one, as were the two French embassy folks I met briefly. The next day brought yet another; Hanako-san, or “Hana-chan” as we all called her, came back from her regular life in Osaka for the second time in a month. We were lucky to have her back, because she was an excellent cook.
As it just so happened, July 31 and August 1 were the dates of Ishinomaki’s famous Kawabiraki festival. The origins of this festival date back to the Edo period, when elements of it – in particular the floating of lanterns on the river to remember those who had died in water-related accidents during the previous year – were occasionally performed following early work to improve what was then called the Kitakami River. The first annual observance was in 1916. The second night of this festival – really the festival proper – always featured a gala fireworks show, in which nearly ten thousand arrays are launched. Apparently there had been some disagreement over whether or not to hold the festival at all this year, but those in favor had prevailed, arguing the not to do so would be to admit that Ishinomaki was indeed too badly beaten to sustain its traditions. Furthermore, the festival would help uplift peoples’ spirits for a change, and also serve to honor and comfort the souls of those who died in the tsunami.
The first night was the “zenyasai” – which translates as the “festival of the night before.” An annual feature of the zenyasai for the Kawabiraki Festival is the floating of brightly-colored paper lanterns down Kyu-Kitakami River toward the bay. This is not an uncommon part of festivals in cities with rivers. Some readers may be familiar with this event – called choro-nagashi – from its more famous observance in Hiroshima every summer, on the anniversary of the atomic bombing. There, the symbolism is obvious: the floating lanterns represent the souls of those killed in the attack. In Ishinomaki, under its present circumstances, this year’s joro-nagashi took on a similar meaning.
This was very much the intention of the event’s organizers, of course. As we walked over the main bridge from the Watanoha side of the Kyu-Kitakami River to the city center, we began to catch glimpses of the lanterns off either side of the structure. At about the same time, the sounds of monks chanting sutras reached our ears. This was a new element to the zenyasai, added specifically to honors those who had been lost to the disaster. The combination produced a somber scene. We arrived as daylight yielded rapidly to the night. As the city and its river darkened, the floating lanterns became dissociated from space in the viewer’s eye, seeming to drift along in a void towards an unseen horizon from which they would never return.
The sense of mourning was overwhelming. Even as we crossed over into central Ishinomaki, the signs of damage still omnipresent, despite the large number of people walking about there was none of the clamor of conversation that one would expect to hear. People walked on in silence through the darkened streets, the sutras of the memorial service continuing to ring out around them. As we walked, I began to notice that the cheeks of some of those we passed were wet with tears. Others just stood in place, staring blankly at the scene around them or looking up at the sky, seeming to have lost their destination.
The aroma of incense permeated the night air as we approached a row of tables placed at the end of a street that ran back towards the river. The sound of the sutras continued as we approached this spot, a temporary offertory, where people were invited to place a small amount of incense into the burner for the souls of the victims of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We did so, bowed with our palms pressed together and then backed away to let others do the same. Some stood before the row of tables for a very long time, their hands held in prayer the whole time. I could guess from the way their shoulders heaved as we backed away that they were crying. I thought of the funeral again, and of the way people were overcome by grief that they probably would not have displayed if they had simply been asked to tell their story. Like them, those now weeping at the zenyasai would most likely be able to tell you of their losses in the most matter-of-fact way, if you were to ask them on any other occasion.
So why the eruption of emotion in situations like this? I don’t think it was because the bereaved of Ishinomaki were repressing the pain of their memories; the composure, the almost off-handed way they could describe what happened on “that day” didn’t seem to suggest that they were avoiding the memories. Perhaps this was another sign of the special community that the survivors now share. There was a time to grieve, just as there were times to talk about what one had been through with a sense of awe at the power of the tsunami and the fact that one managed to survive it, sometimes even with a sense of humor. Grief didn’t need words to express itself, though; everyone in this community understood what you must have gone through.
As if to illustrate this idea of a time and place for everything, the festival proper that took place on the following night had a completely different atmosphere. The zenyasai looked back to remember, honor, and grieve for the city’s losses. In contrast, the Kawabiraki was a clamorous event. The streets were packed with folks – little children with their parents, the elderly, and more teenagers than I could remember seeing since I arrived in Ishinomaki, many of them dressed in traditional yukata robes for the occasion. This was a real summertime matsuri. Canvas canopies and stalls lined the streets in the center, selling cheap toys, cotton candy, soft drinks, beer, and festival fare from grilled corn on the cob to yakitori and grilled squid. There were stages set up at points throughout where bands of various genres played. The main stage, nearest the station and city hall, featured the headline acts – mostly Japanese hip-hop and urban contemporary – most likely aimed at the younger crowd, but the audience was a mix representative of the festival as a whole. I can’t say I recognized any of the artists that performed before we drifted away from this stage to check out the rest of the scene, but the JEN staff told me that they were well-known, at least locally (this would seem to suggest that Ishinomaki has a music scene of some sort – something which I never had the time to check into while I was there). Here’s a taste of the show. Be sure to check out Yama-chan busting some fresh moves and making something of a spectacle of himself with the teenage crowd:
Unfortunately, the vocals were a bit too fast and over-amplified for me be able to catch much of what they were saying. I did get bits, though; messages about staying strong, hanging together, and moving on with life. The banner over the stage hit the same key: “Bonds make our hearts one – dreams, hope, bravery.”
I wouldn’t say that the Kawabiraki, in contrast to the zenyasai of the night before, was about the future. Certainly that message was there in some of the songs we heard and signs we saw, but on the whole the festival was a chance to blow off steam, to have a good time and, perhaps, take one’s mind off of the losses and destruction, even for just a few hours. It was a chance to envision a return to the way things had been prior to March 11. And the people seemed to appreciate it for that.
This made for symbolic little ironies. The finale of the evening was the fireworks display. I learned from Endo-san that it would actually be less than the usual ten thousand arrays this year, due to understandable budgetary constraints. Still, it was an impressive show. As we stood watching it from a location along the west bank of the Kyu-Kitakami River, in a throng of folks with their eyes cast to the sky, I noticed that lying on the ground a short distance from where we were lay the smashed hulls of two boats, thrown up and out of the river by the tsunami nearly five months ago. No one sat or stood on these, either out of a sense of danger or respect. This was not a time to look at the rubble, though; for a change there were more spectacular and hopeful things to see.