(Also, big thanks to Dave Tatem for the technical assist on the entry below – it would have been imageless without his help!)
Takumi
I arrived in Ishinomaki shortly before noon, via the “express bus” from Sendai. The “express bus” takes a little over 90 minutes for a trip that would probably have taken 60 back before the quake and tsunami. The highway to and roads in Ishinomaki are crowded with dump trucks and other vehicles involved in the relief work, giving a city of 160 thousand the traffic problems of a city at least twice as large.
Takumi called me as soon as I arrived, to find out where the hell I was and remind me that I was supposed to call him before leaving Sendai. Five minutes later he was at the station and we were on our way to lunch.
It had been 19 years since I had seen Takumi. We met during my first stay in Japan, when I was an exchange student at Miyagi University of Education. Due to a sense of overconfidence in my height and athletic abilities, I joined the basketball team at MUE, only to realize that even though I was taller than almost everyone on the team (with the exception of Takumi, who is my height), they could all do wondrous things with the ball like dribble, pass, and shoot – none of which I could do reliably. Still, in spite of the fact that my basketball skills barely improved over the year that followed, and I only played a total of five minutes in an actual game, I didn’t regret the decision to join the team for a moment. By doing so, I met Takumi. In spite of the fact that I often found his Ishinomaki accent nearly indecipherable – especially during that first year in Japan, when even the standard language was hardly within my grasp – we hit it off well.
Even later, when I returned to MUE for graduate school, Takumi and I would get together for drinks with other members of the team from time to time. Everyone had graduated by then, of course. Takumi was teaching at a junior high school in his hometown of Ishinomaki by then, just as he is now. Other guys, like Fujigaki and Komatsu were teaching at different grade levels in different cities in Miyagi. But despite the logistical problems work and life in the “real world” produced, we got together fairly often. All three came to my wedding, and I went to most of theirs – at least for the ones who got married before I graduated from MUE and went back to America. The last one of these basketball weddings I attended, in fact, was Takumi’s. It was the first and last time I would meet his wife Yoshiko.
After that, we lost touch over the years, which was entirely my fault. Then March 11th happened. When I saw the photos and video footage from Ishinomaki, the realization that Takumi and his family were probably somewhere in all of that filled me with panic and dread – even though I had not done a good job of keeping in touch, I suppose that like most people I always figured that things would be going well for him, and that getting together with him again would be as easy as making the trip up to Tohoku anytime I happened to be in Japan. The images from Ishinomaki shattered this piece of self-comfort. Mike Bourdaghs, a mutual friends and my senpai from Macalester’s exchange program with MUE, was frantically searching for Takumi from his home in Chicago. Thanks to Mike’s dogged pursuit of word on the missing persons’ pages on Google, after a few days, we got some news – but mixed news, at best: Takumi, his son, and his mother were alive and unharmed, but his father didn’t make it through. Furthermore, his wife and daughter were still unaccounted for. A few days later, we heard from the same source that the bodies of both had been recovered. If there was any comfort to be drawn from the news, it was that at least their bodies were discovered close to one another, around the second floor of their family home, which had been washed 200 meters away from where the house had stood. It is human nature to try to salvage some sort of comfort from suffering: I would like to think that the proximity of their bodies indicates they were together to the end.
I simply can’t imagine the kind of pain Takumi must be going through in the face of such a loss. I’ve tried to put myself in his position many times since learning of these deaths, but keep coming back to the realization that it would probably crush me. If it had crushed Takumi, or some part of him, though, his voice didn’t betray it. Instead, there was a kinds of open toughness – a surprising resilience – that came, perhaps, from grappling with the same question his mother asked herself: “nan datta darō?” Since it’s a phrase that can be interpreted many ways, let’s rephrase it this way: Why did this have to happen? There is no way to answer this, of course. In the course of the few hours I spent with Takumi on this first meeting in 19 years, though, what I think I saw was acceptance of what was unanswerable.
The person who met me at the station was an older man than the Takumi I remembered of course – noticeably grayer and a bit heavier – although I’m sure he had the same impression of me, too. We had lunch at a sushi shop near the station that had only recently reopened for business, and took the time to catch up – at least to the extent that one can in such a situation – while we ate. I told him about my life and the family I now have (he knew my wife in college, but I had neglected even to inform him of the birth of our son). We talked about other people on the team, what and (more importantly) how they were doing now. I didn’t want to say anything that would force him to talk about all that he had lost – because at this point I still thought it would be an extremely painful topic for him – nor did he bring it up.
Which is why it surprised me that after lunch he asked if I’d like to see where his home in had stood. As we crawled through the Ishinomaki traffic, Takumi recounted for me what it was like for him during the first few days after the tsunami. He was at work when the quake struck. His school – Watanoha Middle School – stood less than 100 meters from the ocean. The shaking seemed to last forever, and it was the bad kind of shaking – an up-and-down jolt, rather than a side-to-side sway. After it subsided, he headed outside to the school athletic ground in front of the building (on the opposite side from the sea), which was the standard earthquake evacuation protocol. He recalls that there was already concern about a tsunami, but the vice principal trotted out to the other side of the building to take a look and somehow came to the conclusion that there was nothing to worry about (I’ve heard of similar misjudgments on the part of many people in the area, due to the fact that just two days before a strong “foreshock” hit the area, but produced only a very small tsunami, despite the issuance of a warning). At this point, someone who had remained in the building and turned on a portable radio heard the tsunami warning – including the information that an enormous wave had been spotted barreling toward the coast. “Tsunami! Coming right at us – get out of there!” Takumi frantically climbed the stairs to the roof, with the water rushing into the floors below him as he climbed. It rose incredibly rapidly; at its peak height it seemed to Takumi that he could have reached down and put his hand into the water, even though he was four floors above the ground. He recalled that the water was black due to the tremendous amount of sand, silt, and mud it carried with it from the ocean floor.
The tsunami hit the Watanoha area at around 3:30pm, 45 minutes after the quake and about an hour after the school day had ended. Many students were probably still on their way home at the time.
At about this time we turned off of the main highway through Ishinomaki onto a side road that took us south, toward the ocean. This was the entry point to the Mitsumata neighborhood, where Takumi and his family had lived, less than 200 meters from the water’s edge. As we headed in, the signs of destruction became increasingly graphic: shattered windows on the first floor of buildings rapidly gave way to blown-out walls and then to homes that had entire sections of the first two floors torn away. In some cases, second floors defied architectural common sense, hanging precariously over parts of a first floor that no longer existed. This was much worse than I had seen anywhere up to this point; even Watari, for all of its damage, had at least been cleared of the most lurid evidence of the tsunami’s destructive power. People who could remember what the place had looked like before were awe struck by the absence of what they knew should be there; but for the uninitiated, the clearing of the unsound structures had left a landscape of mostly foundations. Mitsumata was different. Here, it appeared that things were left just as they had been after the waters pulled back – as a testament to the destructive force of the tsunami – although Takumi later assured me that the situation in Mitsumata had improved greatly since he first came to search for his home and family in the days after the disaster. At least much of the largest rubble had been carted away.
We entered a sudden clearing – or rather an area remarkably void of anything higher than two meters – and Takumi turned right onto an even smaller road and slowed the car. “This one – right there!” he exclaimed as we pulled up along side a plot on a corner, “It was here – the gate with the name plate is still there.”
We got out of the car and passed through what was left of the front gate. Stepping up from the entranceway, we stood in what had been the living room, near the front of the house. It had been a compact, single family home, the kind of “my home” setting that most Japanese adults with children consider to be the ideal environment in which to raise their families and spend the years that follow. The living room still had planks across its corner of the foundation, although the tatami mats were nowhere in sight. Since the rest of it was just a series of crossing support beams, Takumi recreated the layout for me, pointing to rooms that no longer existed: “The toilet was here, the bath here, then the sink, and the kitchen and dining room were over there.” He explained this with schematic efficiency; the layout of the home he had entered so many times before obviously still engraved upon his perception of the physical space before him. The difference between what it must have looked like then and what it had become over the course of a few minutes on a cold March afternoon could not have been greater.
We surveyed the wasteland around from the platform of his living room. The water here had reached a height of six or seven meters. Takumi pointed toward two houses with blue tarps covering the gaping holes in their facades where windows, doors, and walls had once been. In the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, he told me that right in front of those houses – over 200 meters from where we were standing – was where the tsunami had deposited the second floor of his house. In the midst of the wreckage piled everywhere, he said it took him twelve days to find it. Here he found what he had come in search of: the bodies of his wife and daughter.
I found it extremely hard to imagine what that must have been like for him: twelve days of anxiety followed by crushing despair. What struck me even more, though, was the way he could now so calmly, almost off-handedly describe those events for me. Even at a distance of four months, I have serious doubts that I could maintain the same composure in recalling what had happened. There is a dimension to the kind of loss that my friend suffered that is beyond the ability of those haven’t faced similar circumstances to fully comprehend. I wouldn’t say that Takumi has found a way to put it behind him, because I know that is not what is going on here. He lives with this loss every day. But the resilience comes from somewhere, perhaps from the context of what it means to be alive in Ishinomaki after March 11, shared among those who were not taken by the tsunami. The experience of loss on such a grand scale – a thankfully rare occurrence – became a new kind of normalcy in Ishinomaki. Perhaps this spares those who grieve from feeling so isolated in their grief – I don’t know. If I had ever encountered fortitude, though, this was it.
Later, after I settled into the routine of volunteer work, I heard similar impressions voiced with a similar sense of bewildered respect from other volunteers. The survivors they talked to all seem to have attained the same kind of fortitude. “Right here is where we found my brother’s body,” or “my mother never made it further than around here, probably”; all said in a tone that betrayed nothing of the shock and dismay that must have come with the discovery, or the deep sense of loss that must still linger. These people are tough; circumstances have given them no choice but to become so. But I’m sure that a community of loss in the face of disaster made the transformation possible – although it couldn’t have been easy.
After looking at the ruins of his home, we toured the ruins of his neighborhood. I asked him how long it took before the roads were cleared of debris. This was a question that I had wanted to ask someone living in an area that had been hit by the tsunami for some time, ever since seeing pictures of the immediate aftermath, in which it appeared as if someone had plowed the roads to make them passable. Takumi told me that this was not the case: although smaller roads were choked with rubble and there were some sections of Ishinomaki in which even the large roads required clearing, for the most part the tsunami left major roads unobstructed. As the water rushed into the city, roads acted like canals, channeling the current in a way that pushed debris off to the side. When the water drew back and the direction of the current was reverse, the clearing effect was the same: meaning that the tsunami left the city shattered, but surprisingly open to traffic.
In a similar way, some parts of Takumi’s neighborhood were spared the kind of complete destruction that his home and those around it suffered – although not by enough to leave them fit for habitation. An area 100 meters to the east still had homes standing, albeit severely damaged. A large factory stood between this area and the shore, and acted as a wave break, thus shielding the homes behind it from the pulverizing force of the first wave.
It was into this part that we now drove. To the unaccustomed eye, it would appear that little if anything had changed here since the tsunami, despite the presence of work crews. Because the full-force current of the tsunami did not pound this section of the neighborhood, massive amounts of debris rode in on the water, to be deposited in the streets and between the houses when the water receded. This all had to be cleared before work on the homes could commence. In one area, Takumi showed me a reminder of what things had looked immediately after the disaster: Three cars piled chaotically between two houses, as if they were toy cars dropped there by an enormous hand. It comes up at around the 4:40 mark in the following clip:
The neighborhood was so changed that Takumi found it hard to figure out which street to take to get to this spot, despite the fact that this was not very far from his house – an area that he passed through at least twice a day commuting to and from work. In spite of the damage, though, there were signs that people were already living on the second and third floors of some structures. Technically they were not supposed to, as this entire area was condemned, and the central government has a plan to buy all the land – including Takumi’s plot of it – and convert it to non-residential use.
We left Mitsumata and headed along the coast to Saikōji, the Buddhist temple where the ashes of Takumi’s ancestors and relatives were interred, and where those of his father, wife, and daughter were soon to be. The trip took us through more scenes of destruction, evincing the frightening power of the tsunami. A bulldozer lay on its side on a plot of land where houses once stood. Takumi told me that before the tsunami it had been parked 100 meters south of this spot, along the shore.
In front of the temple we came upon a large group of volunteers, gathered to get their instructions for the day from the head priest. Volunteers are ubiquitous in Ishinomaki. As I prepared to contact the Japan Emergency Network (the organization I chose to volunteer with) I stumbled upon a page in the Ishinomaki City website that listed all the relief groups that had done work in the city at some point or another. There were well over 200. In addition to these, the city government had also established an office to make it possible for people to volunteer directly through the city’s auspices. The relief organizations generally take care of work that involves the use of tools, such as sludge and debris removal, whereas those who volunteer with the city usually help with serving the needs of those living in the evacuation shelters. I have no idea what the average number of volunteers in the city on any given day might be, but it would be interesting to find out. I know from correspondence with folks at JEN that weekends and holidays seem to be particularly busy; many people from Tokyo use such times to make the trip up to volunteer for a day or two. A heartening thing to consider.
With their work orders received, the group dispersed into the temple grounds. Today’s detail appeared to be cleaning the sludge and rubble deposited by the tsunami out of the graveyard in from of the temple. (The tsunami made it just far enough inland at this point to damage the floor of the temple’s main hall, but otherwise the structure was sound.) As one of the volunteers approached us, Takumi thanked him for his help. He looked to be in his mid- to late twenties, although it’s not always easy to tell with the mask in the way (which, along with the work gloves, safety boots, and tenugui towel around the neck, is a common piece of volunteer accoutrement). I asked him where he was from. “We all drove up from Kobe last night,” he said, with the Kansai accent to prove it. I asked why such a large group had come from so far away. “When Kobe was destroyed, a group from Ishinomaki came to our neighborhood to help out – we’re just here to return the favor.”
After taking care of a few logistical points concerning the upcoming funeral with the head priest, Takumi took me into the main hall to see the altar. Most of the floor leading up to it had been inundated, so the floorboards were now removed. We negotiated our way across the bare beams beneath, pushed aside a tarp hung to keep dust from the restoration work off the altar, and stepped inside.
The place was full of boxes containing the bones of people whose funerals would take place in the next few days. Four and a half months since the tsunami, and there were still funerals to be held for the victims; there were only so many priests and funeral halls to go around, after all. Earlier on, cremation facilities had also been busy, and many people had to take the bodies of their loved ones to crematoriums outside of the prefecture to get things taken care of in a timely manner. Takumi ended up taking his loved ones to a facility in neighboring Yamagata.
Their bones were here too, of course. Takumi pointed them out to me – three ornamental boxes lined up in the left side of the altar, each with a black-framed picture of the deceased behind it. He gently, lovingly, lifted the pictures one by one from behind their boxes and showed them to me. I had met his father twice and wife only once; his daughter’s whole life had passed between our last meeting and this reunion. Four and a half months, and finally he had the opportunity to lay his loved ones to rest.
We left Saikōji and headed back toward the city center. On the way, Takumi recounted more of what it was like in the days immediately following the tsunami. He and the other people who escaped the water on the roof of Watanoha Middle School were stuck there for over a day while the waters receded. As they did, he saw horrible things left behind: dead bodies, some torn apart and headless, lay amidst the rubble-strewn landscape. It was three days before he could begin searching for his family. First, he found his son, who had taken refuge at his school. Next, they found his mother, also alive and well, at another evacuation center. After the quake, she went out to buy food and water, so she was not home when the tsunami struck. This ultimately saved her; a Self-Defense Force search-and-rescue party had already found his father’s body in the ruins of their neighborhood. Takumi eventually got in touch with a friend living outside of the disaster zone, who put the three of them up and lent Takumi a car so he could begin the search for his wife and daughter.
Our car climbed up a fairly steep road into the part of the city just south of the station and city hall, which suffered no significant damage from the tsunami. We pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a small community center or library. “I think you’ll find this interesting,” Takumi said as we approached the entrance, “this is where all of the personal belongings that are found in the rubble are put on display, so their owners can come and claim them.”
One of the staff members handed us each a pair of white, cotton-knit work gloves, and we entered a large room filled with narrow tables arranged in long rows. On these tables were family portraits, photos, photo albums, yearbooks, framed awards, and diplomas, all individually wrapped in clear plastic bags. The rows were divided into sections, according to what part of the city the items had been found in.
It was an impressive and sad sight: sad, because the thought obviously occurred that some of the people in these pictures were probably no longer alive. Likewise, some of the photos might well never be claimed. This lonely feeling was only compounded by the peculiar effect of salt water on the images, which bleached them out from the edge of the paper inward, seeming to encroach on the subject of the photo, threatening it with permanent erasure.
At the same time, though, I couldn’t help but be touched by the conscientious effort to return such mementos to the people for whom they would really mean something. Most of these things, I would later learn, were recovered by volunteer crews in the course of shoveling out damaged homes and sludge-clogged drainage ducts. Anything that might have personal significance was set aside and eventually delivered here. In the midst of the backbreaking work of returning the city to some semblance of functionality, the emotional needs of the people who had suffered with the disaster were not overlooked.
This was not Takumi’s first visit to the facility. He had come before in search of any photos from his home that might have been discovered, but in vain the first time. This was a follow-up visit to see if anything had come in since. Unfortunately, he found nothing in the main room, but decided to check in a back room to see if anything he could recognize might be there. This room contained a variety of different kinds of objects: toys and games, children’s school backpacks, books, ledgers, diaries, CDs, and even old LPs. All of these things belonged to someone. All of them had been carefully rescued from the rubble and rotten sludge to wind up here. I hoped that it would just be a matter of time before they were all claimed.
Today, one of them was. Something on a table in a corner of the room caught Takumi’s eye, and he leaned forward to get a better look. It was a plastic album for keeping New Year’s greeting cards received in years past – so waterlogged that it was at first barely recognizable as such. The addressee’s name on the first card in the file was legible enough, though: “Abe Yoshiko” – Takumi’s wife. He picked it up with the same gentle care with which he had lifted her portrait from behind the box of her remains at the temple. “She used to keep years and years worth of these things,” he said, more to himself than to me.
We headed to the desk at the entrance, where we had received our gloves. There was a bit of paperwork for Takumi to fill out to claim the album. With that taken care of, we got back in the car and drove on.
Our final stop was a Shinto shrine that overlooks the city and the ocean beyond from a commanding height. I realized as we approached the torii gate that I had been here many years before. Shortly after my wife and I were married in Sendai (with Takumi in attendance), we made a trip out to Ishinomaki for some purpose – I can’t remember what. While we were in town, I contacted Takumi. It was during the short break in March between the end of one school year in the start of the next, so he had free time to show us around, and brought us up here. That was probably twenty years back; we’d all aged a bit since then, but when I asked Takumi if he recalled that visit he said he was just thinking about it himself. I of course don’t recall what might have been going through my mind back on that day, but clearly the thought that I might be here twenty years in the future with this same friend, but under very different circumstances, would not have occurred to me.
Takumi pointed out various points of interest – and destruction – from our vantage point under the torii. Then we walked a short distance downhill from the shrine to a small snack shop that sold kakigori – a summertime treat of shaved ice, topped with syrups in every flavor and color imaginable. As we sat across a decrepit table from each other on rickety chairs, Takumi told me more about what the first days were like. His sense of humor (which often tended toward the scatological) was now fully evident: “The worst thing was that there was no water to drink or to flush the toilets with, so everyone became really constipated. I didn’t take a dump for at least ten days! That never happens! I finally had to use an enema, and even that didn’t work right away.” I gave him my best “I’m trying to eat here” look, and he let the subject drop.
The next moment, he was different. “We used to come up here every so often,” he said, looking out the window of the shop at nothing in particular, “Kanon and Yoshiko used to like to during the summer.” This was the first trace of sadness I had heard in his voice, and I got the feeling that he was staring out the window so that he wouldn’t have to make eye contact.
“You alright?” I asked.
“Yeah, sometimes I can’t help remembering, though…sometimes it’s really hard…”
Takumi had some business to take care of after that, so he drove me back to the station, which was very near to the office of JEN, where I would go to commence volunteer work. We said goodbye; I would be seeing him again in a few days at the funeral.
I had a couple of hours to kill, but did not feel like walking very far, due to the humidity and the weight of my luggage. I went into a coffee shop near the station to begin writing about what I had just seen, but couldn’t make much headway. The coffee shop was crowded with what seemed to be regular patrons, and I was attracting enough attention just by being an unknown foreigner there; I didn’t need to attract more by struggling to choke back tears in public. I left in such a daze, though, that I forgot to pay for my coffee. As I stood outside, blinking in the afternoon sun and wondering where the hell to go next, one of the two women behind the counter came out and, in incredibly apologetic tones, informed me that I owed her 300 yen.
I apologized as profusely as I could in my embarrassment, paid her, and crossed the street to city hall. At least there I figured I might find an air-conditioned public space, and maybe even an outlet from which I could purloin electricity to charge my laptop battery. I guessed right on both counts. As I sat there on a folding chair by a wall in the lobby, my laptop charging by my side, I happened to notice a bulletin board a short distance away.
These are missing persons posters, placed here by people who are still waiting to here news – even the worst news – of loved ones, four and a half months after the tsunami. If there is a more painful situation than Takumi’s that I could imagine at that point, it would have to be this.