Richard Lloyd Parry - Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.

It was Japans greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis, and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings. He met a priest who performed exorcisms on people possessed by the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village which had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.

What really happened to the local children as they waited in the school playground in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?

Ghosts of the Tsunami is a brilliant work of literary non-fiction, a heartbreaking and intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the personal accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the bleak struggle to find consolation in the ruins.

RICHARD LLOYD PARRY has lived in Tokyo for twenty-two years as a foreign correspondent, first for the Independent and now as Asia Editor of The Times. He has reported from twenty-eight countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, Granta and the New York Times. He is the author of In the Time of Madness, an account of black magic and violence in Indonesia in the late 1990s, and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.

In The Time Of Madness: Indonesia On The Edge Of Chaos
People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman

For Stella and Kit

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,

This fallen star my milk sustains,

This love that makes my hearts blood stop

Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones

And bids my hair stand up?

W. B. Yeats

On 11 March 2011 two catastrophes struck north-east Japan. The second began in the evening, when reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant melted down, following the failure of their cooling systems. Explosions in three of the reactors scattered radioactive fallout across the countryside. More than 200,000 people fled their homes. But, thanks to a swift evacuation and a good deal of luck, nobody died as a result of the radiation. It is too soon to be sure about the long-term consequences of Fukushima but it may turn out that nobody ever will.

The earthquake and tsunami that set off the nuclear disaster had a more immediate effect on human life. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death or drowned.It was the greatest single loss of life in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945.

This book is about the first disaster: the tsunami.

The eleventh of March 2011 was a cold, sunny Friday, and it was the day I saw the face of my son for the first time. I was in a clinic in central Tokyo, peering at the images on a small screen. Beside me, F lay, exposed, on the examination bed. Her oval belly was smeared with transparent gel; against it, the doctor pressed a glowing wand of plastic. As the wand moved, the images on the screen shifted and jumped.

We knew what to look for, but it was still astonishing to see so much of the small creature: the familiar top-heavy outline; the heart, with its flickering chambers; brain, spine, individual fingers, and so much movement paddling arms, bucking legs and nodding head. The angle of vision altered and revealed at once a well-formed, unearthly face, which gave a charming and very human yawn. Our second child our boy, although we did not know this yet was still in there, still patiently alive.

Outside the clinic it was chilly, gusty and bright, and the wide avenue was filling with midday shoppers and workers coming out of the offices for lunch. We pushed our toddler daughter to a caf and showed her the murky photograph of her sibling-to-be, printed out from the scanners screen.

Two hours later, I was sitting at my desk in a tenth-floor office. What exactly was I doing at the moment it began? Writing an email? Reading the newspaper? Looking out of the window? All that I remember of the hours before are those moments in front of the screen, which had already made the day unforgettable, and the sensation of looking into the face of my son, at the halfway point between his conception and his birth.

I had lived in Japan for sixteen years, and I knew, or believed that I knew, a good deal about earthquakes. I had certainly experienced enough of them since 1995, when I settled in Tokyo, 17,257 tremors had been felt in the capital alone. A spate of them had occurred two days earlier. I had sat out the shaking, monitored the measurements of magnitude and intensity, and reported them online with a jauntiness that now makes me ashamed:

@dicklp

Wed Mar 09 2011 11:51:51

Earthquake!

Wed Mar 09 2011 11:53:14

Epicentre, Miyagi Prefecture. Tsunami warning in place on northern Pacific coast. In Tokyo, we are shaken, but not stirred.

Wed Mar 09 2011 12:01:04

More tremors

Wed Mar 09 2011 12:16:56

@LiverpolitanNYC All fine here, thanks. Its wobble was worse than its bite.

Wed Mar 09 2011 16:09:39

Latest on todays Japan earthquake horror: 10cm tsunami reported in Iwate Prefecture. Thats almost as deep as my washing-up water.

The following day there had been another strong tremor in the same zone of the Pacific Ocean off north-east Japan. This one, too, could be felt as far away as Tokyo, but even close to the epicentre it caused no injury or significant damage. The Thursday morning quake brought the number of quakes felt in Japan since Wednesday to more than thirty, Kyodo news agency reported; and plenty of them were strong tremors, not the subterranean shivers detectable only by scientific instruments. The seismologists warned of the potential for a powerful aftershock in the next week or so, although crustal activities were expected to subside.