by Evan Osnos
The afternoon of Friday, March 11th, was cool and partly cloudy on the northeast coast of Japan’s main island, a serene stretch once known as the nation’s “back roads.” At 2:46 P.M., as schools were beginning to let out, the ground began to shake. It was violent even by Japan’s standards—the thundering went on for five minutes—and before long Japanese television was warning of a wave charging west across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jet. Kicked up from the seabed, the tsunami amplified in size and slowed in speed as it moved into the shallows beside the Japanese coastline, and by the time it touched land it was a wall of water, black and smooth. It was as tall in places as a three-story building, moving at fifty miles per hour. It flicked fishing trawlers over seawalls, crunched them against bridges. It sent fleets of cars and trucks hurtling from parking lots, and turned homes into chips of wood and tile, before heading deeper into Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures across a span of six miles. Rampaging through former farming and fishing villages, and the cosmopolitan city of Sendai, the wave slowed, but remained too fast for most people to outrun on foot.
The afternoon of Friday, March 11th, was cool and partly cloudy on the northeast coast of Japan’s main island, a serene stretch once known as the nation’s “back roads.” At 2:46 P.M., as schools were beginning to let out, the ground began to shake. It was violent even by Japan’s standards—the thundering went on for five minutes—and before long Japanese television was warning of a wave charging west across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jet. Kicked up from the seabed, the tsunami amplified in size and slowed in speed as it moved into the shallows beside the Japanese coastline, and by the time it touched land it was a wall of water, black and smooth. It was as tall in places as a three-story building, moving at fifty miles per hour. It flicked fishing trawlers over seawalls, crunched them against bridges. It sent fleets of cars and trucks hurtling from parking lots, and turned homes into chips of wood and tile, before heading deeper into Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures across a span of six miles. Rampaging through former farming and fishing villages, and the cosmopolitan city of Sendai, the wave slowed, but remained too fast for most people to outrun on foot.
Basho, the most famous poet of Edo-era Japan, once cited a Chinese poet in describing the northern reaches: “Countries may fall, but their rivers and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again.” Yet when the wave receded, some of the small towns in a region that traced its history to the seventh century had ceased to exist in visible form. Minamisanriku (pop. 17,000) reported that it could not account for half its people. A kindergarten in the city of Ishinomaki was spared, because of its location on a hilltop, but its school bus was not. It had already left for the day and was engulfed in a fire ignited by the wave. Parents found the bodies of their children huddled together.
One of the first outsiders to arrive from Tokyo was Tetsuo Jimbo. A reporter and the head of Japan’s largest Internet television news network, Jimbo had raced north just half an hour after his office stopped shaking. He drove twelve hours in his Toyota minivan on small country roads until the debris and sludge made the roads impassable. Then he continued on foot until he reached a broad, placid rice paddy, with telephone poles protruding from it at odd angles. The paddy, locals said, was the village of Karasu.
A hundred and twenty people were dead, as far as anyone could estimate at that point, and eventually the survivors made their way into the dark, unheated elementary school and other shelters, where classrooms were preferred to gymnasiums. (The large spaces were bone-cold.) At a junior high school near Kesennuma, five hundred people were sleeping on the gymnasium floor, sharing ten toilets with no running water. The mess besieged them, and eventually they resorted to the fields of snow outside. They were overwhelmingly elderly; the tsunami had hit the rural coastline, which, like so much of the countryside in one of the world’s fastest-graying societies—more than one in five Japanese citizens are now older than sixty-five—was a land of retirees, the aging children of the postwar baby boom and their parents.
On a hilltop overlooking the ruined city of Rikuzentakata, Jimbo met a semi-retired man in his sixties, who had heard the tsunami siren and packed his mother and dog into his truck and driven two miles inland, the waves churning in his rearview mirror. “He lost his house, and it’s not covered by insurance,” Jimbo said. “His family, fortunately, survived. I said, ‘What will you do next?’ He said he would like to think there will be some assistance from the local government. But all he could think was: The city-assembly office is gone. The mayor could be dead. The only thing he can turn to is the government. But his local government is gone.”
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