A remarkable account of the 2011 tsunami in Japan

Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. By Richard Lloyd Parry. Jonathan Cape, 276 pages, £16.99. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October; $27.

AT 2.46pm on March 11th 2011, an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 was recorded approximately 30km (18 miles) below the floor of the Pacific Ocean off Sendai, about 300km north-east of Tokyo. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have hit Japan, and scientists later determined that movement in the same subduction zone caused the “Jogan quake” of 869, as well as related activity in 1896 and 1933. Like the recent “Great East Japan Earthquake”, as it has become known, that ancient earthquake more than a millennium ago generated a monster tsunami in its wake. Not having the precise instruments that recorded 40-metre-high waves in 2011, villagers in centuries past have placed stone markers along the hillsides roundabout to show how far the wall of water swept inland.

Japan’s tempestuous seismic history has led it to become especially vigilant about what to do in the event of an earthquake. The regular drills that have been developed for Japanese schools have proved remarkably effective. Of the 18,500 people who died as a result of the earthquake and tsunami in 2011, only 351 were children. Yet a large portion of those perished in just one place, the Okawa Primary School. “Ghosts of the Tsunami” is the story of how those directly in charge that day failed to heed the warnings left on the hillsides by those earlier generations, and of how the families of the dead students coped when confronted with parents’ greatest nightmare: being unable to protect their children.

By 2011 Richard Lloyd Parry, the Asia editor of the Times, had experienced many of the 17,257 tremors felt in Tokyo since he first settled there in 1995. In the weeks after the 2011 earthquake, he travelled many times both to the Fukushima nuclear plant that had melted down in the aftermath of the tsunami, and to the wider damage zone beyond. Over and over he returned to the north-east region of Tohoku to interview local officials, Buddhist priests and, most important, the families whose children went to Okawa Primary School. An acute listener, Mr Lloyd Parry heard numerous incomprehensible and disjointed narratives. One mother was so traumatised to hold her daughter’s corpse that she licked the mud out of the dead child’s eyes; another earned herself a licence to operate a digger, excavating in circles because her daughter was still missing under the mud.

As his visits to the area continued (and his notebooks filled up with details), Mr Lloyd Parry learned that surviving the tsunami depended heavily on whether effective evacuation orders were given—and followed. The elderly were hardest hit. Mr Lloyd Parry deftly, even lovingly, tells the stories of those such as Takashi Shimokawara, who died aged 104, and whom he had interviewed in 2008 when the old man set the world javelin record for a centenarian. Next-hardest-hit were those who may not have fully understood the instructions or who thought they could grab some precious object at home before fleeing. A young American schoolteacher helped reunite students with their parents before trying to get to her flat, her father believes, to call home to let her family know she was all right. By contrast, those who strictly heeded town procedures had a solid chance of making it. Warning sirens sounded for about 45 minutes, which should have given them plenty of time to reach a place of safety. So what happened at Okawa Primary School?

To begin with, at least, none of the children or teachers at the heart of this story died or was injured by the earthquake itself. It was the indecisive reaction to the tsunami warning that followed which proved fatal. The headmaster, Teruyuki Kashiba, was not at work that afternoon. His subsequent absence for nearly a week and his failure to help search for bodies and share parents’ distress came to epitomise everything that went wrong. His deputy, Toshiya Ishizaka, and several other teachers decided not to evacuate. Ishizaka told parents who rushed to the school to rescue their children that they were safer there, and he also ignored a school bus parked on the grounds that could have saved everyone. Instead, he and the other adults who were responsible for the children’s safety pondered the meaning of the emergency manual’s instruction to head for “vacant land near school, or park, etc”. Nothing appeared to match these words, so they did nothing. When the wave struck, the children drowned scrambling up a nearby hill.

“Japanese had been dying in tsunamis as long as the Japanese islands had existed,” notes Mr Lloyd Parry. What was different about the 2011 disaster was how the survivors and the bereaved challenged the reactions of the Japanese authorities in the months and years that followed. Okawa Primary School is famous now. Along with the 74 children who died, most of their teachers also drowned—deaths that many of the grieving families came to believe were entirely avoidable and, in fact, criminal. Five years later the Sendai District Court concurred and delivered “a decisive legal victory, an unambiguous assignment of responsibility” on behalf of the families of the dead children. Each plaintiff who joined the suit would receive roughly ¥60m ($575,000) for each lost child.

The portrait of obfuscating officialdom that Mr Lloyd Parry paints has parallels in the account he wrote in 2011 of the murder in Tokyo of Lucie Blackman, the young woman at the centre of his earlier book, “People Who Eat Darkness”. In both, Japanese officials made wild denials in the face of accountable wrongdoing, ignored and hid evidence, hoping the annoying inquiries would go away. By refusing to accept their evasions, and by laying out in panoramic detail what happened after the tsunami, Mr Lloyd Parry offers a voice to the grieving who, too often, found it hard to be heard. It is a thoughtful lesson to all societies whose first reaction in the face of adversity is to shut down inquiry and cover up the facts. You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.