Facing the Wave Read Free Page A

a grave”;
kuruma
is “car,” and the word
grave
comes from the old French and can also mean “shore.”
    When Masumi went to search for her relatives who had farmed rice, vegetables, and flowers at the coast for five generations, most roads at the coast were impassable.
    Families were split up. Wherever you were when the earthquake hit was where you remained for days. No cell phones worked. She did not know who was dead, who was alive, and, either way, where they might be.
    Masumi described her search: “I went first to find my grandmother and my uncle, Kazuyoshi, and his wife. They lived together in my grandmother’s house. I drove as far as I could to the coast, but there was so much flooding, I had to get out of the car and run. The water was knee-deep. People had gone to hillside shrines, Buddhist temples, hospitals, government buildings, and schools for safety. Some were saved, some were caught on the roads, some buildings were overtaken by the Wave. Near the Natori River, to be on the second floor wasn’t high enough. In other places you had to be on the fourth floor, if there was one. We were all looking for loved ones. People were crying, some were screaming. I kept asking for my grandmother at shelters. Sometimes, people were so grief-stricken, they couldn’t talk at all.”
    Masumi made many stops. At designated evacuation centers photographs of survivors were posted on the walls. That’s how she finally found her grandmother—she saw the woman’s picture. “She was alone, without family, in an evacuation center. The earthquake knocked her wheelchair over and threw her under a heavy table. That’s what saved her, but many others around her died.”
    It’s been one hundred days since the disaster and special prayers are being said for the missing and dead. Even after Buddhism merged with Shinto, old Shinto beliefs prevail in Tohoku to this day: death is an unseemly corruption; ghosts are ubiquitous and to be feared. In ancient times, houses where a death had occurredwere abandoned. But the
moya
, the “mourning house,” was miniaturized into a replica of a Shinto temple that is kept on a high ledge. Inside were small “spirit-sticks” with the names of the dead engraved on them. Earlier Masumi’s mother showed me their two shrines—the one outside in the garden, and the one on top of a closet in her bedroom.
    On the way to the rice fields we drive by the Sendai Port. It is a scene of devastation. Big-name factories—Sony, Toyota, Kirin, and Shiseido—are nothing but bent frames with the insides pushed out and scattered. “The press said the Japanese weren’t looting, but they were, a little bit,” Masumi says. “We just call it gathering up what has been left behind! There were photographs of women running around the Shiseido factory grabbing expensive cosmetics—tanning cream and moisturizers, and sunblock. They were very happy to have those things. And Kirin beer … people just helped themselves. After the tsunami, everyone needed a beer!”
    Parking lots jammed with workers’ cars were crushed in place; acres and acres of cars were lost. “Very Japanese,” Masumi says, looking at one such parking lot with a thousand or so ruined cars. “All so neat.” But unfixable. “We are all driving very carefully now because there are no Toyota parts.”
    Slowly, through city traffic, we finally approach the coast, the woman’s voice on the GPS instructing:
“Hidari-desu … hidaridesu.”
Left. Left. Then after we’ve been driving for two hours, the GPS voice says we should stop and rest, a suggestion we ignore.
    Bits of rubbish appear, flung against houses and fences. Rice fields are muddied over with standing water. Around a corner we pass schoolchildren in tidy navy blue uniforms walking home. Men and women ride bicycles, their only form of transportation. In a vacant lot, three uniformed officials are poking sticks into the mud. They no longer look for the living, only for the