Having scored my interview, I dared to risk an encounter with officialdom, and so met a certain bespectacled, pimpled, and narrow-faced young man named Mr. Maeda, who identified himself as “just an employee of this facility. If you put this in your article, you must contact the city office. That’s what we have been told.” (I most inexcusably neglected to follow his instructions, but, reader, if you wish to do so, the telephone number is 022-214-1148.) He photocopied my letter of press accreditation most alertly; fortunately, my interpreter had always reminded me to keep it neatly folded, in homage to its pretense of importance. “In your opinion,” I inquired, “how dangerous is the radiation?” Mr. Maeda replied: “None of us are particularly concerned.”
AN OLD MAN PLANTING SEEDS
ISHINOMAKI, THEY SAID, looked now the way that Sendai had two weeks ago. In Sendai some people stayed for two days on their roofs until the water subsided. In Ishinomaki there were those who were trapped on their roofs for a week.
On the other hand, Ishinomaki was better off than Rikuzentakada. Never mind that; isn’t there always a worse place?
The fifty-kilometer drive in the veterinary science professor’s car would ordinarily have taken an hour. Ever since the quake, there were traffic jams. It took nearly two hours to reach Ishinomaki; and, indeed, in the course of my journey I had almost daily recourse to the four- or six-hundred-dollar creeping taxi ride or half-day stalled bus ride (the region’s railways being broken), on this highway or that expressway, frozen in traffic or not, so many kilometers toward or away from Fukushima, the long windshield wipers sometimes dancing in rain of unknown salubriousness, the radio news on low, the cab creeping and stopping between other cars in a like situation, the driver occasionally misplacing his Japanese patience.
In Ishinomaki the first story of the supermarket was open and newly gleaming. Most goods were present in prequake abundance. Only one yogurt was allowed per customer, several shelves were bare, and others held milk brands from Kyushu and Hokkaido that were not normally sold here. The brand new washing machines were sold out, the tsunami having ruined ever so many; the automobile dealerships were booming for much the same reason.
The professor’s name was Morimoto Motoko. She lived in Sendai. After the tsunami hit, her two teenaged children had stayed overnight in the care of their teachers; now they were living in Osaka with relatives. She was making this drive to bring supplies to one of her students, a young man named Utsumi Takehiro, who now bowed to us; so did his mother, Yoshie. They got into their car and we followed them home, Ishinomaki being less easy to navigate than before. “If you go beyond the number-45 road,” said Takehiro drily, “the scenery changes.”
Passing the vegetable market, which was now a temporary morgue, we rounded a corner, and I saw many grooves cut deep in the smooth tan earth, with a line of cars and people perpendicular to them on the far side, and white coffins down in the farthest of those open trenches. Takehiro’s grandmother was buried here. The tsunami had caught her. From the way that he spoke about her, I came to believe that he had loved her very much.
“I didn’t see the body, actually,” he said. “My parents saw a hundred bodies every day. They finally found her. Now it takes a year or two before they’re cremated. First, we temporarily bury them. Then they’re disinterred. There are only a few crematoria, so we have to take turns.”21
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Our dog was also killed, because he was chained. We took his body to Niigata, where my father was working, and cremated him. But you need a special vehicle to transport a human body, and those are in shortage.”
Now came heaps of mud, canted trailers, gouged walls, crumpled cars, the crazy skeleton of a shed barely supporting its intact roof, many relief workers and blue-clawed cranes, half-smashed houses on a muddy ugly plain with wet trenches tunneled through it, man-high mounds of debris on the roadside; and so we came into the Tsukiyama district (the clouds like sheets of white slate, the sun in the pine tops, and the dust in my throat). Several large oil tanks had exploded, setting off numerous fires. We rolled past the wreckage of the paper mill, whose round bales of product lay oozing and dripping everywhere. Paper was now in short supply, remarked Mrs. Utsumi.
“My uncle was rescued by helicopter, and he appeared on TV,” said Takehiro proudly.
An American battleship lay on the horizon of the pale blue sea. Here came a long mild wave, its crest so clean. One of its predecessors, the tsunami, had dragged a giant fuel tank onto what remained of the dike. More heaps of mud framed our scenic drive, accompanied by fuel tanks thrust against and through roofs, cars leaning against trees, block after block of ugliness; and presently we turned down a street of newly made junk lots and Takehiro said, “This is my house.”
His next-door neighbor Kawanami Shugoro made us black coffee on a butane-powered hot plate on the dust-choked rickety table inside his blighted house, which appeared intact on the outside. He wore a cap, presumably for warmth. Fat hunks of ceiling dangled down from the rafters, the Sheetrock torn like cardboard. Everything in the living room cabinet was in place, but the cabinet itself tilted at about thirty degrees.
Mr. Kawanami said: “When the earthquake came I was at home. My office had some meeting, so I was trying to change into a suit. At that time there was not much damage, so I changed back into my work clothes and drove the clerical worker to her home near the supermarket. Then I headed toward the office. Then there was a traffic jam, and they said that the tsunami was coming, so I made a U-turn, meaning to come home again. I saw water coming out of the canal by the senior high school and vehicles were floating; so, since that direction was no good, I made another U-turn and took a higher direction. At the river’s edge, the fire department personnel told me not to go that way, but it didn’t look bad. All the same, the water level seemed a bit higher, and then I saw it come over the dike. So I fled. I had to sleep on the ground for four days. I went to Yamato to confirm that my grandchildren were all right. Then there was a gas shortage, and it was so cold. I found a garbage bag to keep me warm — so cold, so cold! It was snowing. I tried to find someplace warm; I took more and more garbage bags for a shirt. .”
“What color was the tsunami?”
He laughed. “I don’t remember. It was black, they said, with oil.”
He was a cheery, rugged, white-bearded old man — sixty-six years old, with the face of a workingman. At the shipyard he was in charge of safety and hygiene. The neighbors stood around us. Cans of juice were on the filthy table. His wife had led some panicked Chinese girls up onto the second story of a parking lot, and they all survived. “Everyone went to the roofs,” he said. The second or third tsunami wave had been in his opinion the bad one, people floating in their cars and calling out for help until they sank. Mr. Kawanami said, “These images were in my brain yesterday, and I got depressed and confused. .”
A couple of his acquaintance had fled. The wife had returned home for their valuables, because she was a strong swimmer. Fortunately, they recovered her corpse, which still gripped a bag of precious things.