Ghosts of the Tsunami
On 11 March 2011, Japan was rocked by the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded, said Leaf Arbuthnot in The Sunday Times. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, its epicentre lay 43 miles off the coast, and it triggered a tidal wave that rose 40 metres at its peak and travelled up to six miles inland. “Almost instantaneously, more than 18,000 people lost their lives,” a million buildings were damaged or destroyed, and the floods melted down three reactors at Fukushima, “unleashing the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl”. In the catastrophe’s aftermath, Tokyo-based foreign correspondent Richard Lloyd Parry travelled repeatedly to Tohoku, the affected region, interviewing hundreds of survivors. In Ghosts of the Tsunami, he “draws together stories from the people he met” to create a “measured and moving” portrait of the crisis.
This is, as it should be, a “painful” book to read, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Zoning in on “half a dozen or so individual stories”, Lloyd Parry uncovers many unforgettable instances of suffering – such as the mother so desperate to find her daughter amid the rubble that she learnt how to operate a mechanical digger. He also explores one of the disaster’s peculiarly Japanese dimensions: the upsurge in ghost sightings that followed in its wake. In Japanese culture, the “dead play a continuing role in domestic life”: most homes have altars on which the memorial tablets of dead ancestors are displayed. After the tsunami, Tohoku “suddenly swirled with ghosts”, and priests became inundated with requests for exorcisms. Lloyd Parry’s account of such happenings is “profoundly eloquent”. But “another set of spirits” also inhabits these pages, said Eri Hotta in The Guardian: “the ghosts of Japan’s political failures”. One of the book’s other narratives concerns Okawa primary school, where 74 out of 108 pupils lost their lives – almost certainly because staff waited too long before evacuating them to higher ground. Afterwards, with the authorities reluctant to launch an investigation, some “grief-stricken” parents “decided to fight back”, filing a lawsuit against the local government. This, as Lloyd Parry shows, represented a major challenge to the “statecentred” ideology that has long dominated Japanese culture, and which can produce a “deadly conformism”. Ghosts of the Tsunami is a “compassionate and piercing” work, which explores Japan’s complex reaction to its worst crisis since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.