The school beneath the wave

Seven years ago last week, a tsunami engulfed Japan’s northeast coast, causing the country’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombs of 1945. Richard Lloyd Parry reports from one devastated community

The earthquake that struck Japan on Friday 11 March 2011 was the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth six-and-a-half inches off its axis; it moved Japan about four metres closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, more than 18,000 people were killed. At its peak, the water was 40 metres high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes. Three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi power station melted down, spilling their radioactivity across the countryside, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210bn of damage, making it the most costly natural disaster ever.

Those who work in zones of war and disaster acquire, after a time, the knack of detachment. This is professional necessity: no doctor, aid worker or reporter can do their job if they are crushed by the spectacle of death and suffering. I knew the facts of what had happened, and I knew they were appalling. But at my core, I was not appalled. The events that constituted the disaster were so vast in their implications, that I never felt that I was doing the story justice. It was quite late on, the summer after the tsunami, when I heard about a small community on the coast that had suffered an exceptional tragedy. Its name was Okawa; it lay in a forgotten fold of Japan, below hills and among rice fields. In the years that followed, I encountered many survivors and stories of the tsunami, but it was to Okawa that I returned time and again. And it was there, at the school, that I eventually became able to imagine.

Okawa elementary school was more than 200 miles north of Tokyo in a village called Kamaya, which stands on the bank of a great river, the Kitakami, two miles inland of the point where it flows into the Pacific Ocean. In ancient times, this region of Japan, known as Tohoku, was a notorious frontier realm of barbarians, goblins and bitter cold. Even today, it remains a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place.

One of the pupils at Okawa elementary, Tetsuya Tadano, was a stocky boy of 11, with close-cropped hair and an air of mild, amused mischief. Every morning he made the 20-minute walk from his house to school with his nine-year-old sister, Mina, along the embankment of the river. On the day of the earthquake, it was the 40th birthday of their mother, Shiroe; a small celebration was planned at home that evening. But otherwise it was an unremarkable Friday afternoon.

Lessons at Okawa elementary school finished at 2.30pm. At 2.45pm, the school bus was waiting in the car park with its engine running; a few of the younger pupils had already climbed in. But most of the children were still in their classrooms, finishing up the last school business of the week. A minute later, the sixth-year class were singing Happy Birthday to one of their number, a girl named Manno. It was in the middle of this song that the earthquake struck. The room was shaking very slowly from side to side, said Soma Sato, one of the sixth-year boys. “They weren’t small, fast shakes – it felt gigantic. The teachers were running up and down, saying, ‘Hold on to your desks.’”

The school building was evacuated with exemplary speed. Scarcely five minutes after they had been crouching under their desks, the children were in the playground, lined up by class, wearing the hard plastic helmets that were stored in each child’s locker. The alarm of the younger children was renewed by repeated, jolting aftershocks. At 2.49pm, while the vibrations of the mother quake were still jangling outwards across northern and eastern Japan, the Meteorological Agency issued a warning: a six-metre-high tsunami was expected; everyone on the coast of northeast Japan should evacuate to higher ground. There were more aftershocks at 3.03pm, at 3.06pm and at 3.12pm. At 3.14pm, the warning was updated: the tsunami was expected to come in at a height of ten metres. The teachers in the playground formed a huddle beneath the cherry trees and engaged in a discussion in low voices.

There was an obvious place of safety. The school was immediately in front of a forested hill, 220 metres high at its highest point. Until a few years ago, the children had gone up there as part of their science lessons, to cultivate a patch of shiitake mushrooms. This was a climb that the smallest children could have easily managed. Within five minutes – the time it had taken them to evacuate their classrooms – the entire school could have ascended high above sea level, beyond the reach of any tsunami.

One senior teacher, Junji Endo, later recalled one brief conversation with the deputy headmaster, Toshiya Ishizaka, after checking for stragglers inside the school. “I asked: ‘What should we do? Should we run to the hill?’ I was told that it was impossible with the shaking.” But one of the survivors from the sixth year recalled a much more dramatic intervention. Endo, she said, had emerged from the school, calling out loudly, “To

“At 2.49pm, the Meteorological Agency issued a warning: a six-metre-high tsunami was expected”

the hill! The hill! Run to the hill!” His alarm was picked up by one of the students, Daisuke Konno, and his friend, Yuki Sato, who made their own appeals to their sixth-year teacher, Takashi Sasaki: “We should climb the hill, sir. If we stay here, the ground might split open and swallow us up. We’ll die if we stay here!” The boys began to run in the direction of the mushroom patch. But Endo was overruled, the boys were ordered to come back and shut up, and they returned obediently to their class.

When the first tsunami warning was received, Toshinobu Oikawa, a government worker, climbed into a car mounted with rooftop speakers to deliver the warning in person. He and a colleague were driving through the outer margins of Kamaya when he became aware of something extraordinary taking place two miles ahead of them, at the point where the sea met the land. As he watched, the sea was overwhelming a ribbon of pine trees that grew alongside the beach, tearing up the forest in a frothing surge. They immediately made a U-turn and within seconds were driving through Kamaya again. His colleague was shouting through the loudspeaker: “Evacuate! Evacuate to the higher ground!” But people paid no attention. “We passed the school. We were driving fast, we didn’t stop. But they must have heard our message too.”

In the playground, the children were becoming restless. Ishizaka, the deputy head, who had been absent, reappeared suddenly. “A tsunami seems to be coming,” he called. “Quickly. We’re going to the traffic island. Get into line, and don’t run.” Tetsuya and his friend Daisuke were at the front of the group. The traffic island was less than 400 metres away, just outside the village, at the point where the road met the New Kitakami Great Bridge. It was as Tetsuya approached this junction that he saw a black mass of water rushing along the main road ahead of him. Barely a minute had passed since he had left the playground. He was conscious of a roaring sound, and a sheet of white spray above the black. It was streaming in from the river, the direction in which the children had been ordered to move.

Some of those at the front of the line froze in the face of the wave. Others, including Tetsuya and Daisuke, turned at once and ran back the way they had come. The rest of the children hurried on towards the main road; the little ones towards the back were visibly puzzled by the sight of the older children pelting in the opposite direction. Soon, Tetsuya and Daisuke found themselves at the foot of the hill, at the steepest and most thickly forested section of the slope. At some point, Tetsuya became aware that Daisuke had fallen, and he tried, and failed, to pull his friend up. Then Tetsuya was scrambling up the hill. As he did so, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the darkness of the tsunami rising behind him. Soon it was at his feet, his calves, his buttocks, his back. “It felt like the huge force of gravity when it hit me,” he said. “It was as if someone with great strength was pushing. I couldn’t breathe, I was struggling for breath.” He became aware of a rock and a tree, and found himself trapped between them, with the water rising about him. Then darkness overcame him.

Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard and smelt something different. Much depended upon where you were, and the obstacles that the water had to overcome to reach you. Some described a waterfall, cascading over sea wall and embankment. For others, it was a fast-rising flood between houses, deceptively slight at first, tugging trippingly at the feet and ankles, but quickly sucking and battering at legs and chests and shoulders. In colour, it was described as brown, grey, black, white. The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai: blue-green and cresting elegantly in tentacles of foam. The tsunami was a thing of a different order: darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming on to land, the ocean itself picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat. It stank of brine, mud and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile.

Tetsuya came to on the hill, blinded by mud and with the roar of the tsunami in his ears. His limbs were immobilised by spars of debris and by something else – something wriggling and alive, which was shifting its weight on top of him. It was Kohei Takahashi, Tetsuya’s friend and fifth-year classmate. Kohei’s life had been saved by a household refrigerator. It had floated past with its door open as he thrashed in the water, and he had squirmed into it, ridden it like a boat and been dumped by it on his schoolmate’s back. “Help! I’m underneath you,” Tetsuya cried. Kohei tugged him free. Standing on the steep slope, the two boys beheld the scene below. Beyond Kamaya had been a succession of hamlets, and beyond them fields, low hills, the swaying curve of the river and finally the Pacific Ocean. After the tsunami, the village, the hamlets, the fields and everything else between here and the sea was gone.

Tetsuya’s first thought was that he and his friend were already dead. He took the raging water to be the River of Three Crossings, the Japanese equivalent of the River Styx. Those who have led good lives cross the river safely by bridge; evil-doers must take their chances in the dragon-ridden waters. Innocent children, being neither sinful nor virtuous, rely on a kindly Buddha to make their passage, and to protect them from the depredations of hags and demons. “I thought I’d died,” Tetsuya said. “Dead... the River of Three Crossings. But then there was the New Kitakami Great Bridge, and the traffic island. And so I thought this might be Kamaya after all.”

Tetsuya’s face was black and bruised. In the churn of the tsunami, the ill-fitting plastic helmet that he wore had twisted on its strap and dug brutally against his eyes. His vision was affected for weeks; he could only dimly make out what was going on in the water below. Kohei’s left wrist was broken and his skin was punctured by thorns, but his vision was unaffected. Whatever was visible of the fate of his school and his schoolmates, he saw it. He would never talk publicly about it.

Only later would the full scale of the tragedy at Okawa elementary school become clear. The school had 108 children. Of the 78 who were there at the moment of the tsunami, 74 of them, and ten out of the 11 teachers, had died. Later, many of the children’s parents were tormented by self-reproach for not rushing to the school to collect them. But far from being neglectful or lazy, they had followed the course of action that, in every other circumstance, would have been most likely to secure their safety and survival. Nowhere in Japan are precautions against natural disaster more robust than in state schools. On 11 March 2011, out of 18,000 people killed by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, only 75 were children in the care of their teachers. All but one were at Okawa elementary school.

This article is an edited extract from Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry (Jonathan Cape, £16.99). To buy from The Week Bookshop for £15.99, visit www.theweek.co.uk/bookshop

“He saw a black mass of water rushing along the main road ahead of him”