After the Wave

Passing a test of strength

Cry, if you want to cry, if it helps you see, if it clears your eyes.

-Soundgarden

Imagine that you lost everything that you owned. This happened to my in-laws on March 11th, 2011. Except for a car (my father-in-law’s old Subaru Impreza) and some heirlooms from the family altar, hastily gathered when the tsunami warning sirens first went off, the Pacific Ocean came and swallowed the lot. All that was left of the family home were a few orange tiles from the patio, still visible a few weeks later through a gap in an almighty sea of debris.

My wife and I were in Omotesandō, doing some shopping, when it happened. What stands out in the memory now are, absurdly, trivial fragments. The way the water in a puddle sloshed back and forth when the quake first hit; I had felt many quakes before, as every resident of Japan has, but never had I seen one that made waves in a puddle. A great flock of pigeons rising as one in the minutes before the first tremor, to swoop overhead like a rumour of an impending storm - it is true what they say: when it comes to earthquakes, animals retain powers of prognostication we have lost. An old man, walking along listening to a transistor radio, first to hear the news as everybody else gazed at cellphones rendered useless by a network outage. He remarked to his wife: ‘They say it’s up in Tōhoku [the north east].’ That was the moment when dread took hold - we’d been due to visit our in-laws, who live in the idyllic north-east coastal city of Kesennuma, the very next day.

Trains weren’t running, and wouldn’t for days, so we walked back to our hotel, over in Ueno, joining a vast throng of salarymen trudging their way across Tōkyo. Like hunter-gatherers we detoured to search for drinks, battery-chargers for our phones, glimpses of news in hardware stores. For the next two or three weeks we scrabbled for information. It was a few days before we could confirm that my wife’s family were all still in one piece - in a tense phone call in which my sister-in-law insisted that we oughtn’t to try to come up north to help. (Amazingly, their dog also survived. I loathed that animal - a feeling that was entirely mutual - but I surprised myself by being happy to hear it was still alive. Not even one’s worst enemy deserves to die in a tsunami.) In the meantime, though, we learned that friends, close friends who had attended our wedding, had died. Some left children behind. Others would not be confirmed dead for months.

We were in limbo. We’d spent the last few months in the UK while I tried to complete my PhD, and most of our belongings, having been in storage at the in-laws’ place, were now gone. (I still wonder what happened to my old guitar, perhaps washed up somewhere on a beautiful Micronesian shore.) We spent a few nights in a hotel, then went to stay at a friend’s house in Tochigi prefecture in a grand old traditional farmhouse while we figured out what to do. There were constant aftershocks of the quake - the house rattled and swayed every fifteen minutes as though stationed directly above a subway station - and we spent most of each day driving around in search of petrol, or rice, or both. Everywhere there were lines of cars, vast lines of cars, queueing because it was better to be in a queue now than have to join a longer one later. Everywhere people rushed about as if every moment counted - as though death had revealed his face, and we had all discovered that he was close enough to see in more detail than we’d have liked.

Whenever we came home the TV was blaring out news of impending nuclear apocalypse - I learned more about microsieverts in those surreal weeks than the average nuclear physicist does in a lifetime - or else grim statistics of fatalities. Occasionally, this was leavened by a struggle session, during which some sweaty-faced government minister, or official at TEPCO (the company which owned the Fukushima nuclear plant) would be hauled in front of journalists to be berated for his incompetence. In the meantime, to complete the weirdness of the moment, civil war broke out in Libya and rumours began to swirl of a NATO bombing campaign. In the evenings we hunkered down as though WWIII was on its way, and drank Korean makkori while scrolling Facebook for rumours about the lost.

Eventually it became clear that the roads up north would not be traversable for the foreseeable future and that the trains would out of action for even longer. We were running out of money and all we could do was get a plane back to the UK. We had practically the entire flight to ourselves; Narita airport was a ghost town. There wasn’t a tourist in the world who wanted to come to Japan, and not a soul who had remained. I felt like my leaving was a betrayal. I still feel like it was.

This was as nothing, though, to what people up north went through. My in-laws spent weeks sleeping in a school gymnasium before the Japanese government was able to build sufficient prefab dwellings for refugees. My mother-in-law tells stories of vast swarms of flies, fat with blood, roaming across the shattered landscape in terms of decaying flesh; others tell of how octopuses caught for food would for months afterwards be found to be full of human hair which they could not digest.

Eventually the family managed to get into a small unit - basically a single room with a kitchen to house three adults and a dog, with walls so thin you could hear the neighbouring family breathe. They spent the next six years working, scrimping and saving so as to be in a position to buy some land and build a new house, which wasn’t completed until 2017. The dog didn’t make it; he died of cancer along the way. My parents-in-law still work full time to this day, aged in their late 70s, to pay the mortgage. And this story was repeated in the hundreds of thousands all up and down the north east coast - grim survival, the will to endure, the bloody-minded insistence to carry on, and the wherewithal to rebuild.

Thirteen years on, though, Kesennuma is still there - still alive, still kicking. I sit there now, typing these words, at the dining table in my in-laws’ home. Last week for the umpteenth time I visited a local memorial to the victims of the disaster - a school building, made of reinforced concrete, which managed to withstand the wave. The building itself is preserved as it was in the aftermath - there are entire cars wedged into third- and fourth-floor classrooms - and, in a certain aspect, its grounds are hauntingly beautiful:

But behind it there is now a kids’ adventure playground where my own children love to play on family visits, and in front there is an entire miniature ‘gate ball’ course (the croquet-like sport with which the elderly Japanese are entirely obsessed) where once there would have stood houses. It is a very Japanese thing to mix the solemn with the cheerful in this way - and says something important and bittersweet which would only be diminished by stating it directly.

The city’s surroundings, meanwhile, remain stunning - the sanriku coast, of which Kesennuma forms a part, ought to be one of the most famous tourist destinations in the word: a paradise of long sandy beaches, excellent surf, beautiful wild mountains, and fabulous sea food. And one would never guess that large parts of the city were completely levelled a mere decade or so ago - save for the large, empty plots of land, now overgrown with grass and shrubs, which cover big chunks of the city centre. Life is pleasant, peaceful, prosperous. Children walk to and from school alone, like they do everywhere in Japan, completely safe; there are bustling restaurants and supermarkets; it is, to resort to cliché, living testament to the human spirit that a place can undergo such hardship and regenerate itself.

The people of this humble place faced a test of their strength thirteen years ago. And they were not found wanting. On the 11th of March they saw their world destroyed. They woke up on the 12th of March to find an almighty mess - ruin, devastation, fire, then snow. They waited for things to be safe and then they set to work clearing up, and then rebuilt. They were equal to the task that confronted them. They did not gripe, or plead anxiety or depression, or bleat about injustice; they got on with things. And they can justly look around themselves now with pride at what they have accomplished. That they by and large do not do so - that they by and large, indeed, still just get on with things - is extraordinary, and in itself speaks of their quiet strength of their resolve. The strong do not need to brag about their strength - they merely demonstrate it when it is necessary.

Japan is a society which embodies what Machiavelli referred to as virtù - the capacity to govern oneself. This is what people notice about it, and admire in it, when they visit. It is a place in which people can be trusted to get on with things. The unit of governance is not so much the state as the family, and the state itself can tread lightly because the people bear society on their own shoulders. Where the state does get involved - as, inevitably, it did during the tsunami clear-up - it does so effectively and quickly, because it does not in general try to do too much. It does not involve itself in what it knows to be within the capacity of society to manage. It is a bloated beast, to be sure, but it is bloated for reasons that are economic rather than social. It does not leave its people merrily alone - Japan is no libertarian paradise. But it grants them that they are functioning adults, and reaps the benefits of doing so.

It remains a great source of mystery to me as to why the rest of the world, seeing what the Japanese have managed to build in their beautiful islands, do not seek to emulate its social success (let’s leave to one side the economy) - but seem indeed to be hell-bent on doing the precise opposite. And so the most important question in political philosophy, it seems to me, is raised. We know how societies can ruin themselves. But how may a society like Japan’s - a society that is strong, that can endure what was endured in 2011 without civil disorder, criminal activity, or complaint - be constructed where it does not already exist? This question will I think become pressing across the West in the coming years as our own strength further declines into genuine weakness, and as we search for a route out of our predicament.