Ghosts of the Tsunami is the kind of book that I want to urge everyone to read, and yet it's such a brutal, heartbreaking read that I find myself hesitating. I actually teared up three separate times while reading it--and I never cry while reading. Never.
This is the story of the terrible tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Specifically, it's about what happened at Okawa Elementary, where most of the children and teachers died, in spite of the school being next to a hill that was high enough that had they climbed it, they would have been safe. What happened at the school, how decisions were made, is pieced together throughout the book.
But it's about so much more than that. It's about Japanese society. It's about how people grieve. It's about how once you've faced a terrible tragedy like this, the people outside of the tragedy don't or can't understand, and you're left in a small community of people who know how you feel. One anecdote tells of a mother who lost one of her children shopping at a store one day and hearing two women from outside the community talking about the tsunami. The women both vehemently agree that if they'd lost a child, they would have killed themselves. They couldn't understand how the afflicted parents hadn't done that. Imagine being that mother, hearing that kind of judgment from people who have no idea what you've just gone through.
However, even within the community of survivors, there are fractures. Parents whose children's bodies were found quickly found themselves at odds with parents whose children's bodies were missing for much longer. A hierarchy of grief rose up: from those who lost all their children, and even spouses and parents, to those who lost some but not all of their families, there were levels of grieving and how the grieving were viewed. When a group of parents decided to confront the school and city government over the failure to protect the children, that drove a further wedge into the community. Unlike America, where people are increasingly confrontational and litigious, that just isn't done in Japan. Those who spoke out found themselves ostracized by those who didn't. And some who perhaps wanted to speak out feared for their jobs and livelihoods if they did. As author Richard Lloyd Parry so eloquently puts it:
"It is true that people can be 'brought together' by catastrophe, and it is human to look to this as a consolation. But the balance of disaster is never positive. New human bonds were made after the tsunami, old ones became stronger; there were countless remarkable displays of selflessness and self-sacrifice. These we remember and celebrate. We turn away from what is also commonplace: the destruction of friendship and trust; neighbors at odds; the enmity of friends and relatives. A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes. And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy and fell out of love."
Parry walks a fine line here and does an admirable job. He shows the all-too-human reactions, but he doesn't judge, and doesn't lead the reader to being judgmental either. These are humans in horrific pain, and how human react to that kind of pain is all over the place. That doesn't make them bad people.
There's also discussion, briefly, of Japanese politics of the time, of which I was ignorant and which bore a startling--and horrifying--resemblance to the American political climate today.
Finally, Parry writes about Japanese beliefs, how as a country they don't consider themselves particularly religious, but they do have a strong belief system involving ghosts, ancestors, and the sacredness of the familial lineage. I don't want to give spoilers, but that section alone is worth the read.
So. A very hard book to read, but so well-written, such an excellent piece of coverage of a tragedy and its aftermath--the aftermath that people stop paying attention to once the death toll is finalized. Parry has a couple of other books out, and I think I may need to read those too.