The Day the Ground Moved

I had been in Kyoto until two days before. Kyoto is approximately seven hundred kilometres south of the earthquake’s epicentre in the Pacific Ocean, thirty kilometres off the Oshika Peninsula. Seven hundred kilometres of the same island, the same country I had been in for the past two weeks. I felt nothing. While I was boarding a flight to Hong Kong, the wave was crossing the Tohoku coastal plain, carrying with it the evidence of ordinary life, cars and houses and fishing boats, in the brown surge that the news footage would show on a loop for the following days.

The television in the hostel in Hong Kong was showing aerial footage taken by news helicopters. You could see the wave moving. It was not the wall of water that appears in dramatisations of tsunamis. It moved like a tide, a very fast tide, with an indifference to the infrastructure in its path that was more frightening than any theatrical version of it could have been, because it was simply the movement of water through a landscape not designed to contain it. The town of Rikuzentakata, which had a population of twenty-three thousand people, was almost entirely destroyed. Minamisanriku lost sixty percent of its population in the initial inundation. Ishinomaki, a city of a hundred and sixty thousand, was submerged in significant portions. When the final count was reached, nearly twenty thousand people had died and four hundred and fifty thousand had been displaced from their homes.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, fifty kilometres south of the worst of the tsunami damage, had been struck by a wave that overwhelmed its seawalls and flooded the backup generators that were keeping the cooling systems running for three of its six reactors. The cooling failure that resulted produced three reactor meltdowns over the following four days, releasing radioactive material in quantities that required the evacuation of a twenty-kilometre zone around the plant. It was the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986, a comparison the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company were initially reluctant to make and which became unavoidable as the scale of the contamination became clear. The information released in those early days was incomplete in ways that became apparent later, a pattern familiar from Chernobyl, where the Soviet government’s response to the 1986 disaster had included the active suppression of information that would have enabled faster evacuation of affected populations.

Sitting in Hong Kong watching this, I was aware of a particular kind of disorientation that comes from being a peripheral witness to a catastrophe in a country you have just left. I had been in Japan for ten days. I had been in Tokyo and Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Kyoto. I had eaten in small restaurants and used the rail network and navigated a pod hotel spa with no shared language. The country I had just left was being covered on international news in the register used for historical events, for things that happen to places rather than to people you have recently been among, and the register was wrong for what I was feeling.

The Japanese response to the disaster was watched carefully by the world. The orderliness that I had observed throughout my time in the country, the social compact that produces queues where everyone stands behind the line without being told, the mutual consideration that makes a city of twelve million people function without the low-grade friction of most cities of comparable size, these qualities were tested under conditions that test qualities properly. What happened, broadly, was that they held. Aid distribution was organised. There was no significant looting. The failure, when it came, was institutional rather than human: the government’s response was slower and more confused than the ground-level behaviour of ordinary people, and the concealment of information about Fukushima in the early days was a failure with real consequences for the people who lived near the plant. But these were failures of institutions and of specific individuals within them, not of the society that was trying to respond to something genuinely unprecedented.

I had a flight to Manila booked for Monday. The Pacific-wide tsunami warning had extended to the Philippines, and I spent Sunday establishing that the warning had been downgraded and the islands were safe. The flight would go ahead. This was the right decision and also a small one, made from a hostel in Hong Kong while twenty thousand people were dead in Tohoku, and I was aware that it was small while I was making it.