Part I

Soutei-Gai

Northeastern Japan

By the time I arrive at Ishinomaki, eleven years have passed since one of the most horrific catastrophes in modern history. Like millions of others around the globe, I had watched and rewatched hundreds of witness videos, spending hours descending down a rabbit hole of some foreign grief. I had read the news reports and books, listened to recordings of survivors’ stories, mined the academic literature, and spoken with dozens of experts. There was nothing that could have prepared me for what I hear and see here.

Now, I sit cross-legged amid the earthy scent of tatami mats in the Dogenin Temple, drinking iced yellow tea and listening as the softspoken Miki tells of how the last of the survivors left in August 2011. It’s a clear, hot day in what has been an oppressively muggy summer, and I’m happy to be sitting out of the sun while her Japanese washes over me.

During my visit, which occurs while the country remains largely locked down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I will be aided by a small army of interpreters who not only translate the words through dozens of interviews but also fill me in on the backstories and cultural nuances that can be so hard to glean secondhand. Today, I’m traveling with Sebastien Penmellen Boret, a French anthropologist who studies death, grief, and burial rituals. While I take in the serenity of the temple’s inner hondo, he talks with Miki and the priest about the hundreds of Buddhist ceremonies they’ve held for the 19,747 confirmed victims and 2,500 others who are still recorded as missing after an eleven-year absence.

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.

My eyes wander along the gilded altar, the intricately carved statues and the hanging banners. If not for the photos of children sleeping on this very floor, bundled in dirty winter coats, I couldn’t tell anything out of the ordinary had ever happened. Through sliding paper doors, past a garden, and under a tall wooden shrine gate, Ishinomaki spreads beside a glistening bay. Fishing boats slide into port and sailboats cut white lines through the silver water. This is the same vantage from which Miki gazed upon the mayhem unfolding eleven years and five months before.

Where she saw the water rise between the homes, lift them up, and crush them together like dollhouses. Where, as night fell, she watched fires flare on islands of floating debris while she received refugees. 

Ishinomaki lost 3,173 souls that day, more than any other city in Japan, but not because it was uncommonly vulnerable. The port was well developed, with breakwaters out in the bay to limit erosion and slow waves before they reached shore. A concrete seawall skirted the coast to resist surges and king tides. Its flat face was pockmarked from decades of abrasive tides and rose straight up to about 20 feet in some places. It was no match for the wave that came in 2011, but nothing was. No country was better prepared for a tsunami than Japan, and yet its leaders later admitted to being caught by surprise. Tens of thousands perished. I’m still wrapping my head around it. I’m not the only one.

The disaster lured swarms of journalists, civil engineers, anthropologists, and even tourists, who found stories of immense sorrow and unexpected hope. Fishermen who escaped by sailing into the wave and daughters who were lost while searching for their parents. Forests wiped away and towns rallying to rebuild. A journalist who covers climate change and adaptation, I found myself caught up in the story of a people harmed by the very efforts made to protect them.

Climate change is often discussed as a monolithic crush bearing down on all of us at once, but what we experience is a series of familiar hazards— though more intense, more frequent, and certainly more erratic than we’re used to. A tsunami might not be a climate-driven phenomenon, but it carries the hallmarks of one: the breadth and severity of harm. If Japan could fall victim to adaptations built to protect them from a hazard it has known for eons, so could we all.

Early in trying to understand how it had happened, I spoke with a Japanese anthropologist named Shuhei Kimura, who was asking many of the same questions. He told me of a fifty-two-year-old man whom he called Konno-san, who was not home when the tsunami struck but whose wife was. Of the 2,500 residents in their coastal village, she was one of only thirty who perished. Between bouts of unhinged grief, Konno worried that her death had been “embarrassing.” Shameful might be a better word. The Japanese have a rich vocabulary to describe shades of guilt, and, as I will learn, it’s impossible to understand the full complexity of a survivor’s feelings. An elder in the community and the head of a respected household, Konno felt ashamed that he had not saved his wife. He worried about how it must have looked to his neighbors. He also wondered why his wife had not led the way to safety, because he expected his family to set an example. Why had she remained while all around her alarms whirred and neighbors fled in panic? He blamed the seawall; the numbers back him up.

In the months after the disaster, a team of anthropologists from Oxford University discovered that the death toll had been highest in communities where the government had recently invested heavily in coastal protections, such as seawalls and levees, and where people had little experience with such waves. They reasoned that, in many cases, Tohoku’s seawalls had been maladaptive. Investment in protective infrastructure had not only stimulated settlement in areas that were known to be vulnerable to flooding but also imparted a false sense of security that delayed victims like Konno’s wife from fleeing.

Subsequent research showed that despite Japan’s long relationship with tsunamis, education campaigns, and regular evacuation drills, coastal residents were as much as 60 percent more likely to stay put when they lived behind a seawall that rose above height estimates for an incoming wave. On March 11, 2011, initial alerts predicted a 9.8-foot tsunami, and many towns were already protected by 13-foot seawalls. In Ishinomaki, the wave reached 22 feet.

“Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature”

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Where to find it:

SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

Miles north, residents of the Taro district of Miyako City suffered the worst of this bad adaptation. They had constructed a concrete barrier so robust locals dubbed it the Great Wall of Japan. “It was the pride and symbol of Taro. I had never imagined that this seawall could be breached,” said one survivor. X-shaped to offer double protection, the Taro wall reached 34 feet high and stretched along 1.5 miles of coastline. It was the largest of its time, and in 2011, people were so confident in its strength that they stood atop it recording images of the wave until the very moment they were washed away forever.

The unique design turned out to be a terrible mistake. The 57-foot wave’s energy focused on the center of the X, where it shot up and over the wall onto the town that had settled in its shadow. At Taro, residents had put their faith in technology developed by one of the most advanced societies on Earth. One-hundred-sixty-one victims discovered too late that their trust had been misplaced. So it struck me that in the wake of such catastrophic failure, the city responded by building a new wall, 14 feet taller than the last and yet still more than 8 feet shorter than the 2011 wave.

Seawalls undoubtedly saved untold lives and property in 2011, and since then, Japan has doubled down. Knowing that another tsunami is inevitable, the country has raised roads, elevated and relocated entire towns, planted coastal forests, and rethought its evacuation routes. Some of these were novel measures, but the centerpiece of reconstruction is an old idea: encasing the coast in concrete fortifications. Today, construction has nearly finished on some 400 miles of breakwaters, river levees, and seawalls as tall as 50 feet, at a cost of about $255 billion. As the walls go up and the memory of Tohoku’s devastation fades further into the past, people rebuild their homes and settle on raised land in areas that were obliterated by the wave.

That the new walls are so much mightier is encouraging, but I also discovered a growing sense of disillusion toward them. It manifests in heated community planning hearings, protests over the flippant use of concrete on natural coastlines, and the embarrassment that a 52-year-old man feels about his wife’s final moments. 

I came to Tohoku to learn what had happened and to find what, if anything, the past decade could teach the rest of us about how—or how not—to adapt to this increasingly unforgiving planet. Tsunamis may not be caused by climate change, but, like climate disaster, they are collections of hazards capable of consuming huge areas and countless lives. Each can be explained with math and physics. Mostly, though, they both confront us with the enormous challenge of understanding ourselves. Sitting in Dogenin, I can picture the hundreds of people dragging themselves up the steep approach in the thick, wet snow of a distant March. When all the engineering marvels, techno-wizardry, and gadgets had failed them, victims of a horrific tragedy came seeking the only salvation they could think of: They went to a centuries-old temple upon a hill. Given the threats bearing down on all of us across the world today, the uncountable risks and inconceivable uncertainties, and the comparative frailty of our grandest inventions, I’m left thinking that sooner or later we’re all going to find religion.

From “Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature” by Stephen Robert Miller. Copyright © 2023 Stephen Robert Miller. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Stephen Robert Miller is an award-winning independent journalist based in Colorado. His reporting and essays have appeared in National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Sierra Magazine, and many others. He has previously worked as a magazine editor and was a Ted Scripps Fellow at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism, where he also teaches.

Type of Story: Review

An assessment or critique of a service, product, or creative endeavor such as art, literature or a performance.