Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (12 page)

Kaneta trained at Eiheiji, the top monastery for S
t
Buddhist priests; only S
jiji, where my cousin Daisuke went, may be considered equal in prestige. Though Kaneta is proficient in sutras, funerals, and memorial services, he did not receive any sort of training for exorcisms or grief counseling. This is not what modern priests learn to do. And yet, once upon a time they did, as, for example, indicated in the classic Noh plays, whose high period was from 1336 to 1573, and coincided with the medieval Muromachi era.
These dramas frequently depict the sad fate of beautiful women who turn out to be spirits roaming the earth, unable to rid themselves of an attachment to a passionate love affair gone awry when they were alive. Invariably, it is a Buddhist priest who recognizes what ails these tragic women and who is able to release them from their torment. The fact that Kaneta and others are now performing this role speaks to the fact that such traditions, which might otherwise seem to have died with Japan’s modernization, are in fact merely slumbering until needed.

I
SHINOMAKI IS A
small fishing town about twenty-three miles northeast of Sendai. On March 11, 2011, it was struck by numerous waves, with some estimated to reach the height of thirty-three feet. Over three thousand people from Ishinomaki, including hundreds of schoolchildren, lost their lives. Twenty-nine thousand people out of a population of just over 160,000 lost their homes. A temporary housing community built for the citizens of Ishinomaki is where I first met Kaneta and watched him work.

The temporary houses had been built fairly quickly and were of a uniform size. Rooms in Japan are measured by the number of tatami mats required to cover the floor. A modest room in a nice hotel, for example, is often made up of eight tatami mats, which converts roughly to 142 square feet. The temporary housing units at Ishinomaki had two rooms, each with six tatami mats, as well as a kitchenette and a bathroom with bathtub and shower. The back of each house had a laundry rack. Japanese rarely use dryers, even at coin-operated laundromats. On a sunny day, driving through T
ky
, you will see futons pinned to balconies, baking in the sun, while laundry dries on racks. Even in a temporary housing unit, one hangs one’s laundry to dry. Altogether, the space was smaller than your average Best Western hotel room, and I cannot imagine most
Western families managing to live in such a unit for a few weeks—sleeping on the floor—let alone for an indefinite period of time. The Japanese government still does not know how long many evacuees will have to wait for a new home or to go home, though some of the Fukushima evacuees have been told they will never be allowed to return home at all.

The houses were clustered together, and each shared a wall, except for those lucky few who were on the ends of a row. Each house had a number on it and, in some instances, a name. It was easy to spot the homes that had children; it was May, and there were little
koinobori
, or carp-shaped flags, in the window or hanging out with the laundry rack.
Koinobori
are hung up in conjunction with Children’s Day, which is celebrated on May 5 in Japan, though the decorations often stay up for the entire month. Here and there a hand pulled aside a curtain, and an elderly face—almost always a woman—peered out to see who was there.

All of a sudden Kaneta pulled up in his truck outside the community hall, and instantly the mood in the community changed. It was as though Santa Claus had arrived on his sleigh. Kaneta, about sixty years old, was quite tall—particularly for a Japanese of his generation. He was bespectled and had shaved his head bald, as most Japanese Buddhist priests do. He had a slightly toothy smile and bright eyes that darted around, searching for information and for any problems that need to be addressed. He told me later that he had been to so many temporary housing shelters across Japan that he could determine the story of the people inside just by looking at the parking lot. He knew how much money they had by their cars, if the shelters were mostly full of elderly, if there were children, if the men had been fishermen before the tsunami, or if the people were from Fukushima.

With the magical proficiency of Mary Poppins, Kaneta and his staff unloaded tables, chairs, boxes of cake, coffee, tea, clay and
origami materials from the back of the truck. I couldn’t help but wonder how they fit so much stuff in the truck in the first place. Seemingly within minutes appeared two picnic tables with canopies, chairs, a hand-painted sign that read “Café de Monk,” and trays of cake. More tables were set up inside the community hall, which sparkled with the sound of jazz and the smell of burnt sugar and hot coffee. One by one, or two by two, the residents began to enter the building.

Around me, in the community hall, women had seated themselves in chairs or on pillows on the floor. A few men sat quietly together. The volunteer priests went to work, serving cake and coffee. And then, after just a few minutes, in a corner, Kaneta was with two women who were crying.

They were a mother and a daughter and they had lost everything. The girl’s name was Nami, which means “wave.”

“You lost everything,” Kaneta said bluntly.

“Yes,” they cried.

“Are you fighting a lot?” he asked.

“Yes,” they wailed louder.

“You can’t fight,” he grinned. “You have to stop that.” Then he laughed, as if the situation of a mother and daughter who had been displaced from their home by a tsunami were humorous. As if the entire situation were so absurd, one could only laugh at it. “Have you ever wondered about the difference between life and death? They can be separated by such a small thing as a second. You are here for a reason, and you must find it.”

The daughter sulked, and the mother looked around, a little embarrassed. They wiped tears from their eyes. Then Kaneta leaned forward. “Okay, guys. Why are you fighting? Huh?” Then he laughed.

Earlier that week, in the grief-counseling training run by T
hoku University, I met a motley crew of priests hailing from various
religious sects: Buddhists of various sects, Christians priests, and New Agers. One was a highly impressive-looking Tendai Buddhist nun whose shaved head and bright saffron robes gave her a distinguished, androgynous appearance; Tendai Buddhism, brought to Japan in the ninth century, is among the oldest sects that still exist in Japan, and it stresses that all living things are capable of attaining enlightenment. I became particularly friendly with a young Pure Land priest named Tokita who hailed from Fukushima. Before the disaster, Tokita had been uncertain about his future; he was the third son in his family and would not be inheriting his family’s temple. But once the tsunami struck, he felt galvanized to turn his priestly training to use and to help those in need. His family owned and ran a very old Pure Land Buddhist temple; Pure Land Buddhism originated in the twelfth century and sought to provide the common people with a simpler way to achieve enlightenment. Unlike Zen, the sect to which Kaneta belonged, which emphasizes meditation, Pure Land Buddha stressed that an individual only needed to recite a simple prayer in order to be reborn in the Buddha’s Western Paradise, a place that is always described as a golden palace.

Overseeing all these trainees was a fascinating young man named Morita. He was a priest of the Yuzu Nembutsu sect, and he told me he had eschewed his own family’s temple in lieu of working for a hospice at a hospital in Nagano; this is unusual, as Japan does not have the kind of chaplain/hospice program that is the norm in the West. Morita’s main goal as a teacher was to help train more priests to do hospice work, but he now also helped train priests on how to work with tsunami survivors. A slight man with a patient, smiling, and sorrowful expression, Morita moved with the purposefulness of someone so engaged in the painful art of healing that he almost seemed to be undergoing a kind of penance.

Late in the morning, the participants of the group gathered
in a circle and offered up their stories, one by one, as to why they had decided to come for grief-counseling training. A young man, dandily dressed in a tweed jacket with a striped scarf looped at his throat, explained that his job was to call people to give them the results of their radiation tests. Most of the time, he said, the test results were negative, but on one occasion, he had to call a mother and tell her that her two children were sick. She began to cry on the phone to him—a stranger—and he did not know what to do. He found himself repeating phrases from the training manual. “Don’t worry! There’s always hope! Don’t worry!” Then he added, “It’s not your fault.” He immediately regretted this last sentence. By introducing the concept of “fault” into the phone call, he was concerned that he was implying that it
was
her fault, and he hated himself for his offense; Japanese manners are full of such subtleties, which may seem odd to a Westerner, but they are essential to the graceful way so many Japanese interact with each other on their small island nation. The man did not want to go back to work. He never wanted to pick up the telephone again.