Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (4 page)

He listened to me on the phone as I went on hysterically about the dangers of radiation and reminded him of other family members who had survived the bombing in Nagasaki. Their ordeal had given them
hibakusha
status, which not only afforded them lifetime free medical care from the Red Cross but also marked them as official radiation victims, which isn’t always a good thing in a culture where people scrutinize family health records and possible weaknesses in DNA before agreeing to marriage. I suggested that the Japanese government was concealing the true extent of the nuclear reactor’s problems. I thought that perhaps the American media was more truthful. He and his family should leave the area.

Semp
responded with vague phrases like “That is true.” And “Yes. I see what you mean.” These answers didn’t commit to any sense of urgency and only made me more frantic. Instinctively, I began to talk more, to try to clarify what must surely be a misunderstanding. Couldn’t he urge his children to leave? Semp
was in his sixties, but the boys were in their twenties and thirties.

“Yes,” Semp
said. “Of course. If we come to that kind of a situation, I will of course send the children away.”

“Hasn’t the time come now?”

“The truth is . . .” Semp
hesitated. “We are out of gas.”

“I thought you had one car with gas,” I said. “Can’t you at least get over the mountains and away from the radiation and then buy more gas?”

“The roads are clogged,” he said. “Everyone else is trying to escape.”

Summer blockbuster movies had taught me the rules of escape: you fled with whatever tools you had, making up your plans as obstacles emerged. That’s the narrative. “Go as far as you can,” I said. “And then walk.” I was sure that this was what I would do, were I in his shoes.

“My back hurts.”

“Then send your children.”

After a long pause, Semp
said, “The truth is, I’m not going to leave. The truth is, I’m not afraid to die.”

“Your children . . .”

“We would all like to stay together.”

In the news coverage of Japan immediately after the nuclear power plant accident, Western reporters praised the Japanese for their stoicism and their selflessness and marveled at the Japanese for being so meticulous in their clean-up efforts. This was true admiration. But I knew it also meant something else.

I knew that the reporters were also asking, “How can they do this?” How could fifty volunteers go into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to do cleanup? It was the Western reporters who anointed the many engineers and workers at the nuclear power plant with the collective name “the Fukushima Fifty.” The name conjured up the image of other selfless, self-sacrificing figures from Japanese history: the inscrutable samurai who committed ritual suicide, to say nothing of the kamikaze pilots in World War II.

I knew what the Western news reporters were thinking but not saying. They were thinking, “You are not quite human and that is why you are not afraid. I admire you, but I could not be you.” I knew this to be true because a part of me was also thinking these things. Another part of me was horrified by the stereotypes now emerging in the media. But then here was Semp
saying he wasn’t afraid of death.

What can you say to someone who has declared that he isn’t afraid to die? On the phone to Semp
, I said, “I want you to be okay.”

“Right now we are okay. And I . . .” Here, his voice caught. He said something that sounds awkward in English, no matter how many times I try to translate it. “I am deeply honored that you care so much. And I am so sorry to make you worry to this extent.”

I sensed something unspoken in this exchange, something that
made me think I had approached this situation incorrectly. The feeling that you have put your foot in your mouth is a common experience in Japan, even to a relative insider. I remember, for example, visiting Aizu Wakamatsu castle in Fukushima Prefecture when I was a teenager. The castle is famous for an episode in 1868 when fifteen young samurai, aged sixteen or seventeen, committed suicide after mistakenly believing the castle under their protection had been taken by the enemy. I was overcome with rage that boys my age would kill themselves, and that we would now celebrate these deaths as beautiful.

An older man who was also visiting Aizu watched me as I carried on to my mother. He gave me a tolerant and compassionate smile. “I’m so sorry you are upset,” he said. “But you don’t understand. You aren’t Japanese.”

I
WAS FORTY
when the tsunami struck, and death and grief were very much on my mind. My American father, to whom I had been extremely close, had died less than three years before, and I was still struggling to cope with his loss. My Japanese grandmother was dead, and my Japanese grandfather had died at the end of January in 2011. Now my Japanese grandfather’s house was for sale. I had an eighteen-month-old son, and I wanted to give him the same kind of cultural foundation my parents and grandparents had given me. It was my paternal grandmother, an American, who had paid for my airfare to go to Japan every year since I was four, an opportunity she would love to have had; she died in 1993. I, too, wanted my son to feel like he was a citizen of the world. I wanted to rejoice in the future, but I was struggling.

After three years of grieving for my father, I was supposed to be feeling better. Instead, I knew I had what modern Western psychology calls “complicated grief.” A few friends had kindly suggested
to me that I might be experiencing postpartum depression. One suggested I get my thyroid checked. I laughed all this off. For me, the continuum of grief had been going on for so long, I couldn’t see where one form of depression started and another began. By the time the tsunami struck Japan, I was feeling hopeless about ever managing the voyage from grief to any semblance of “normalcy” or “healing,” the terms most often associated with where you are supposed to go after you have been very sad.

I can see now that the death of so many people so close together had shaken me deeply. The foundation of my life was eroding—particularly my roots in Japan. I had taken for granted a certain kind of security, nurtured since childhood, that I was a small part of something much larger, and that this much larger thing would always be there, shining its light on me. Now I felt thrust into the cold place of the shadow. I did not have any confidence that I could give my son the same rich cultural history that I’d been so fortunate to receive. The tsunami and the nuclear disaster made me fear that one day I would have nothing to pass on at all.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER
the tsunami, I went to Japan with my mother and my son. This was supposed to be the trip during which we buried my grandfather at the temple in Iwaki. Trains from T
ky
still did not travel north, and the roads were closed to everyone except rescue personnel and recovery teams. Burying my grandfather’s bones was a low priority in the middle of such a disaster. We had considered postponing our trip but decided to go anyway, partly as a show of solidarity. There was also quite a bit for us to do at my grandfather’s home; we needed to remove the items we wanted before the old house, whose foundation was infested with termites, was bulldozed and the empty lot put up for sale. I was intent on finding as many letters and photographs as I could. If any
of my grandmother’s kimonos could be saved, I was hoping to take these back to America as well.