A World Without Pain Is a World Without Heroes
Five months after an earthquake shook Japan, I visited Tokyo — and witnessed how a country copes with tragedy
The fishing village on Japan’s northeastern coast existed until a few minutes past 8 p.m. on June 15, 1896, when the people inside their wooden houses opened their eyes to darkness — and a rumbling noise drowned out the sound of dogs barking, the crackle of fires settling to ash.
Four months later, an article in National Geographic described what happened next:
Only a few survivors on all that length of coast saw the advancing wave, one of them telling that the water first receded some 600 yards from ghastly white sands and then the Wave stood like a black wall 80 feet in height, with phosphorescent lights gleaming along its crest.
Those lucky enough to spy the tsunami ran for higher ground — or their roofs — except one nameless man:
A half-demented soldier, retired since the late war and continually brooding on a possible attack by the enemy, became convinced that the first cannonading sound was from a hostile fleet, and, seizing his sword, ran down to the beach to meet the foe.
The wave hit. It smashed houses to kindling, carried boats a mile inland, snapped trees at the roots, tore away a temple’s stone crossbeams and hurled them the equivalent of three football fields. It killed more than 27,000 people by some estimates, and left the survivors to struggle with the wreckage and bodies. One of the latter, presumably, was the half-demented soldier.
Japan sits on the circum-Pacific seismic belt, with a network of deep-sea trenches and volcanoes that earns it an ominous nickname: the Ring of Fire. When the unstable crust trembles, it shifts millions of tons of water, which crush everything in their path. Your only options are escape, or death.
II.
On March 11, 2011, another earthquake shook Japan.
In video after video, people step beneath doorways or stop to crouch as the ground shakes, as lights swing wildly, as boxes and books tumble from shelves. Minutes later, a tsunami barrels into the coastline. Television cameras in helicopters…
