Ghosts of the Tsunami

Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan is a 2017 work of non-fiction by the British journalist Richard Lloyd Parry. The book examines the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, with a particular focus on its grief-stricken aftermath. Amongst the survivors, Parry encounters many ghost stories and stories of possession by spirits, which he links to the Japanese tradition of ancestor-veneration. Parry, a seasoned reporter on East Asian affairs, has lived in Japan since 1995. The book was widely praised by reviewers and won the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize.

Parry adopts a narrow focus, ignoring the much-covered meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to investigate the tsunami and its aftermath. His account centers on the Okawa Elementary School, where all but one of the seventy-five children who died in the tsunami met their fates.

In setting out the facts of the disaster, Parry emphasizes that Japan’s efficient focus on earthquake and tsunami safety did a great deal to mitigate the loss of life, particularly of children. He points out that despite the fact that the Tohoku earthquake was the fourth most powerful ever recorded—moving Japan four meters closer to North America—less than a hundred people, and no children, died as a result of the earthquake. “Japanese architecture and bureaucracy did an almost perfect job of protecting the young. No school collapsed or suffered serious physical damage.”



Even the tsunami, which killed nearly 20,000 people, could have been far worse. Many of the dead ignored warnings; others were simply unlucky, fleeing to high ground which turned out not to be high enough for the exceptionally large wave.

As he turns his attention to the Okawa Elementary School, Parry introduces the Tokohu region: “In ancient times, it was a notorious frontier realm of barbarians, goblins and bitter cold. For modern Japanese, it remains a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, of thick dialects and quaint conservatism, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory. Tohoku has bullet trains and smartphones and all the other twenty-first-century conveniences, but it also has secret Buddhist cults, a lively literature of supernatural tales and a sisterhood of blind shamanesses who gather once a year at a volcano called Osore-san, or ‘Mt Fear,’ the traditional entrance to the underworld.”

Okawa was obliterated by the tsunami. Some four kilometers inland, the town had never been through a tsunami before and most of its residents ignored warnings, which were first issued more than fifty minutes before the tsunami arrived. Others took inadequate precautions: the children at the school were simply brought out to the playground.



Parry talks to many bereaved survivors: a man who was trapped in the water for hours; a man who couldn’t recognize his granddaughter’s body. However, he focuses on the mothers of the children who died, finding them angry in their grief. They report that as the women of the town begged to be allowed to evacuate the children to higher ground, they were silenced by the “oblivious, overbearing dismissiveness of old men.”

Parry recounts a confrontation between bereaved parents and the school’s principal, who struggles to explain why his school—several miles inland—was destroyed. The parents are enraged by his equivocations: “Come and talk to us after you find your own child like that, you bastard.”

As Parry’s attention shifts to the aftermath of the tsunami, his focus broadens again. He follows the Taoist priest Reverend Kaneda as he attempts to bring some comfort to the thousands of people who have lost loved ones and homes.



Kaneda reports that as time passed, he began to encounter more and more people who had seen ghosts or even been possessed by the spirits of the dead. He describes some of these cases to Parry and the exorcisms with which he encouraged the spirits to move on.

Parry collects a wide and varied range of ghost stories, which seem to be proliferating as time goes on: “A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who squatted in her house. A middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain, because the eyes of the dead stared out at him from puddles…A civil servant…saw a solitary woman in a scarlet dress far from the nearest road or house, with no means of transport in sight…A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami…A cab driver in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, he looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty…At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbor would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses…No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.”

Parry explains that although Japan is officially a highly secular society, beliefs about the veneration of the ancestors are so commonplace that they escape notice. He reports Reverend Kaneda’s concerns that so many spirits have been left “homeless” by the earthquake.