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As I report on the seemingly endless stream of wildfires, hurricanes, or floods experienced across the United States in recent years, I often think of the phrase, “A recipe for disaster.” It’s the sort of phrase that feels best said in a dramatic podcasting voice, but cliche as it may be, I’ve found it sums up these events much more accurately than the commonly-deployed “natural disaster.”

The term disaster itself comes from a combination of Latin words that roughly translates to “ill-starred.” This refers to the early belief that disasters were punishments from the universe or God. Over time, our understanding of disasters evolved and other explanations took root. Researchers shared the science behind natural hazards like earthquakes or tornadoes, knowledge that allowed us to track and prepare for them. We came to adopt the phrase “natural disasters” to describe particularly impactful bouts of these naturally-occurring phenomena, a term we still use today despite the fact that there is scientific consensus that humans have altered the natural world around us. 

The following stories dig into the “ingredients” of recent natural hazard-related disasters. Each piece traces back through time to unveil how policies, politics, or societal norms set the stage for the disasters they chronicle. The authors interrogate the role of fossil fuels and industry; of racism, classism, and colonialism. Ultimately, they offer an opportunity to learn from the past, and hopefully better prepare for the inevitable hazards to come. 

We Have Fires Everywhere (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine, July 2019)

The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, has been the subject of countless articles, documentaries, essays, books, and even an upcoming film feature. Much coverage of the wildfire has focused on the horrors of the evacuation process or the near-total devastation of the rural town. And while Jon Mooallem certainly spends time on both of these subjects, he also chronicles the path that led to that November day, including digging into Paradise’s previous brushes with wildfires and attempts to learn from those incidents and prepare for future fires. 

This was a perspective many other stories left out, the fact that residents and officials not only understood there was a threat but attempted to mitigate it. He presents those failed efforts against the backdrop of the broader landscape of PG&E’s infrastructure failures and the suppression-first firefighting policies, which, mixed with years of drought and warming temperatures, primed the forests surrounding Paradise to ignite in a conflagration that surpassed the idea of what a worst-case scenario could look like. 

I remember being so struck by the ending of the piece after my first time reading it — simple sentences that were particularly prescient, knowing what we’ve seen in the years since. 

Still, even before the Camp Fire, many people in Paradise and around California had started to look at the recent succession of devastating fires — the Tubbs Fire, the Thomas Fire, blazes that ate through suburban-seeming neighborhoods and took lives — and intuit that our dominion over fire might be slipping. Something was different now: Fire was winning, finding ways to outstrip our fight response, to rear up recklessly and break us down. That morning, in Paradise, there hadn’t even been time for that fight response to kick in. And the flight response was failing, too. Those who study wildfire have long argued that we need to reshuffle our relationship to it — move from reflexively trying to conquer fire to designing ways for communities to outfox and withstand it. 

Earth’s New Gilded Era (Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, October 2020) 

For years, heat waves have been among the deadliest extreme weather events in the United States, but it’s rare for extreme heat to be referred to as a disaster. There’s a growing movement to treat such sweltering stretches like we do hurricanes or wildfires, ascribing names or categories to them, to convey their seriousness. Part of the challenge in winning that battle, as Vann R. Newkirk explains in this article, is that the impacts of heat are so disparate. 

Newkirk tackled the subject after spending years on the disaster beat, including revisiting Hurricane Katrina in the deftly reported Floodlines podcast. In this story, he spans the globe to identify the throughlines of historic inequity that correlate with heat exposure. For many, heat waves mean days spent largely inside, air conditioning cranked up. It’s those who do not have that luxury — maybe their jobs require them to be exposed to the temperatures or their neighborhood and home does not have adequate cooling infrastructure — who are most impacted. 

When Americans think about climate change, they probably don’t have these kinds of consequences in mind—an uptick in stillbirths, or more Black children with asthma. Climate communication often tends toward the apocalyptic and the episodic, for good reason: Dramatic events are a good way to get apathetic people to care. But the destruction wrought by the heat gap in American neighborhoods is just as important as the high-profile cataclysms. That destruction is insidious and hard to follow because it plays out along existing lines of inequality and injustice. Comparable to its role in some chemical reactions, heat accelerates the logical outcomes of unequal human systems. In this reaction, heat is not necessarily a bomb that will suddenly vaporize civilizations. Here, its preferred pathway is decomposition, working slowly and steadily at severing bonds until two components are separate, if not equal.

The Abolitionists Born After Hurricane María (Edmy Ayala Rosado, Atmos, 2022) 

Edmy Ayala Rosado set out to write about the fifth anniversary of Hurricane María and the power of Puerto Rican people, she explains at the start of this article. Instead, she found herself having to make sense of yet another devastating storm. While 2022’s Hurricane Fiona was historic, it was in many ways not surprising, Rosado says, as Puerto Rico has weathered multiple significant disasters in the years since Maria. She includes political disasters in this list, noting throughout the piece that it’s impossible to strip politics from the impacts of these natural hazards. 

Blackouts and electrical issues certainly stemmed from the 2018 storm’s lashing winds, but they continue because of politics, Ayala Rosado argues. She chronicles the work of citizen-led grassroots groups that are tackling some of Puerto Rico’s most entrenched issues since the storm: electricity, food sovereignty, and accessing aid funding. Repeatedly, she returns to the structural and political problems that began long before Hurricane María, which were then laid bare and exacerbated by the challenging years that have followed. But she never loses faith in her community’s ability to withstand what happens next. 

Many of these efforts—although created in the darkness of one of the worst weather events in recent history—have helped local communities steer our reconstruction. They are doing it leveraging academic, historic, political, and ancestral knowledge. 

We Boricuas are showing the world a true and noble resistance to capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Though some may argue the colonial project seems to be working in Puerto Rico, we push back. We level the playing field for true sovereignty. We have turned our grief into action.

The Bear God Revisited (Emily Sekine, Orion Magazine, February 2020)

While studying geology in Japan, Emily Sekine explores the ways disasters become a part of culture. They’re woven into the stories we pass down, like the titular “Bear God,” and they can shape the way we live our daily lives, if we so choose. Sekine acknowledges the high risk of natural hazards Japanese people face on any given day, with the ground under their feet existing across four tectonic plates. But the “3.11 disaster” still remains singularly devastating, Sekine says, referring to the earthquake-triggered tsunami that also caused a nuclear accident. More than 15,000 people were killed and more than 400,000 were displaced. 

Observing the disaster from nearly a decade later, Sekine joins a preparedness workshop being offered to residents in Tago. After a brief topography lesson, participants fan out into the landscape, tasked with viewing the familiar landscapes of their neighborhood through disaster-focused eyes. What obstacles might prevent them from evacuating before the wave of a tsunami crests towards their path? What steps could they take now to prevent that from happening?

Like most of the reads on the list, Sekine’s essay draws from the benefit of hindsight, of being able to look back at a disaster and decipher what went wrong. So, I appreciated the inclusion of this meeting, of using that understanding from the past to take steps to mitigate what devastation a future earthquake might cause. 

One of the main appeals of living in and visiting the areas around Mount Fuji is the pleasure of soaking in the mineral-rich onsen, or hot spring baths. But, Tanaka-san told me, most people do not connect this experience with the ever-present threat of earthquakes and volcanoes. When people are relaxing in the onsen, he wants them to think about how these geological processes are connected. His point, as I understand it, is not to ignite fear, but to insist that people grasp the full and varied powers of the earth — the blessings as well as the dangers. 

The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 2015)

It’s impossible to talk about longform disaster writing without mentioning this piece, which brought the threat of a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest into public consciousness. When reporting in Washington once, I was even presented with a carefully stapled paper printout of the article. Residents told me it had inspired — or, perhaps, frightened — their rural community to develop its own preparedness committee.

Schulz approaches the threat that lies under some of the West’s biggest cities from multiple angles, from the scientific to the sociological. It culminates in her predicting what the earthquake might look like on a societal level, from the grid collapses to the roads destroyed, and the personal level, from the way “refrigerators will walk out of kitchens” to the various ways homes might slide off their foundations and collapse. Ultimately, Schulz questions how we’ve come to a place where we’ve researched and studied and learned so much about this risk, yet taken such little action to prepare for it. 

The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

Great American Wasteland (Lauren Stroh, Longreads, March 2022)

Writing about her native Louisiana, Lauren Stroh speaks to the reader with familiarity, as if welcoming you into the sort of exchanges you hear on a front porch or in passing at a local diner. In Cameron Parish, those conversations for the past three years have centered largely around disaster. The town experienced two hurricanes, a winter storm, flooding, and tornadoes all in a less than two-year period, all during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the deaths, destruction, and devastation, Stroh asks why. 

Why was the area so vulnerable in the first place? Why were bodies still being held in trailers months after the storms? Why was there not more aid and funding being sent to address this devastation?

While I described Stroh as welcoming to the reader, that’s not to say she approaches these conversations lightheartedly — she’s frustrated and angry, tired, and tough, and her voice is unflinching. Throughout the piece, Stroh shares snippets of her interviews, again letting the reader in to be a part of her conversations. Some of these are with officials; one with a suspect nonprofit leader. Others are with the residents who remain, the people who are navigating the maze of insurance claims and federal aid Stroh carefully lays out. It’s an analysis of how cascading disasters can bury survivors in bureaucracy, making it increasingly difficult for them to surface before the next one strikes, and the ways the same bureaucratic system can contort to let industry off the hook. 

Danny Lavergne, the director of Cameron’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, tells me it took 51 weeks for FEMA to get 201 people housed in mobile housing units after Hurricane Laura. For months they refused to place camper trailers in a flood zone before abruptly reversing that decision without reason or explanation. That’s how arbitrary bureaucracy can be. But it fucks up your life: For nine months, 201 people were homeless and waiting. They made do in loved ones’ living rooms, in their cars, in hotel rooms they had to drive in from situated far and wide across the state. People lived this way through the fall and into spring — throughout the pandemic in 2020, when at times Louisiana suffered among the highest caseloads in the United States, long before there were any vaccines. Cameron’s only hospital is still operating out of a tent with limited services. Lake Charles has no homeless shelter, and all the hotels and apartments in close vicinity were damaged or price gouged to match the demand for livable housing. In the meantime, while they waited on FEMA to coordinate temporary housing, do tell me — where exactly were these people supposed to go?

Colleen Hagerty is a journalist specializing in disaster coverage for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC News, among others. She also has a newsletter on the subject called My World’s on Fire. You can find her on Twitter @colleenhagerty.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

Matthew Komatsu | Longreads | March 2019 | 24 minutes (6,092 words)

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center. 

Ichi (One)

Obā-san tasted ash. Yes: ash and dust. Her youngest son’s kanji and hiragana on paper could not assuage the bitter news the letter delivered: that her youngest son would not return from America to his hometown of Kesennuma, Japan. He would stay to marry the American woman who carried his child. Dishonor. Shame. Betrayal. And I was the ash she tasted: the end of the pure line of the Komatsu name. Nothing more than an accidental flutter in the brine of my mother’s womb.

My grandmother would not have considered this metaphor of the sea, despite the proximity of her home to it, the wind-borne scent of the waterfront fish market and processing plants mere blocks away, burbling down the streets, seeping through the window and door cracks of her home. And beyond, the vast blue-gray of the Pacific Ocean, heaving and rolling the life it contained. She would not have thought of the sea’s power to both create and destroy.

***

A soccer ball washes ashore on Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska. On it, handwritten script in permanent marker that identifies its origin as a grade school in Rikuzentakata, Japan, 30 minutes north of Kesennuma. Its owner, Misaki Murakami, survived the tsunami but his family lost their home. It is a personal effect recovered from his home. On one of the panels are kanji characters inscribed by a classmate that read Ganbatte. Good luck.

***

I can only imagine what changed Obā’s heart. Perhaps it was my grandfather. According to my father, Ojī was more sympathetic. It was Ojī who responded to my father’s letter to say that he understood. Or maybe the simple need of a grandparent to hold her grandchild eroded her pride. But these are all, in a way, little fictions: my American need to emote in conflict with a Japanese inclination to accept.

Regardless, Obā and Ojī came to the United States. I wonder what they thought when they held this chubby black-haired infant boy, whether they struggled to pronounce my English first name. What it felt like to stare into the deep, brown eyes of a grandchild whose blood ran mixed. Or if any of this mattered at all.

What I do know: When Ojī and Obā journeyed halfway across the globe to the unlikely destination of Duluth, Minnesota, they didn’t know my parents arranged to leave me with a family friend at the beginning of a cross-country road trip across America that doubled as both honeymoon and getting-to-know-the-in-laws. When Ojī said goodbye to me, he wept. It was the last time we were together and the only time my dad saw his own father cry. My grandfather died in Japan, in 1987.

The only Japanese uttered in my home was spoken into the telephone on holidays. On those days, I rushed to answer the phone in the hope of hearing the voices of my Japanese relatives. Moshi moshi, came the greeting. When I answered in English, the caller usually responded, Ahhhhh… Toshifumi-san?

Dad, for you.

If my mother answered, the single phrase she knew: Chōttō matte, kudasai. One moment, please. I would sit on the brown shag carpet speckled with gold and red and yellow, my back to the heat vent, shirt lifted so the hot air blew up my skin and ruffled the black hairs on my neck. The book on my lap stayed open to the same page as I listened to one half of a conversation, mouthed words whose accented syllables I will never utter with any meaning. A pause for the delay, then the muffled return. A smile, a laugh, an imperceptible head bow from my father.

***

A Canadian finds the rusted hulk of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle on the shores of British Columbia and traces its license plate to its owner, Ikuo Yokoyama. Photos of the bike reveal a year at sea: spokes rusting away and missing, corrosion widespread across a frame whose gleam has been replaced with a forlorn absorption of the light that reflects upon it. Yokoyama resists an outpouring of internet-fueled financial support to restore the bike and repatriate it. Instead he asks that it be preserved in a museum as is, a memorial to what was lost.

***

During a precious summer break from the Air Force Academy, I joined a family trip to Japan. Eager to show the Japanese I’d picked up over two years of college classes, I greeted Obā. My father told her that I knew Japanese now, that she should speak to me. We sat down in the living room of the small family home in Kesennuma. The air was heavy with the smell of the nearby ocean, mothballs, dust, and paper. But when she spoke, I could not understand.

***

Here is a list of Japanese words. Tsunami. Pronounced “tsoo-nah-mee.” Translation: “harbor wave.” E. Pronounced “a-ay.” Interrogative. Translation: “What?” Hayaku. Pronounced “hi-yah-koo.” Translation: “hurry.” Hashitte. Pronounced “hah-shht-ay.” Imperative. Translated to English: “Run.”

Ni (Two)

At 2:46 p.m. on Friday, 11 March 2011, a 100-mile-long section of the Pacific tectonic plate 19 miles deep thrusted beneath Japan. Richter scale needles twitched. Japan shifted eight feet east. The Earth shuddered off-axis. The seabed rose, lifting the ocean above it by 25 feet. All that water had to go somewhere. And it did — away, in a series of waves that raced west at 86 miles per hour. The tsunami made landfall roughly 45 minutes later on the shores of my father’s hometown of Kesennuma in northeast Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture.

My 11 March dawned no different than any other. I woke up and checked Facebook over coffee. My sister posted something about a big earthquake in Japan, but the family was fine. Big earthquake, Japan: happens all the time. I didn’t think much of it during the 45-minute drive from Columbia, South Carolina, to Shaw Air Force Base, NPR now revising the magnitude, the Richter climbing. I paid it no mind during my 12-mile run before work. It was spring in South Carolina, flowers opening under a rising sun, the air heavy with their dewy scent.

The tsunami made landfall on the shores of my father’s hometown of Kesennuma in northeast Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture.

It wasn’t until after I showered and changed into my uniform that the narrative unraveled. I turned on the car and the radio cascaded breaking news of a large tsunami in Japan. But even then, I did not think of the risk to my father’s hometown, a fishing city in northeastern Miyagi Prefecture directly in the tsunami’s path.

At work, I punched a code into a keypad and walked through a door into the cubicled space I shared with close to 50 other officers. The room was quiet, all eyes glued to the televisions on the wall. I looked over my shoulder and from the second floor of the Air Forces Central Command Headquarters, I watched 22,000 Japanese die.

***

In the years that follow 3/11, I will often open my laptop to type “Japan Tsunami” into a search engine. In a half second, tens of millions of results cascade down the screen, many of them videos.

***

No phones were allowed in my office. I left to use the bathroom, checked my phone: a missed call and a voicemail from my mother: Matt, call home. My gut twisted.

My mother answered. They were driving from their home, nestled in the green pines and gray popple outside Duluth, to an aunt who had cable. My parents had never paid for cable television — considering it either unaffordable or unnecessary. Now, for the first time in their lives, a luxury became a necessity. The internet was too slow; they needed to see.

Yes, I’ve seen the news, I said. But Lauren posted something on Facebook. Everyone is fine.

No. Uncle Kazafumi called from his office in Kesennuma — it lasted eight seconds — to say he was okay. Then the call ended.

And he tried to call him back?

Yes.

And?

Nothing. Dad can’t get a hold of him, or anyone else.

***

11 March passed. Friday. 12 and 13, Saturday and Sunday. Monday, 14 March. Still nothing. I watched the same scenes looping on the office televisions.

A coworker blurted, “I’m just waiting for some Japanese person to show up on the TV and yell, ‘Godzilla! Godzilla!’” Someone nearby laughed mirthlessly.

The morning of the 15 March, my youngest sister, Lydia, received the news from our cousin in Tokyo. She spoke no Japanese and his English was broken but somehow he conveyed the news.

My uncle and aunt had survived. Tokuno Komatsu, our grandmother, was dead.

***

Sendai, a city two hours south of Kesennuma: Empty cars wash across the airport tarmac. The reporter flying above an ocean-covered Minami-sanriku: Where have all the people gone? Rikuzentakata. Ōshima. Ishinomaki. Miyako. Natori. And finally, Kesennuma, now burning an orange horizon of flame into the black pall of night.

***

Ten days after the tsunami, I boarded a flight to Japan. The U.S. military mobilized a relief effort called Operation Tomodachi. Friend. I called in every favor I had to deploy as a Tomodachi rescue planning officer.

Before the flight, my father told me that he was proud that a member of the family would be in Japan to help. He asked what I’d be doing there, but I didn’t know. I told him I sold my language abilities hard, maybe oversold them. That I was worried. Don’t worry, he said. It will all come back.

The flight from Dulles to Narita International Airport was all but empty. Once aboard, I reviewed old Japanese textbooks and watched Harry Potter once in English, then twice in Japanese. I tried to sleep, but nightmares woke me with linguistic versions of the naked dream: Me, aside the American general to whom I’ve been assigned as a translator. His Japanese counterpart speaks a torrent of Japanese, then pauses to look at me and await the translation. The American nods intently, casting ever-increasing looks my way. I recall one word in 10, try to divine meaning from inflection and posture. My mouth works, but the words do not come.

The bus ride from Narita to Yokota Air Base on the outskirts of Tokyo bore no witness to the quake and tsunami. No billboards hung precariously, no cracks split the roadways, and the lights were on. It was as if nothing happened at all. At Yokota, I disembarked to a cold, snowy night and entered a hangar to process into the Tomodachi task force. Airmen, clad in multiple layers, walked between different stations in the hangar, pausing at powered space heaters to warm themselves in the frigid night. I thought of the thousands of Japanese shoved into tiny makeshift evacuation centers. I imagined how they huddled, warmed only by blankets and each other.

***

Yokota fell away from my window of an Air Force HH-60G helicopter as it lifted off and flew east. I needed to see affected Japan for myself. It wasn’t until we were out over the ocean, flying outside an imaginary bubble around Fukushima that I did.

Rivers of debris from the tsunami appeared on the surface of the Pacific and streamed to the horizon, a flotsam road of shattered wood and plastic. We flew low, eyes out and scanning for life. The last survivor had been pulled from the water a week prior, but we hoped despite the odds, knowing we were far more likely to spot the dead.

A crew member saw something, and the helo banked hard. Over the intercom, he admitted it was probably nothing but worth investigating. Lower, slower, we orbited until the rotor wash beat the sea into mist over what turned out to be a white sheet rippling into the depths.

The farther from Japan, the larger the debris. Refrigerators and freezers. Orange tiled roofs bobbed in the blue and gray, impossibly buoyant. The wall of a home, the glass of a window somehow intact, offered a view into the saltwater beneath. All of it surrounded by a mass of splintered wood.

***

The shivering woke me again. I blinked into the darkness of the Sendai Airport first class lounge and pressed a button on my watch. 0300. I retreated further into the insulation of my puffy coat. Snores came from airmen off-shift from their post on the airport roof. Periodically throughout the night one would return and hand off a radio the size of two stacked laptops, then pop a sleeping pill while the other ran air traffic.

It was supposed to be a short visit, an hour or less. Just enough to make contact with the senior officer on the ground and determine what, if any, help I could provide as a planner. But the sound of the helicopter was only audible long enough to make radio contact with the airman on the roof: Tell Major Komatsu that we have to return to Yokota. We’ll be back when we can.

The cold shook me awake every 15 minutes until I stood up at 0600 and crept out of the dark room and into the daybreak of the terminal. Behind glass windows stories high, I wandered the vacant space, pausing at the vendor stands. The airmen were initially ordered not to take any food, but soon after they arrived, vendors themselves showed up and told them to take what they wished. The stacks of dried cuttlefish and shrimp-flavored crackers vanished, leaving only inscrutable books of manga and the assorted comforts required to heel the modern traveler. I lifted one of the books and perused a few of the oddly colored pages, taking in black and white lines of manga from back to front. I set it back in its place and looked out the glass.

Refrigerators and freezers. Orange tiled roofs bobbed in the blue and gray, impossibly buoyant.

In between the east end of the runway and the coast, a road once connected Kesennuma with Sendai; I’d made the drive twice during family trips. Now, I thought about packing my ruck, stuffing it with MREs and walking north, picking my way through the detritus until I reached my father’s hometown. My grandmother lay in the freezer of a morgue. The old family home, gone. Dozens of extended family — great uncles and third cousins and aunties once-removed — missing.

***

The morning of 27 March, I sat in my room back at Yokota alone after a run inside the confines of the base perimeter, under the pink-white beginnings of the cherry tree bloom washing the country from south to north. A rebirth of spring, of hope, of all things green and full of life.    

Three hundred miles away, my relatives cremated Ōba’s remains.

***

Our rescue helicopters and crews went home, the work of finding and extracting the living long over. Only the dead remained missing, and the Japanese government politely declined U.S. military support to the search. My job as a rescue planner turned to playing games of what if. What if an American aircraft transporting radiation measurement crews crashes inside the Fukushima no-fly zone? Who will rescue them and how will we coordinate between Japanese and American operations centers?

These questions could only be answered in conversation with my Japanese counterpart at the Japanese Rescue Coordination Center, located 53 minutes down the Ome train line, on Fuchu Air Base. When we met in the lobby of the Japanese Air Self Defense headquarters building, a fellow American officer acting as my linguist introduced Okahashi-san. We smiled and bowed, then he presented me with his meishi (business card) in the manner I learned in my sophomore Japanese class at the Academy: Both hands present, both receive. Study the card, then place it only in a chest pocket; never, ever in a disrespectful pants pocket.

Fatigue lined his face and eyes — Okahashi-san has worked twenty hours every day since the tsunami. Lt Col Okahashi said something, smiled and gestured toward an imaginary flat surface a few feet off the ground. He sleeps on a cot in the back of the Rescue Coordination Center.

As we ate pork katsu at the Japanese dining facility, I attempted Japanese the best I could. I explained my last name, and when I said Kesennuma, he said, haltingly, “Your daddy. From Kesennuma?” Yes, I said. He simply frowned, lowered his eyes, shook his head and said no more.

***

Cell phones document the tsunami’s arrival in Minami-sanriku from ground level. A woman’s voice reverberates across the town, alternating with sirens to warning the residents over a citywide loudspeaker system. Impossibly, it continues even as the tsunami piles into the streets and people scream to those who’ve not yet made it to high ground, continues even as the ocean continues its inexorable rise. Until it falls silent. And all that remains are the cries of the Japanese who have survived.

***

When I met my Japanese cousins for dinner, I’d been asking my father for weeks to arrange for me to visit Kesennuma at the end of my deployment. I missed my stop on the train from Yokota, had to double back at the next, then wait at the eki for the only cousin who spoke any English to walk from the restaurant. All around me, life streamed through automated ticketing gates amid the wall of sound that is a Tokyo train station during evening rush hour. And yet, not so far away, their countrymen were digging through rubble with their bare hands. Posting desperate signs for missing persons.

We did our best to converse around our sukiyaki. They showed me pictures from Kesennuma. The old family home, gone. My uncle’s two-story office, first floor hollowed by the tsunami. My uncle, passed out on his floor with an empty bottle of whiskey nearby. Uncle drink lot now.

When I asked my cousins about my request to visit Kesennuma, their eyes dropped and they picked at their food. Mizuki — the English speaker — pulled out his phone. We call your daddy. He dialed, spoke Japanese when my father answered. I could not interpret Mizuki’s body language. He handed me the phone. My father talked around the question — his mother’s death, the family shock, the loss of the business and deaths of two employees, the destruction, how his brother wouldn’t say no to my visit but wouldn’t say yes either — until I interrupted him.

“Dad, what’s the bottom line?”

“Culturally, they would lose face if they said no. But the timing is bad.”

“I’d be a burden.”

“Yes.”

“But I have to make the decision.”

“Yes. You will have to tell them you do not want to go.”

“OK, then. I’m not going.” I handed the phone back to my cousin, and the relief on his face told me everything I needed to know.

***

Of the 12 million tsunami videos, I will not watch them all. And yet it will be too much, as well as somehow not enough.

***

On my last day in Japan, I sat with the Air Force colonel who led my shift. He was a pilot without a cockpit anymore, his jet long mothballed. He’d flown a desk for years now, he said as he smiled and removed his glasses; this was his last hurrah. Then he asked about what drew me to volunteer for this. When I told him, he fell silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We should have found a way to get you to Kesennuma.” Then he handed me his card, thanked me for what I’d done, and I walked out of the operations center for the last time.

Before boarding the bus to Narita, I walked to a nearby cherry tree whose branches drooped under a blooming mantel. It stood above a patchwork of dirt and a browning white carpet of fallen blossoms. I found a living flower within reach and pinched its green stem, careful not to disrupt the delicate petals above it. Once free, I carried it two-handed; one pinching its base, the other cradling the bloom in my palm until I was back in my room. A book of devotions lay open on my desk, a gift from my parents. I placed the flower in the book, closed it.

San (Three)

2018. The shinkansen pitches us north from Tōkyō, picking up speed until the bullet train hits 200 mph and the endless series of the Tōhoku region’s ubiquitous rice paddies visible through my window blur green, flickering as dike-top roads come and go. I have returned to hear, yes, but also to touch. Taste, smell, and once again: see.   

We strategize. Three of us: my father, the linguist I’ve hired, and me. A cousin produced the name of the rest home where my grandmother perished: Shunpo. A classmate worked at Shunpo on 3/11, but my cousin is unwilling to connect us. So the linguist puts on her fixer hat and determines the former manager not only survived, but rebuilt Shunpo in a new location and now speaks internationally on tsunami readiness. It’s as good a lead on determining how my grandmother died as we’re going to get. Anticipation builds as we get off the bullet at Ichinoseki for the drive to Kesennuma until I’m straining against my seatbelt and we finally get where I could not go seven years ago.

I have returned to hear, yes, but also to touch. Taste, smell, and once again: see.

Kesennuma. No longer confined by glass or screen, I step from a cousin’s car in front of the vacant lot that was once 2-13-16 Nakamachi-cho. My father and he speak quietly in Japanese. The home I remember. His home. From where I stand, I could have reached over the street’s gutter and touched the house’s wall, perhaps taken in that odd mothball scent that seems to accompany my few memories of the texture of the place. But there is nothing but the tang of salt air in between me and the violet dusk of a sun long since set behind the hills of tall pine that mark Kesennuma’s western edge.

***

The tsunami is everywhere.

Blue placards on buildings show its maximum height with typical Japanese simplicity: a horizontal line and measurement in meters, in white lettering. Buildings still slated for demolition next to the orange-brown of cleared earth. Construction signs and workers and new roads unimpeded by human artifice. Signs along the sides of the road that undulates up and down through the endless series of ria (“bay”) that pocket the Sanriku coastline mark the tsunami’s maximum inundation points. Dystopian reconstructed landscapes behind massive seawalls that stretch across the horizon. The “Dragon Tree” of Kesennuma — a gnarled pine that survived the tsunami only to later die and be preserved where it stands on the cape of the Iwaisaki area of the city. The “Miracle Pine” of Rikuzentakata: the sole remaining tree of an estimated 70,000 that made up a coastal forest, eventually felled by the saltwater left in the ground by the tsunami, then preserved in detail at an estimated cost of 150 million yen (close to 2 million dollars based on the exchange rate at the time). O-tsunami, the survivors say, applying the honorific “o-” prefix because they cannot adequately capture in words a full integration of all senses. It roared. Smelled of salt. It burned, pulled, swept.

It was incomprehensible in a way that can only be assembled by a comprehension of  what it left behind.

***

We climb a path beneath old-growth pine and cedar until a panorama of the city reveals the tsunami’s reach, still clear, even now. Gray and green mark the untouched. Yellow earth, the scar of the destroyed, the still-being-rebuilt. My cousin guides my father and me to the family gravesite. A light breeze, cool with the ocean across my skin, the sound of traffic. The smell of needle and ocean. I grasp at the sensory through the mantle of jet lag and culture shock, hoping to hold on to this moment. My father stands in front of a polished granite marker, brings his palms together and lowers his head to offer a silent prayer.

It’s been a decade and a half since I last saw my Aunt Fumiko, but her face remains cherubic, her skin pale and smooth. She apologizes for not having the snack she recalls as a favorite: a mix of salted peanuts and chili-flavored rice cracker crescents. She looks thin but well. I show her pictures of my family. When I produce an app on my phone that lets her see my infant daughter at that very moment sleeping halfway around the globe, she smiles.

Kawaii, ne. So cute.

She tells me that the earthquake found her in the midst of shopping. When the world ceased shaking, she felt an overwhelming urge to immediately head home. Something horrible was going to happen. She followed her instinct and drove straight to the new house, three miles inland from the old one that no longer exists. Her son called at about 3:15 p.m. after seeing tsunami warnings on the news. Obā was at Shunpo, but my aunt thought it would be safe. It had two floors, a good flat roof, was a fair distance from the ocean. She worried about my uncle, whose office was on the downtown waterfront at the tip of Kesennuma Bay.

And so it was at her home, upstream and uphill, surrounded by the trappings of suburban comfort, that she awaited news even as the lives and homes of friends and family disappeared beneath a wall of raging, frigid seawater.

Here, my aunt begins to sniffle and weep until she can barely complete a sentence of her account. My uncle survived the tsunami, checked in periodically through the night from where he’d sheltered on the third floor of his building, and the next day, picked his way home through an apocalyptic scene of bodies stiff with rigor amid the debris of a shattered world. But as the scale of the disaster became more clear with each passing hour, Obā’s fate grew uncertain.

She cannot recall what day she heard Shunpo had evacuated its residents to a middle school and that a list of survivors was up at city hall, but she walked the mile to check the list. The city’s power was still out, had been since the quake. The area where the list was posted remained unlit. She did not have her glasses, and so asked a young person to look for her mother-in-law’s name. It was not there.

Two days later, she was asked to the fire department. There, under a blue tarp, in a line of bodies, was my Obā. Her face was peaceful, my aunt says, intimating a singular solace.

Tears now stream down her face, her breath halting. She brought flowers from her home to the coffin that now held Obā. The morgues were overwhelmed and short on dry ice to preserve all the bodies. But somehow she was able to get Obā to one of them.

Whenever she thinks of the tsunami now, my aunt tells me, one word comes to mind: samui.

Cold.

***

The manager of the reopened Shunpo Rest Home, a tall man of bearing named Morimitsu Inawshirō, has agreed to speak to me in a small waiting room at the rebuilt facility. He verifies my identity, then opens a small folder with a spreadsheet that shows the residents, by name, on 3/11. With a finger, he indicates my grandmother’s name. There, on line 40: “Komatsu” in familiar lines of kanji, followed by “Tokuno” in hiragana. In another column, a small “x” indicates her status as deceased.

He had prepared the Shunpo staff with multiple earthquake and tsunami drills by 3/11. When he returned from the meeting that had been interrupted by the 9.1-magnitude temblor, he found his 187 staff, visitors, and residents already evacuating to the second floor of their building, which had suffered little to no quake damage. On his way in, fire department personnel parked nearby told him a six-meter tsunami warning was in effect.

Here, a door opens and one of his staff produces a picture of my grandmother, the type that might be used to familiarize the staff with residents whose grasp of concrete memory is ever-fleeting. My breath catches. The picture is dated 14 September 2008. I have only recently learned her birthday: 10 April 1921. Which made her 87 when the photo was taken. Skin tallowed, hair not completely silver yet. I recognize my high cheek bones and jutting bulb of a chin. Rose-tinted glasses and lipstick to match. I see my father. I see myself.

Ninety percent of the Shunpo’s residents on 3/11 were wheelchair-bound. The staff wheeled everyone to the second floor via a ramp constructed for exactly this scenario. It was an orderly, prompt affair. The staff did their best, interrupting baths and naps and visits to transition the guests rapidly to the second floor while assuaging their fears. The clock was ticking.

Whenever she thinks of the tsunami now, my aunt tells me, one word comes to mind: samui. Cold.

He does not describe what it was like to watch the river drop, then rise inexorably. I have seen the videos and thought surely this is that moment, the crescendo at which the impossible level of destruction must cease, only for it to continue. He does not need to tell me that the tsunami rose for nearly 20 minutes, because I know this for myself.

And then it was ripping through Shunpo’s second floor.

The water rose until staff were lifting patients atop beds and desks and clambering themselves on to anything high to get away, as vending machines drifted down the halls, just as entire homes swept past the second-floor windows, and now he is standing in front of me on his tiptoes, arms wrapped around imagined patients pushed afloat in the torrent, lips lifted to air.

Twenty minutes.

But it was hours until the waters receded into night and the fires lit the horizon and he could begin an accounting while the survivors huddled, cold and wet. He feared lighting the emergency supply of portable propane heaters because the smell of the gasoline was heavy from the tsunami ripping open the waterfront reservoirs of fuel that supplied Kesennuma’s fishing fleet. He and his staff found their dead residents and collected the bodies into one place. They were filthy with stinking mud. Throughout the night, he tried to wipe the faces of the dead clean.

I’m sorry, he whispered to them repeatedly. I’m sorry.

More died in the night, and still more would die, many whimpering with fear into the cold night air of the unpowered gymnasium of the junior high school they evacuated to the next day.

***

Three hundred ten feet above where the Pacific laps against Kesennuma, I walk through the doors of Rias Ark Museum. The irony of the symbology is not lost on the purpose of my visit: to see a special collection of preserved 3/11 tsunami debris. I have come with an idea of a small room, maybe a few pieces of flotsam. Instead, the subterranean room is a couple thousand square feet full of both photos of what the tsunami left behind and physical examples themselves.

It is everything. A rusted automobile hulk. A filthy stuffed animal on top of a tattered doormat, both wrapped in plastic. Photo of a pile of rotting fish in a market stall oozing a black pond of decay. A dirty clock stopped at 3:34 p.m. A pile of children’s gaming devices. Broken timber. A solitary shoe, child-size.

One final oversize canvas features a blown-up amateur panoramic shot of Shishiori post-tsunami. Debris fills the frame with an impossible amount of detritus. The photo was not meant to be expanded like this, now grainy. But it is here, lingering to make sense of this collected remains of a shattering, that I begin to understand.

***  

My mother dreamed of Obā before the tsunami. I saw the dream as she told it to me: She’s in a kind of hospital room, sitting in a chair next to Obā’s bed. She holds my grandmother’s hand, and they look at each other without speaking. Now there is water on the floor and it is rising. They cannot speak. They continue to stare at each other. The water rises. My mother wakes.

***

I set my destination in Google Maps and let the navigation feature guide me through the endless series of tunnels and winding road that lead to the coastal city of Ōtsuchi, a few hours north of Kesennuma in neighboring Iwate Prefecture. The location: kaze no denwa, which translates as “wind telephone.” Before 3/11, a man in Ōtsuchi named Itaru Sasaki was grieving his brother’s death. So in his backyard, on a hill overlooking the Pacific, he installed a telephone booth. Inside, from a disconnected phone, he placed calls to his brother. The mere act of speaking into it, as if he was holding a one-sided conversation with a silent recipient, assuaged the pain. After 3/11, word spread among the vast community of those who’d lost loved ones to the tsunami until they came in droves to speak to the dead. I will do the same.

Questions plague the drive. What to say. Why. What I think this will accomplish. As the distance decreases, anticipation mounts until the road descends one last time along the pocketed, mountainous coastline. Past the blue-inked sign that indicates, yet once more on the coastal road, the high-water mark of 3/11 in Ōtsuchi.

My phone sends me up a steep hillside, into the collection of homes that dot its flank, but the destination turns out to be a candy shop. I peek into the backyard. Nothing. I walk around some more, fruitlessly. When I check the the coordinates I found online, I punch them in once more, get back in the car. Drive some more. Park more. Walk more.

At one point, I find myself bushwhacking through someone’s property, stepping through wet chest-high brambles past long-neglected shacks. Emerging in the middle of a field, I stand where the coordinates tell me the wind phone should be. But it is not.

The staff at a nearby hotel and convention center have no idea what the kaze no denwa is, but sort it out with a mixture of broken English and even-more-broken Japanese.  

Back in the car, uphill, through an underpass beneath the multilane Sanriku Highway under construction that will enable the rapid deployment of emergency services to the tsunami-prone towns, villages, and hamlets that bore the brunt of 3/11. But she’s sent me to a cemetery.

It feels close. I park and my feet lead me past more homes until finally, I see a woman weeding her gravel driveway. The need to ask overcomes my embarrassment over my terrible Japanese.

“Ah. Shitsurei shimasu?” She stops weeding, looks at me, expectant. I again try to ask if the wind phone is nearby. After an abortive, brief exchange, she asks if I speak English. Yes, I say, relieved. She leads me downhill to a nondescript yard, and leaves me at a sign at the yard’s edge inscribed with the kanji characters for the wind telephone.

I wait for something to descend upon me, for the clouds to open and the sun to shine and the green of life to become vivid. But I’m just a guy staring at a telephone booth painted white, surrounded by a small garden supported by donations and kept in someone’s free time. At any moment now, some overwhelming grief, cathartic relief. Any moment.

Everything I read online mentioned the peacefulness of a hillside overlooking the same ocean that took the lives of those who come here to grieve. But the Sanriku Highway was more important. Its berm is the only thing I can now see from a wooden bench underneath a tree’s canopy.

Minutes pass. No grief. No catharsis. I should do something. I ought to use the phone. What do you say to the dead? The air is heavy with moisture, the low clouds enveloping me with gray light. Rain feels imminent.

So, my notebook open upon my lap, legs crossed, I write my grandmother a letter. It is awkward, searching for denouement. When it is done, I stand and walk to the booth, open the door and stand inside. The paint is chipping from the glass frames. There’s a visitor’s book. And a black rotary phone. I pick up the handset. Zero seems as good a number to dial as any. Ten clicks pass from phone to line. Handset to my ear, my lips brush the same plastic receiver as those who have come before. My other hand presses my notebook open to the letter. I hunch to read it.

“Obā-san,” I begin.

***

This essay was made possible by a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting that supported a series of stories about the 2011 Japan tsunami, which you can read here. Matthew Komatsu is an Alaska Air National Guardsman and graduate of the University of Alaska’s MFA in Creative Writing program. He received the 2017 Alaska Literary Award for Nonfiction and his work was featured in The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers (Norton, 2018) and The Spirit of Disruption: Ten Years of The Normal School (Outpost19, 2018). His essay does not reflect official policy or position.

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

We spent our first night there not really sleeping at all, just kind of leaning with our backs against this boulder. It snowed most of the night. Everyone was really on edge, and every time there was an aftershock, people would start screaming and running. I was terrified of every aftershock. We were saying that we couldn’t tell if the earth was still moving or if it was just us trembling.

I had a satellite phone with unlimited minutes, so I became the telephone booth for the village. Some of it was logistical stuff: the leaders of Kyanjin Gomba were using the phone to call the Nepalese army to make arguments for why the helicopters needed to come, but the majority of the calls were people calling family members. Each day, people would line up and have a number written down on a scrap of paper, and we would try calling. These people were crying into the phone. You don’t need to speak Nepalese to understand that.

— American mountain climber Colin Haley, in Outside magazine, recounts waiting for help after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Langtang Valley, 40 miles northeast of Kathmandu, on April 25, 2015. In this oral history compiled by Anna Callaghan and Rabi Thapa, residents and foreigners describe this day of destruction, how half of the village population was buried, and what happened in the days that followed.

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Because the area is full of Buddhists, most people stayed positive and were not shocked by the realization that death is inevitable. The earthquake was actually a great Buddhist teaching that everything is an illusion and things are never as they seem to be. Like a rope on the ground can be mistaken for a snake, as a reflection of the moon in a mud puddle is not the actual moon, the ground and the buildings that we live in are not as safe and immoveable as we may think. This is a disturbing revelation that can be very unsettling especially while the earth kept moving for days. The Buddha also said “all component things are destined to fall apart.” Of course, we can all die at any moment, but I think we are all afraid to suffer a painful death crushed by fallen buildings or to be trapped for days before expiring slowly.

–Shiv Mirabito, in the Woodstock Times. The Woodstock, New York-based anthropologist, poet, artist and publisher survived the recent earthquake in Nepal.

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