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Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017)

par Richard Lloyd Parry

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377	19	67,913	(4.2)	21
History. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit Hub The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan�??by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways. Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings, and met a priest who exorcised the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village that had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own. What really happened to the local children as they waited in the schoolyard in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up? Ghosts of the Tsunami is a soon-to-be classic intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the struggle to find consolation in the ruins.… (plus d'informations)

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Affichage de 1-5 de 18 (suivant | tout afficher)

A well-done book on a heartbreaking topic. Over 18,000 lives lost is incomprehensible, so the author focuses on the children lost from one school, the families left behind, the legal repercussions and, as the title says, the ghosts. (

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cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |

(44) Was looking for a compelling non-fiction account of something apolitical and not true crime. This has some good reviews but it was just OK for me. This is the story of the 2011 earthquake and Tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. About 20,000 people died from being crushed or drowned by the water yet the earthquake itself caused minimal damage. Japan is one of the most susceptible places on the planet to earthquakes and Tsunamis yet has a disciplined, prepared, relatively well-off populace that drill and build to survive such natural disasters. Then why did almost all the children from one coastal elementary school die despite minimal earthquake damage and about 45 minutes to evacuate to higher ground? This is the story of the day, and the sad, sad aftermath as well as an interesting description of the passivity and uber-politeness of the Japanese people writ large.

So this should be very compelling reading - and at times it was incredibly poignant. The parents are so angry and in such a state of disbelief that they sue and fight the school to uncover a conspiracy that never was. I was troubled by this as well as the many sections about possession and ghosts. Umm... I should have expected it based on the title -- but the author doesn't just mean it figuratively but literally. And while I sense he is a pretty down to earth guy who doesn't buy it -- he had to be respectful of the families who confided in him and allowed him their stories to write the book. So communing with the dead and ghosts and exorcisms it is then. It just didn't do it for me. He tried to connect it to the fervent belief in religion. In Japan, the closest thing to religious fervor is worship of ancestors, so in a way it makes sense. But it just didn't resonate for me and disconnected me emotionally from the people he was writing about.

Some parts were good, but overall too disjointed and repetitive. Too much material that did not connect with me. The horror of the day at the school and the immediate aftermath was excellent, the rest not so good - for an overall mediocre rating. (

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jhowell | Aug 17, 2023 |

Living in the US and watching so many disasters close to home unfold, it was equally heartbreaking and familiar to hear how another culture deals with the aftermath of a tragedy. This earthquake and tsunami Japan experienced was monumentally disastrous, but the book focuses in on a school where children died due to the lack of planning and negligence of the officials. That narrative reminded me a lot of school shootings here, and how hard it is to get justice. This really reminds me that humanity is the same all around the globe, and our empathy should always reflect that. (

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KallieGrace | Jul 23, 2023 |

It took me a long time to finish reading this book, and I was a little disappointed in myself because of that, but it was, at times, a heavy read; especially if you're able to connect the unnecessary death of the children at the school to the regular mass shootings we have here in the United States, which I did regularly while reading this book.

Like mass shootings in the US, tsunamis are just a way of life in Japan, especially with the regular earthquakes they have and the geographic location of their country. It's terrifying.

It was also a fantastic book. I feel like I learned a lot about Japan and, to some degree, the world. It was truly a great book. I'm thrilled to own it.

Adrianne (

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Adrianne_p | Aug 31, 2022 |

An astoundingly detailed account of the 2011 tsunami in Japan that concentrates on the destruction of a coastal village elementary school and the 74 children who were lost. I won't be able to do this review justice because it's hard to explain how deft the author was at slowly revealing the layers of this tragedy in brilliant prose. After the wave takes these children, the agony of the parents' lives going forward are breathtaking: the mother who learned to operate an excavator so she could continue looking for her child after the officials have given up; the young boys who tried to convince their teacher that they needed to run up the hill to get away from the coming disaster; the terrible disaster planning on the part of the school and the apparent negligent behavior of the principal during and after the wave; and the second guessing on the part of parents who failed to go pick up their children before the tsunami hit. Incredible reportage by a prose master who also made the Japanese culture understandable. Just an absolutely brilliant book that is also astoundingly sad. (

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brenzi | Nov 17, 2021 |

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Lloyd Parry has opened out his celebrated essay to offer an eerie, brushstroked evocation of a whole realm of remote villages struggling to find order in a world of absences. Fittingly, his book is less a continuous narrative than a collection of shards. Torn pictures from a family photo album, as they seem, his individual stories form a fractured portrait of a country we’re more accustomed to seeing as a polished whole. In particular, he homes in on the tragedy at the Okawa Elementary School, located in a tiny coastal village “in a forgotten fold of Japan,” where 74 of the 75 children who died in Japan in 2011 while in the care of teachers perished under the wave. The village’s surviving teachers, parents and children seem, not surprisingly, barely more settled than the loved ones who were lost.... The ghosts that hover just above his charged and elemental pages are a reminder of how much this land of order remains ruled by things that can’t be seen. Japan, he reminds us, is an often-22nd-century society largely governed by the past.

ajouté par Lemeritus | modifierNew York Times, Pico Iyer (payer le site) (Dec 26, 2017)

Parry writes about the survivors with sensitivity and a rare kind of empathy; he resists the urge to distance himself from the pain in an attempt at emotional self-preservation. The result is a book that's brutally honest, and at times difficult to read. "A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes," he writes. "And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy and fell out of love."... The stories Parry tells are wrenching, and he refuses to mitigate the enormity of the tsunami with false optimism or saccharine feel-good anecdotes. Above all, it's a beautiful meditation on grief....

ajouté par Lemeritus | modifierNational Public Radio (NPR), Michael Schaub (Oct 26, 2017)

In a gripping fashion, Parry builds his account around solving the excruciating mystery that haunts the parents of those who were killed: “the earthquake had struck at 2:46 p.m. The hands of the school clock were frozen at 3:37 p.m., when the building’s electricity was quenched by the rising water. This was the central question of the Okawa tragedy: What exactly happened between the first event and the second? What was going on … for the last fifty-one minutes of its existence?”.... Parry homes in on the Okawa Primary School, which — despite its frequent disaster preparedness drills and a 700-foot-tall hill behind the building — lost 74 of its 108 students and 10 of its 13 teachers and staff.

ajouté par Lemeritus | modifierChicago Tribune, Kathleen Rooney (Oct 23, 2017)

By refusing to accept their evasions, and by laying out in panoramic detail what happened after the tsunami, Mr Lloyd Parry offers a voice to the grieving who, too often, found it hard to be heard. It is a thoughtful lesson to all societies whose first reaction in the face of adversity is to shut down inquiry and cover up the facts. You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.

ajouté par Lemeritus | modifierThe Economist (payer le site) (Aug 19, 2017)

The author’s narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting. One memorable moment comes when he describes someone brought back from the brink of madness by a perhaps unlikely method: namely, being sprinkled with holy water and thus freed from the hold of “the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead.” Parry’s set pieces come to have a certain predictability: expert–victim–expert–survivor. Yet they retain their urgency, for, as he writes, it won’t be long before another earthquake of similar or even greater intensity strikes Tokyo proper, with its millions of inhabitants; in that event, “the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs.” A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.

ajouté par Lemeritus | modifierKirkus Reviews (Jul 3, 2017)

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Nom de l'auteur	Rôle	Type d'auteur	Œuvre ?	Statut
Richard Lloyd Parry	—	auteur principal	toutes les éditions	calculé
Vance, Simon	Narrateur	auteur secondaire	quelques éditions	confirmé

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Audie Award (Finaliste – Non-Fiction – 2018)

Writers' Prize (Gagnant – 2018)

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Amazon's Best Books of the Month (November – 2017)

NPR: Books We Love (2017)

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Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List (Adults – 2019)

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Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

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Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

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Japan

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Japanese Tsunami (2011)

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What is this this flesh I purchased with my pains,

This fallen star my milk sustains
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?
-- W.B. Yeats

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On March 11, 2011, two catastrophes struck north-east Japan.

The eleventh of March 2011 was a cold, sunny Friday, and it was the day I saw the face of my son for the first time. (Prologue)

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The building, a nondescript twelve-story structure that had never seemed particularly old or new, sturdy or frail, was generating low groans from deep within its innards. It was a sound such as one never usually hears, a heart-sickening noise suggesting deep and mortal distress, like the death sound of a dying monster.

It was the biggest earthquake ever known to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth ten inches off its axis; it moved Japan four feet closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, 18,500 people were drowned, burned, or crushed to death. At its peak, the water was 120 feet high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes. Three reactors in the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station melted down, spilling their radioactivity across the countryside, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The earthquake and tsunami caused more than $210 billion of damage, making it the most costly natural disaster ever.

The trick is to preserve compassion, without bearing each individual tragedy as your own; and I had mastered this technique. I knew the facts of what had happened, and I knew they were appalling. But at my core, I was not appalled.

“All at once … something we could only have imagined was upon us—and we could still only imagine it,” wrote Philip Gourevitch. “That is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”

In Japanese, domestic leave-taking follows an unvarying formula. The person departing says itte kimasu, which means literally, “Having gone, I will come back.” Those who remain behind respond with itte rasshai, which means “Having gone, be back.” Sayonara, the word that foreigners are taught is the Japanese for “goodbye,” is too final for most occasions, implying a prolonged or indefinite separation. Itte kimasu contains a different emotional charge: the promise of an intended return.

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Only two forces can inflict greater damage than a tsunami: collision with an asteroid or nuclear explosion. The scenes along four hundred miles of coast that morning resembled those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but with water substituted for fire, mud for ash, the stink of fish and ooze for scorched wood and smoke.

The first thing you learn about Tokyo is that it won’t be there for much longer. My friends talked with gossipy animation—there was evidently a mischievous pleasure in imparting this frightening information to a new arrival. They spoke with a kind of scandalized amusement, and with no evident alarm or trepidation. Earthquakes, the mass destruction of human life, the obliteration of the city were matters of lively breakfast conversation, of no more concern than a violent rain shower or an unseasonable fall of snow.

Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics—the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience, or perseverance.

The Shitos were victims; but the shame was theirs too. “They” meant “us,” meant everyone. The tsunami was not the problem. Japan was the problem.

Japan’s civil-justice system, like its democracy, appeared on the face of it to be beyond reproach. Judges were independent; bribery and intimidation were almost unknown. But at its core the system expressed a bias in favor of the status quo and the private and public institutions that upheld it. Judges, Yoshioka told me, were derisively referred to as “flounders”—flatfish who dwelled on the ocean floor, with their eyes positioned on the top of their bodies, always anxiously looking upwards. There was no explicit conspiracy to deliver verdicts one way or another, no direct orders from on high, just an understanding, as natural as the instinct of an animal, about how the world worked and where self-interest lay.

He talked about the word gareki, meaning “rubble” or “debris,” and used to refer to the detritus of the tsunami. To most people, it was a neutral, colorless term, unthinkingly employed; but for Tetsuya, it hurt to hear it. “Our possessions,” he said, “are now called gareki. Until the disaster, they were part of our life. Now, they contain our memories. I don’t like to hear all those things referred to as ‘rubble.’” And now the school, where he had been so happy, and where his friends and sister had died, was also to be treated as gareki.

“We realized that, for all that we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. This destruction that we were living inside—it couldn’t be framed by the principles and theories of religion. Even as priests, we were close to the fear that people express when they say, ‘We see no God, we see no Buddha here.’ I realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it."

But after the practical problems were resolved, the anxiety they felt was as strong as ever. It stretched ahead indefinitely into the future. It could no longer be soothed by just giving them things. The things will never be enough.”

The Okawa parents had won their case—they had been awarded more than £11 million, or $13.4 million. All their children were still dead.

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History. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML:

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit Hub

The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan�??by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness
On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.
It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.
Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings, and met a priest who exorcised the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village that had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.
What really happened to the local children as they waited in the schoolyard in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?
Ghosts of the Tsunami is a soon-to-be classic intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the struggle to find consolation in the ruins.