‘It’s strange that I am alive’

THE JAPANESE HAVE always lived on the brink. For centuries their islands have trembled. Great waves scoured the shores. Their homes were made of wood, their finest art appeared as flimsy prints, their most famous poetry was short and fleeting. A sense of impermanence was part of life.

Yet last Friday afternoon, at 2:46 p.m., the greatest earthquake since records began in Japan 140 years ago came as a terrible, unexpected shock.

In Tokyo the skyscrapers “started shaking like trees.” Oil tanks ruptured. Refineries burst into flames. The 186-mph bullet trains ground to a halt. Mobile phone networks fell silent. A pall of smoke hung over the capital, home to

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13 million people.

Thousands of commuters gasped as underground trains swayed in creaking, groaning tunnels. The airports closed.

In nuclear plants, which provide a third of the energy in oil-starved Japan, technicians raced to shut down reactors. But at the 40-year-old Fukushima reactors, an explosion blew the tops off two buildings as engineers fought to stop a meltdown.

More than 200,000 people were evacuated. The ghosts of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island hung in the air.

When news spread of a radiation leak at the nuclear power plant, which is run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, there was panic on social-networking sites.

“Came back home at 8 in the morning after the depressing night.…Now the nuclear power plant has exploded and we might already be exposed to radioactivity,” said a 23-year-old female office worker from Tokyo on a Facebook page. “I just don’t know what to do—what’s coming next, and will I be alive tomorrow?”

The nuclear alarm capped a double disaster. The quake of 9.0 magnitude was followed by a tsunami—a word Japan gave to the world—which tore into the isolated northeast coast of the main island of Honshu and was so powerful that it rippled around the Pacific Ocean to California and Chile.

“I heard a strange sound, the kind of sound I have never heard before,” said Kazushi Ara, a 51-year-old office worker in the city of Soma, near the stricken nuclear plant. “I looked back. Waves cascaded over the trees that make up our beach windbreak and rushed toward me. I ran like crazy.”

When the waters receded, whole cities were ablaze and in ruins. Trains had vanished. Ships and boats lay tossed like bath-time toys along a ravaged coastline.

The water swept inland about six miles in some areas, swallowing boats, homes, cars, trees, and everything else.

In stricken Sendai, smashed cars and small aircraft were jumbled up against buildings near the airport, several miles from the shore. Felled trees and wooden debris lay everywhere as rescue workers in boats moved through murky waters around flooded structures.

A 29-year-old man told how he survived the wall of water that hit Sendai. “I hurried into my car,” he recalled. “Then came the tsunami. But fortunately my car floated on the waves. I saw three men working at a petroleum pumping station being swept away. It’s strange that I am alive.”

Koichi Takairin, a 34-year-old driver who was inside his 4-ton truck when the wave hit, said, “The tsunami was unbelievably fast. Smaller cars were being swept around me. All I could do was sit in my truck.” He joined the flow of survivors who walked along the road away from the sea and back into the city.

One of them, Kumi Onodera, a 34-year-old dental technician, said that the night after the tsunami was “like a scene from a disaster movie” punctuated by frequent aftershocks. “The road was moving up and down like a wave. Things were on fire and it was snowing,” she said.

“You really come to appreciate what you have in your everyday life.”

HIROSATO WAKO STARED at the ruins of his small fishing hamlet in the city of Natori: skeletons of shattered buildings, twisted lengths of corrugated steel, corpses with their hands twisted into claws. Only once before had he seen anything like it: World War II.

“I lived through the Sendai air raids,” said Mr. Wako, 75, referring to the Allied bombings of the northeast’s largest city. “But this is much worse.”

For the elderly who live in the villages lining Japan’s northeastern coast, it is a return to a past of privation that their children have never known. As in so much of the Japanese countryside, young people have largely fled, looking for work in the city. The elderly who remained are facing devastation and possible radiation contamination, a challenge equal only to the one this generation faced when the defeated, despairing nation had to rebuild from the rubble of the war.

Several days after the tsunami struck, the search for survivors was turning into a search for bodies. And most of those bodies were old—too old to have outrun the tsunami.

YUTA SAGA, 21, was picking up broken cups after the earthquake when he heard sirens and screams of “Tsunami!” He grabbed his mother by the arm and ran to the junior high school, the tallest building around. Traffic snarled the streets as panicked drivers crashed into one another. He could measure the wave’s advance by the clouds of dust created by collapsing buildings.

When they reached the school, Mr. Saga and his mother found the stairs to the roof clogged with older people who appeared unable to muster the strength to climb them. Some were just sitting or lying on the steps. As the bottom floor filled with fleeing residents, the wave hit.

At first, the doors held. Then water began to pour through the seams and flow into the room. In a panic to reach the roof, younger residents began pushing and yelling, “Hurry!” and “Out of the way!” They climbed over those who were not moving or elbowed them aside.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mr. Saga said. “They were even shoving old people out of the way. The old people couldn’t save themselves.” He added, “People didn’t care about others.”

Then the doors burst open and the water rushed in. It was quickly waist level. Mr. Saga saw one older woman, without the strength or will to stand, sitting in water that rose to her nose. He said he rushed behind her, grabbed her under the arms, and hoisted her up the stairs. Another person on the stairs grabbed her and lifted her up to another person. The men formed a human chain, lifting the older residents and some children to the top.

“I saw the ugly side of people, and then I saw the good side,” Mr. Saga said. “Some people only thought of themselves. Others stopped to help.”

Mr. Saga said one woman handed him her infant. “Please, at least save the baby!” she pleaded as water rose above his chest. Mr. Saga said he grabbed the baby and ran up the stairs. Many of those still at the foot of the stairs were washed away.

He joined about 200 people on the second floor of the building. The baby’s mother rushed upstairs, and he put the baby into her arms. From the windows, they watched uprooted homes and cars flowing by on the wave. People did not speak, he said. They just cried and moaned, a collective “Ahhhh!” as they watched the destruction unfold. He saw one of his classmates, whose parents had gone back home to get something as the wave came and did not make it to the school. His friend sat on the floor, in tears.

Mr. Saga’s family was safe, including his 15-year-old brother, Ryota, who’d fled to the school by bicycle.

On Monday, the two brothers returned to the hamlet for the first time. The house was entirely gone; just the foundation was left. When they got there, a false tsunami alert sounded. They ran for higher ground, then the younger boy broke down, sobbing.

“He cannot forget the memory of what happened,” Mr. Saga said.

“Many of my friends are missing,” Ryota said.

HISAKO TANNO, 50, was working at a warehouse when the earthquake struck. She rushed home to get her 77-year-old father. As she parked in front of her home, she heard screams. She looked down the street to see a “mountain of garbage” moving down the street at her. It was the wave.

“I only had time to grab my bag and run,” Ms. Tanno said.

Her neighbors called to her from their home, and she ran up to their second floor. Then she remembered she had left her father.

She could see her house from the window. When the wave hit, it smashed the sliding doors. Then, to her horror, she saw her father swept outside. The water was by now the height of a one-story building. She saw him grab the ironwork on her home’s second-story balcony and hold on.

“He was trying to pull himself up, but he has a bad leg,” she said.

As the water surged, her father was able to somehow hoist himself over the metal railing and onto the balcony. There he held on for dear life.

“I didn’t know he had it in him,” she said. “He wanted so badly to live that he found that last burst of strength.”

After the earthquake, Jun Kikuchi, 33, who owns a local taxi company, drove to the homes of a half-dozen residents age 70 or older to ask if he could take them to higher ground. They refused, saying that there was no tsunami alert, so they would stay home.

He survived the wave by going to the second floor of his company office, which withstood the tsunami. The next morning, when he finally ventured out again, the homes of all six of the older residents were washed away.

“The elderly can’t take care of themselves in a disaster like this,” he said. “They didn’t stand a chance.”

This story was compiled from reports by Michael Sheridan of the London Sunday Times and Martin Fackler of The New York Times. All rights reserved.