Stories From The Living Honoring The Dead (Some Graphic Content)

The circular building with classrooms facing the playground in the middle, windows surely filling the rooms with light stands still, alone, and silent.  I'm here to plant an elm tree honoring the 74 children and 10 teachers lost at Ohkawa Elementary School outside of Ishinomaki.  Of the 108 children and 11 staff, 84 are dead or missing.

"You'll bawl," I'm told.  I probably will.  "It's holy.  You'll feel it as soon as you get there."  I'm sure I will.  I drive down the hill with the looming and tall embankment to my left.  The wave rushed up the river on the other side of the bank, spilling over with force that swept 84 people away in an instant. Ohkawa Elementary School is right there, on my right.  No one ever assumed this was a dangerous place to build a school.  Hindsight.  Again.

My host greets me.  I look at the building, the hill right behind the school grounds, the emptiness of it all, taking it all in.  "Pray first," I hear my host say.  Right.  There's a series of altars, stone, marble, concrete, with fresh and artificial flowers covering them all.  The lilies, carnations, chrysanthemums in white and yellow remind me of the funerals I've been to in Japan.  Bottles of juice, soda, a tray of coins, a rin bowl (a small metal bowl to gong before offering prayers), and an incense holder dot the altars.  There's a statue to the far right of a woman cradling a child in her arms that reads "Statue of the Child Protector."  Fat lot of good that statue did.

Large signs in front of the ropes strung around the building read, "Do Not Enter (Except Family Members of the Deceased)."  I'm allowed in thanks to my host, so I go.  I crawl under the rope and enter hallowed ground.  People, many people died here.

Round containers, huge flower pots, line the outer walls of the classrooms, facing into the playground.  I like this architect.  The children must have planted flowers, watching them grow, scent and color filling their rooms.

I walk around the grounds.  I'm alone.  Wondering what the hell must have happened here, I enter a classroom.  The floors are swept clean.  Pieces of plaster fallen from the ceilings are the only debris on the floor.  Someone is taking great care to keep this place clean.  It's all unreal.   It's so quiet.

I leave the classroom and find myself outside again.  It's a bit of a maze, this design.  I would have loved that about this school had I been a student here.  I would have found hiding places--closets, nooks, secret passages--escaping pirates and evil men on horseback.  Outside, I see pillars holding something up that are broken at the base.  This is wrong.  I feel tears.  Fair enough.  I was told I would bawl.

Making my way back to the group of people I'm here with, I frantically wipe away my tears.  I don't want to make a scene.  They're sitting on a concrete wedge.  A tour bus pulls up.  This is a tourist spot.  We all stare.  Sixty or so elderly people get off, all huddling around the altars listening to a tour guide explain in a low voice what happened here.  We talked later about this.  Is this a good thing?  It's good to be remembered.  It's another thing to be a spot on a tour.  They mill around, and we overhear them.  "Why didn't they just escape to that hill over there?"  Pointing to the hill behind the school, an elderly man heads towards it.  My host whispers, "See that tree?  That one right behind the white truck?"  I see a tree with branches shaped like Ys.  Is it a sycamore?  "There was a kid stuck in that tree for days."  We all look at him, the same question we dare not ask.  "Dead, of course.  They couldn't get heavy machinery in here to get him down."  We all stare back at the tree.  "The families of the kids hate that question.  That 'Why didn't they run up the hill' question.  Ten out of eleven teachers died.  The kids, they're kids, how do you not panic?  They did run there.  It's just that most of them didn't make it."  We don't say anything.  "The bodies of the kids were laid here..." and he gestures over to the right, "Here on the ground for days.  The police and firefighters didn't have extra blue tarp to place the kids on or cover them up with.  Relief supplies wouldn't come in for days."

I'm introduced to one of the parents and the groundskeeper.  The mother lost her daughter and is still searching for the remains.  She says she has something to show me.  We walk in silence to a classroom.  She points up to the wall.  "That's when it hit," and for a minute I don't know what she's talking about.  Then it becomes obvious.  The clock stopped when the tsunami hit the school.  "Is it alright if I take a photo?" I ask.  "Please do.  We want people to know."

I decide to walk through the rooms again.  I notice again how all the floors are swept.  In one larger classroom up against the wall I see what surely must be items belonging to the kids.  Unicycles?  These kids rode unicycles?  How cool is that? 

The mother and the groundskeeper and I walk back to our group.  There's another tour bus.  More elderly people crowd the altars praying.  I see a grandpa wiping away tears.  They fan out.  I see one of the men walking towards the hill.  He stands at the foot of the hill facing it.  He's urinating.  We all stare.  What do we do?  What do we say?  Don't pee?  My host again starts to speak.  "The kids who climbed that hill were found on the other side of it several days later by residents of the town over here."  These are stories we don't hear unless the speaker knows for a fact this is what happened.  He heard it from the parents of the kids.

It was an exhausting day.  I came away drained.  Glad I went, grateful to be given an insider's perspective on what happened and how those left behind feel about those of us who come to visit, but I'm crushed by what I saw.  The pain was palpable, real, and still raw.  On days like this, I still don't know what to say.  "I'm sorry for your loss" seems wrong, hollow, and too simple.

If you go to Ohkawa Elementary School, and I suggest you do, know the parents of the children need to know you're there out of respect.  If at all possible, avoid the tour bus that takes you there.