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GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI by Richard Lloyd Parry 304PP, JONATHAN CAPE, Pounds 16.99, EBOOK Pounds 9.99
In November 2011, I drove with a group of volunteers from Tokyo to north-east Japan, a region reeling from the massive tsunami that had swept in eight months before. On a rubble-strewn coastal terrain that had once been the village of Ogatsu, we helped locals stage the area's annual religious festival. The holy palanquin we carried had been assembled from the wreckage of the village's shrine. Our motto was "Ogatsu Reborn: We Can Do It!" It didn't happen. The village was never rebuilt; its Wikipedia page is now in the past tense.
The fate of Ogatsu was on my mind as I read Ghosts of the Tsunami, but in truth I hadn't thought about it for years. We all know about the sheer levelling force of the tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 2011, killing almost 20,000. We've seen the amateur footage of the water engulfing harbours, chasing down desperately fleeing cars and depositing ships on buildings. But whereas the subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant is an ongoing issue, influencing global energy policy, the fallout from the tsunami itself is a less familiar story. To outside observers, that crisis seemed to end with the wave's last retreat.
In Ghosts of the...