Authors: Gretel Ehrlich
The abbot’s niece, Fukan-san, greets me. This, the fourth time I’ve visited, elicits not just the familiar bow, but a hug as well. I’ve come to see the
bonsho
, the big bell that was brought from the devastated Kannonji Temple up the road to be kept here, and to meet the carpenter who is building the
bonsho
’s shelter. It will be suspended in a wooden stand with a roof decorated with traditional Buddhist carvings.
But first, tea. The temple is unheated. We sit on tatami and warm our hands on teacups near a
tokonoma
, an alcove, with a scroll whose calligraphies translate “Drifting Reed” and “White Cloud.”
“There are still so many lost souls here,” Fukan-san says, placing little cakes on our plates. She talks of a father in the community who lost both his wife and his child at the Ookawa Elementary School. They found the child’s remains and he asked if
he could keep her ashes here. “At the funeral for the child he was unable to show emotion. He couldn’t greet those neighbors who came, and he was unable to pour the traditional sake. He just sat there, frozen.”
There’s a group of grieving parents who meet often, but this man never turns up. “He can’t bring himself to go to the temporary morgue to find his family. He can’t accept that they are dead. A tragedy like that … impossible to imagine what it’s like … the amount of pain and suffering he goes through every day is beyond my imagination. Yet that’s my job. To help all of them.”
We drink tea in silence. This time, no parents stream through, and no one brings flowers. Nine months have passed. A child’s remains are found off the coast of Nobiru: it is “the digger’s” child. She and her husband cremate their daughter and give her a proper burial. Determined to help others find their missing children, the mother keeps renting the backhoe, keeps digging. Those who survived the intrusion of tsunami waters on the Kitakami River are getting back to their lives, living with their losses, and fixing up damaged houses and farms.
“I’ve been thinking about the mysteries of life,” Fukan-san says. “We just happen to be born humans. My room is by the toilet and the light is on all night. Big bugs come there and some die. It’s nothing when compared to the death of children, and yet, many days I see clearly how we are all equal. I mourn the death of the bugs as well as the children. I tell the parents that those who passed away remind us that we will all die, and to remember this fact; they gave their lives to remind us to live!”
She tells me about the day she went to the river to sit
zazen
, in meditation. “I sat there for a long time,” she says. “Then the smell of food cooking wafted up from a farmer’s kitchen—such a wonderful smell … and it was only then that I cried.”
Her head drops, then she gives me a searching look. I nod and tell her that it once happened to me after losing someone I loved;
that food, reminding us of life, stirs grief. Finally, she smiles and jumps to her feet. “Let’s go find the carpenter who is building the stand for the Kannonji bell.”
The air is brisk. Fukan-san wears a black balaclava and gloves with her robes, white tabi socks and sandals. We rush down the lane to his lumberyard.
“I’m called a
miya daiku
, a master temple builder,” Sakai-san says matter-of-factly. In his mid-sixties, he’s talkative and hyperenergetic. “I’ve built 350 temples, and do two or three a year. I’m the first generation. Our family business wasn’t doing so well, and they couldn’t afford to send us all to high school. My older sister was very clever, so to keep her in school, I went to work and she graduated. I’ve always loved making things, so I decided to become a craftsman.
“The day I was married, I got up in the middle of the night and went out to the shop and began working. My wife woke and couldn’t find me. She called my parents to tell them I’d gone missing. They laughed. ‘He’s just in his shop. Go back to sleep. That’s how he is.’
“I apprenticed to a master from Iwate Prefecture. He moved to Tokyo and I went with him. He’d bought a big piece of land in Tohoku and used the timber from there to make temple carvings. I build the temples with my crew and do all the carvings myself, except for one. A carpenter is not fit to carve a Buddha.” (He holds his palms together while saying this, almost absent-mindedly.) “Carving the Buddha is a different world … it’s like being a priest.
“But since 3/11, I’ve dedicated my time to those who need help since the disaster. We spent two weeks at Ookawa Elementary School, just up the road, helping the people look for bodies. We brought food to them too. I’ve been fixing floors that were water-damaged, reconstructing pillars, repairing houses and grave markers. This is what the living have to do at a time
like this. But at the end of this year, I must stop, or I’ll go broke. We have trucks and heavy equipment and I employ many people who depend on me. So I must start building temples again to pay the bills.
“Do you want to see my tools?” Before we can get our shoes on, he has darted across the road to his lumberyard and shop. Inside are hundreds of boxes of traditional planers, chisels, and saws. “It looks like a mess but no one else uses them. The blades never touch each other. You have to buy these in Kobe. Just three of my best tools are worth enough to buy a new car,” he says, flipping open wooden boxes to show us.
“The tools are made by master toolmakers just for temple carving. And my sharpening stone goes back eight hundred years to the Kamakura Period in Kyoto, where a master craftsman said: ‘The spirit of the blade lies in the spirit of the natural sharpening tool.’ ”
We walk to the entryway to the temple to think about where he’ll build the “bell house”—an elaborately constructed stand and roof for the great
bonsho
. Fukan-san questions the carpenter about the exact placement. The bronze bell is four feet long and two feet wide and is rung by ramming the end with a long stick. He tells us that during World War II, all the temple bells were taken to be made into weapons. But this bell was spared, and after twenty years it was returned to the Kannonji Temple. “But here it is and we will make a beautiful house for it,” he says.
Sakai-san stands in one place and makes the motion of ringing the bell, then another place and tries again. He and Fukan-san laugh. “Well, I’m not sure where to put it yet,” he says, looking suddenly distracted, as if remembering all the temples he has yet to build. “But we’ll find the right place and make beautiful carvings for it. Maybe it can be built next year … or the year after …”
Fukan-san looks stunned. She’d hoped it would be completed in a few months. But turning to me she smiles: “You gave us
money for this structure. As soon as it is in place, we will have a special ceremony. Some say the sound of the bell signifies
mujo
, impermanence. Others say it is the voice of the Buddha. Whenever the small house is completed, you must come and ring the bell!”
Abyss-san slides into the seat of the van and turns the key. The engine starts, the heater comes on. We scrape ice from the windshield. He lets the van roll before putting it in gear, takes the twisting road to the top of the mountain, and careens down the other side. No traffic, the dead deer more than half eaten, its carcass a kind of calendar of days: as soon as it’s entirely consumed, he says, it’s time to leave Japan.
When I close my eyes we fall upward. The shape of the road enters us, the apple orchard, baseball field, and bamboo forest, its branches hanging down and touching ground. A farmer by the side of the road is making charcoal to use as a water purifier. Abyss-san talks a litany of outrages at government corruption; about when he will next distribute donated supplies.
The mind is flung this way and that; the rope of days, braided back into itself, the ends joined, a loop that keeps open the circle of living and dying, morning and evening, night and day. Nikki’s sparkling youth and Abyss-san’s generosity: beautiful ruptures, openings that delight me in the midst of tragedy. Yet a fisherman we talked to said: “Now there’s no happiness in our lives because of the radiation.”
We glide over frosted earth, over blunt-cut fields of harvested rice,
sugi
trees bending down to us as if in conversation, their short needles tiny, filigreed, whole forests of green lace. Where trunks have fallen sideways, we drive on heartwood—smooth, smooth—bumping across rice fields and water ditches, we pierce each small farm as we go, cutting through leafless persimmon
trees hung with orange orbs. “All those moons,” Nikki says. Lopped in half.
We cross a river, our velocity splitting open the valley like a peach. Buckled roads fall to either side of the van, and smoke from debris piles fades into dusk, or is it morning? Lights from the vanquished town of Rikuzentakata come on, as if from nonexistent houses. A brief twinkling, then the illusion fades, the town’s desolation cut, the two halves identical, their tidal monotonies and rubbish-glutted shores, all the pines but one, pulled like teeth.
We’re falling. Forward now, not down. Open. Away from what is broken. To slice is to heal. We enter the ocean, rapt and wakeful, its rough grain cracking open, the van moving north and south at once, the Wave falling on either side of the blade.
We stop a last time at Ikoji, the small temple with the kindergarten in Shichigahama. The abbot trained at Daitokuji, Japan’s most famous Rinzai Buddhist monastery in northern Kyoto. Practice there is very tough, but the results can be like polished silver: its graduates exude a sourceless deep shine.
The abbot bursts through the door, tall and big-boned with a wide smile and large ears. Sometimes a person’s presence can change a room, and make it suddenly feel larger. He stands, then sits, and at every moment he radiates without a radiator. He slides his arm around his wife, smiling. With me, he’s brisk, kind, direct, and informal.
We sit facing each other. My note-taking hand shakes—that’s what his presence does to me. He waits patiently until I can talk. There’s a fly on my cheek and I wonder if I should flick it away. I don’t. For his wife it’s the end of a long day taking care of children and she leans affectionately against him.
“Usually people don’t come here,” he begins. “This place is hard to find,” he says, and laughs. “And you’ve been here twice already!” He gives the child who is waiting for his mother a kind look. “Once a tsunami comes you should never run back to get something. You have to give it all up on the spot,” he says. His wife passes a box of chocolates. They take turns picking out a sweet. The boy sits quietly, shyly, chewing candy and holding a ball.
The abbot continues: “We thought we were safe from the tsunami. See, there are mountains all around protecting us from the
ocean. But it came right through that gap.” He points to a notch in the hills.
“I had to face it. I had to face the wave coming when we didn’t expect it, and in that moment I knew I had to survive so I could help others. I was very concerned about the woman who had gone back to her house. I was yelling over and over, ‘Come back, come to the mountain with us.’ I waited until the last moment when everyone had to leave. I prayed aloud for her to go to the
nikai
, the second floor of her house. Then one of her neighbors informed me that her house had only one floor!” He laughs.
“We had already gone up to the top of the hill with the children and the staff, but I kept hearing noises and not understanding what it was. I heard stones being thrown and something banging. I yelled out, ‘Who is it?’ A wavering voice came back: ‘It’s me!’
“I knew it was her—the woman we couldn’t find. She had climbed to the temple roof and was banging on it with rocks and tree branches. I ran down the mountain. I rescued her from the wall behind the temple, put her on my back, and carried her up to the top of the hill. Finally we were all safe. Later, hours after the last wave had receded, we became very cold and hungry. Our clothes were wet and it was below freezing, so I went back down the hill and got some food. This whole room, here in the kindergarten, was mostly under water. But I knew there were some snacks and juices here in the uppermost shelves, so I waded through—the water was up to my neck—and got them, and carried them back up to the others. We shared the food. There wasn’t much but it helped.
“It was snowing and we were getting hypothermic. I thought a long time about how to get warm. There are traditions in Japan about one’s ancestors. They are thought to live inside these tall pieces of wood called
ihai
with the names of the dead written on them. It’s very important for families to have these memorial
sticks. They are sacred. But we had to survive. I ran down the hill again and waded through the water to the cemetery by our temple. I had made the decision to take the
ihai
from the graves and break them up to use for firewood! This is considered a sacrilege, but I’d thought very hard about it and decided it was the best thing to do.”
A long silence. His wife muffles a raspy in-breath. “We’ve been laughing a lot … I don’t know why!” she says. The abbot looks at her, his eyebrows raised, and he smiles. She whispers again: “My husband was upset because his golf clubs got ruined when the water came into our house!” We all laugh out loud. “The tatami in the temple has been replaced for the second time in six months,” she continues. “But the autumn flowers that line the stone paths still bloom.”
I get up and look out the window. Darkness is coming on and just as the sun vanishes, it begins raining very hard. The rice field in front of the temple is still waterlogged from the typhoon, and the ruined car is lying in it, nose up, as if trying to suck in oxygen. Rain turns to snow. At Daitokuji practitioners sit in meditation facing the wall. Facing emptiness and then no emptiness. The box of candy is passed again, as if each brown square stood for the present, and by eating them we could face whatever comes.
The abbot speaks, his voice solemn now. “Since the disaster, some older people have committed suicide. But there’s no reason to do that. We just start from where we are, from whatever the day brings to us.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and looks straight at me: “The tsunami is past. We must think about the future. What we will do next. Up on the mountain my wife and I decided to restart the kindergarten as soon as possible. The children may say that they lost their house, or their lunch box, or someone they loved, but it’s always followed with laughter. It’s hard for adults to hear these things, but we try
to remain energetic and happy. It helps us. In disasters, children show us the way to laughter. They are our special treasures.”