Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (13 page)

Morita listened compassionately to this story and then leaned forward. Gently he said, “What exactly is it that you are afraid of?” Morita wondered why it was that people became afraid of talking to the dying and the grieving. He suspected it was because when the living had to speak to someone who was sick or dying, they also had to face the fact that all life will one day come to an end. But there was no use running away from such information, Morita said. It could be helpful to know that death was the thing we most feared. If we understood that, it would make it easier to listen to other people.

Now in Ishinomaki, at Café de Monk, I was surrounded by priests who had been through Morita’s training and were doing their very best to be empathetic listeners. Morita himself was folded compactly on a small pillow, smiling gently and listening to a
group of women talk about life in the temporary housing unit. The androgynous Tendai nun was holding an elderly lady’s hand, while Tokita sat ensconced in a corner, deep in conversation with another woman.

Then there was Kaneta, whose style was the complete opposite of Morita’s. The general feeling that Kaneta conveyed was one of strength and health. There was something almost martial about him, a pure Zen quality; Zen Buddhism was the favored sect of Buddhism for many samurai in Japan’s medieval period. He had a constant half smile on his face, as though even in the face of ghosts, or insanity, or a tsunami, he would be able to stand, unafraid and wholly rational, and even be amused. But even as he spoke to some of the women with a blunt, almost badgering tone, he was empathetic. He might laugh if you told him you were fighting with a relative, but you knew he would not laugh if you told him about a ghost. Though your story of suffering was one of many, you knew he would listen and tend to it.

For those who did not want to immediately launch into a story about the tsunami, Kaneta had devised other activities, each with a therapeutic purpose, and each quintessentially Japanese. At one table, a young priest was helping women to make rosary bracelets on an elastic band. He had a jeweler’s box of plastic beads, each color symbolizing something different: hope, life, happiness, and so on. In another box he had actual rosary beads from discarded or retired priests’ rosaries. The women used beads from both boxes to make their own personalized bracelets. At another table, a young priest was enthusiastically showing women how to fold origami lotus flowers (the lotus being a key symbol in Buddhism). Most had never folded a lotus before, though all were immensely skilled with their hands. Some bragged how good their flowers were on the first try. The flowers were made out of thin plastic, which meant they could float in a glass of water. “Take these home,” said the priest
with enthusiasm. “And you can put in a floating candle. It’ll make a great decoration!”

In another corner, tucked away from the foot traffic to the cake and the coffee, there was a table with a few
ihai
. These are funerary tablets. Typically, when someone dies in Japan, they are given a new name, as death is a kind of “rebirth,” and just as the newly born are christened, so must the dead receive a new name as they cycle through the great karmic process of being reborn into Buddha’s paradise, or as some other living entity.

In some forms of Buddhism, priests can’t give an
ihai
—or perform a funeral service—if there is no body. Such is the case with Zen. Takahagi, Semp
’s middle son, told me that he had been to many memorial services after the tsunami, but that often these families could not have a true funeral service without any remains. And so the living went on with the cruel uncertainty of wondering what happened to the body, and thus what would happen to the soul of their loved one.

Kaneta dispensed with this torture. If someone was dead, he made an
ihai
and performed the funerary sutra. The
ihai
could then be placed on the family altar in the home, giving survivors a focal point for their grief. Kaneta also went into people’s homes and recited additional sutras if they so desired.

Then there was the marquee therapeutic activity: the making of a Jiz
. The Jiz
is a particularly compassionate character in the Buddhist pantheon that is greatly loved by the Japanese. While he has the ability to transcend reality and become enlightened like the Buddha, the Jiz
stays behind to help humans who are suffering. He is often depicted with slightly childlike features and a warm smile; the Jiz
is a figure of serenity and warmth in an otherwise frightening world. About two hours after he arrived, Kaneta pulled out a tub of clay and passed out handfuls of it and molding instruments to a group of women seated on the floor around a rectangular
table. In the world of Jiz
making, he remarked, it was now fashionable to make sure that each statue had long ears. This was because a large-eared Jiz
was able to catch more coins in the ears than a statue with small ears, and since everyone staying at a temporary housing unit needed more money, the women were to make the ears as large as possible. The ears, of course, were simply metaphoric in function—they were not literally expected to catch any money.

Next, Kaneta said, if anyone had lost someone in a tsunami, they were to write the name of the person on the back of the clay Jiz
. He would then make sure to give that person a special blessing when he returned the next time, after the Jiz
had been fired and glazed in the kiln he had at home. I sat and helped the woman next to me attach the ears and the “third eye,” a bump between the eyes that most Buddhas and bodhisattvas have, and that is often a symbol of wisdom. As they made the Jiz
s, the women laughed and gossiped.