In March of 2011, I would’ve been finishing up the eighth grade. When I think back, I remember the news talking about an immense earthquake that hit Japan and caused a nuclear reactor to undergo a meltdown. I remember nuclear power being a huge topic of discussion for the weeks to come, but I remember nothing about a tsunami. This makes my heart wrench looking backsince almost all of the 20,000 deaths from the disaster were attributed to the tsunami, not the earthquake or the nuclear meltdown.

I thought I had a sense of what a tsunami was before I read this book and watched videos of the disaster online, but I was totally wrong. I thought tsunamis as one giant ocean wave, crashing against the land - like in the famous Japanese painting. Instead, it was as if the ocean suddenly rose 40 feet and was rushing down onto the land to become level once more. The rapid crawl forward you see in the ocean after a wave has already broken on the shore. You can see houses, trees, cars, being engulfed and sucked out to see sea as if they were grains of sand on a beach. Even hearing so many firsthand accounts and seeing the destruction online with my own eyes, the brain can’t quite make sense of such a thing. I couldn’t believe how dark the water was - black, exactly like the survivors described in the book.

This book tells the story that didn’t make the news abroad: the story of the tsunami and its victims, with special focus on an elementary school where almost all of the children and teachers died. Listening to the accounts of the children who escaped the tsunami and the parents who lost their children to the water was difficult, but captivating. I was struck by the depth of interviews the author was able to conduct with so many different people - teachers, students, parents. It provided such a human view of an event that is so often described with mere statistics.

Something I didn’t expect to find in this book was an exploration of Japanese culture. The author, who is English, strikes an equally critical and awed view of Japan’s value of gaman, which refers to calm endurance of hardship - something Japanese are meant to aspire to embody. This trait is what allowed people to immediately organize after the tsunami, even without government assistance, to make sure those displaced had food and shelter. Like the author, I cannot imagine Americans being this cooperative. There was no looting, no fighting, even no outward expression of their suffering! As the author notes, gaman also leads to preservation of the status quo. It is why so few parents were outspoken about criticizing the negligence of the school board, and why people so diligently followed the directions of their higher ups, even when it would’ve been better not to.

I was also really intrigued by Japanese spirituality and the worshipping of ancestors. So many of the parents interviewed were grieving not only their child, but their spiritual future. Without children to remember them and their other ancestors, what would happen to them in the afterlife? It was a grief that had never even occurred to me.

Overall, I think this book was a beautifully written, people-focused look into the 2011 disaster. These stories are so valuable and will stick with me more vividly than the Wikipedia page did.