Photojournalist revisits the horrors of Japan’s 2011 quake in new book Yoshida’s Dilemma
Japan resident Rob Gilhooly investigates the fallout from the country’s worst natural disaster in living memory, and profiles the man who stopped a crisis from turning into a catastrophe
Images and memories of the aftermath of March 11, 2011, come to Rob Gilhooly unbidden. Without warning, he will again be confronted in his mind’s eye with a fishing boat deposited atop of a five-storey hospital building by the tsunami triggered by the magnitude 9 Great East Japan Earthquake.
On other occasions it will be glassy-eyed children and pensioners sitting on the floor of a classroom in a school serving as an emergency evacuation centre, or the clatter of helicopters bringing in the injured and the dying to the Red Cross hospital in Ishinomaki. What inevitably follow are images of chaotic scenes within the hospital, where the spacious lobby had been turned into a triage centre and victims of the worst natural disaster to strike Japan in living memory received treatment on the filthy floor.
“The most disturbing thing I saw was two days after the earthquake,” says Gilhooly, a Briton who moved to Japan in 1990 and now works as a writer and photojournalist.
“I was in a school gymnasium in Ishinomaki that had been turned into a makeshift morgue and there was a steady stream of military trucks pulling up and unloading bodies,” says Gilhooly, who was on assignment for several British and US media outlets.
“I cannot erase the memory of a muddy shoe falling off the foot of an elderly man wrapped in a flowery blanket and gently being replaced by one of the officials given the task of tallying the arrivals.