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Japan’s stoicism in the face of natural disaster, and the tragedy of the tsunami-hit school: a British journalist investigates

Richard Lloyd Parry ponders the paradoxes of Japan - the constant threat of natural disasters in such a safe country, the beauty and dread of its post-tsunami landscapes, and the fatalism that elsewhere would be fury

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Family members who lost children at the Okawa Elementary School, in Ishinomaki, offer flowers at the place where many of the bodies were discovered. Picture: AFP

Published: 8:00am, 24 Aug 2018Updated: 1:47pm, 24 Aug 2018

Discussing the weather with an Englishman is, you might think, like talking to an Englishman about soccer, or beer, or gardening: stereotypical par for a stereotypical course. But during two conversations with journalist and award-winning author Richard Lloyd Parry, weather, often in its most extreme forms, becomes a subject of philosophical, spiritual, political and national significance.

Nor is there anything narrowly English about Lloyd Parry’s interest, or indeed the man himself. Born in Merseyside, northwest England, and educated at Oxford University, he has lived for almost 25 years in Tokyo, Japan, where he is currently Asia editor for The Times of London newspaper. The English may apparently spend five months of their lives chatting about the weather, but the Japanese are no less attuned to their meteorological environment.

“Natural disasters are Japan,” Lloyd Parry says at one point. “It’s the ground beneath your feet. It’s the weather. The typhoons.”

That phrase – “the ground beneath your feet” – haunts his most recent book, Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017), winner of 2018’s Rathbones Folio Prize, a literary award that recognises the year’s most ambitious work of fiction or non-fiction. The book’s ostensible subject is the Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami that, on one freezing winter’s day in March 2011, killed more than 18,000 people and destroyed the lives of countless more. “It was Japan’s greatest crisis since the second world war,” Lloyd Parry concludes in his examination.

In graceful, analytical but ultimately compassionate prose, Lloyd Parry zeroes in on one infinitesimal corner of the overwhelming catastrophe: the deaths of 74 children at Okawa Elementary School, in Ishinomaki, after the tsunami transformed the nearby Kitakami River into a roiling, black ocean devastating everything in its path.

“The story of the school was a distillation of the tragedy,” Lloyd Parry says, during our initial meeting, in England. “There were so many tragedies that day, but in terms of the number of lives lost in one place, and how those lives were lost, there was no worse story that I heard.”