第二十章

11 March 2011 14:46

It all started with a bang like something large, hard and heavy falling over at an indistinguishable point far off in the distance. I had heard this sound before and knew immediately what was to follow.

Everything around me started shaking, the screaming began. I could see the cranes that were just in front of us swaying from side to side and could hear the metal cables as they slapped against the cranes’ arms. I was expecting this to end almost as soon as it started just like many of the earthquakes I had experienced before but it carried on. The floor that we were standing on had also started to move, so much so that a few of my classmates lost their balance and fell over. By this time, the teachers had gathered their senses and started to direct us.

Jishin da! ‘It’s an earthquake! Move away from the building as quickly as you can and stand towards the centre of the port where there is nothing around you,’ Kinoshita-sensei shouted with understandable urgency.

Kyōto-sensei held his arms out wide as if to literally gather us up and move us away from the building behind us and towards relative safety. Those who had fallen over were quickly on their feet and as a class we ran towards the open space. I looked behind me and saw that Hiroshi had banged his head when he fell and was being tended to by Ohara-san who held his hand towel to the wound to try to stop the bleeding.

That was when the movement caused by the earthquake changed; rather than shaking from side to side, the earth started to move up and down, and I knew that this was a big one. Watching Hiroshi and Ohara-san from a distance, I wished that they would just get up and move away from the building that was now starting to lose parts of its roof. Great sheets of corrugated iron slid off and glided ungracefully to the ground where they made a clattering sound on impact twisting and buckling into irregular shapes.

‘Hiroshi-kun! Ohara-san! You have to move! The roof is starting to fall down and you might get hit!’ Kyōto-sensei shouted towards them with hands cupped around his mouth to make sure that they heard him.

I saw Hiroshi slowly get to his feet and, supported by Ohara-san, he started to walk towards us very slowly as the fall and bang to his head made him move like a punch-drunk boxer. 

Abunai! ‘Watch out!’ Natsumi shouted as she saw that from above, some more sections of the roof had begun to shake loose.

As Ohara-san turned around, the heavy sheets landed on top of them and I saw him hold up an arm in an attempt to soften some of the blow and protect Hiroshi. The two of them disappeared under the metal. The screaming continued and Kinoshita-sensei rushed forward to help.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked as he reached where the two lay. ‘Somebody give me a hand to lift these off them.’

Kyōto-sensei sprinted towards where Kinoshita-sensei was now standing and between them they began heaving the roof sections off the two bodies lying on the ground. I saw some blood near Hiroshi and turned away in shock hoping that this was a dream. Even though I was not watching I could still hear everything that was going on and was also aware that the shaking had not stopped as a warehouse that I was now looking at caved in on one side and then collapsed onto the floor like an animal that had been shot with a tranquiliser dart, falling first onto its forelegs before finally rolling over and hitting the ground.

‘Hiroshi. Can you hear me?’ Kinoshita-sensei asked. ‘Hiroshi. Are you OK? Please say something.’

I turned back and saw Kinoshita-sensei kneeling by Hiroshi shaking him gently to try to get him to acknowledge and answer the question. Hiroshi did not move and the blood around his head was now pooling. I was sick all over the concrete in front of me and despite the situation noticed that there was still some undigested gobō in it.

‘Call an ambulance!’ Kinoshita-sensei shouted towards Ohara-san, who was starting to get to his feet.

Around us buildings were now falling freely and crash after crash was followed by clouds of dust billowing into the air. The screams continued and so did the earthquake.

There was a jolt and a huge section of the concrete close to where we were standing rose up out of the ground at one end and sunk into the ground at the other. Cracks had begun to appear even closer to us, something that was noticed by Ohara-san.

‘Get away from the port’s edge! It’s too dangerous!’ he shouted whilst unclipping his walkie-talkie from the point where his high-visibility vest joined in the centre of his chest.

‘Port control. This is Ohara. Over.’

‘Port control. Go ahead. Over.’

‘We need medical assistance. Student has hit his head and bleeding badly. Over.’

‘Will call for ambulance. Over.’

There was a brief pause.

‘The phone-lines are dead. No signal on mobile phone either. Over.’

‘Any first-aiders on site? Over.’ 

‘Yes. Am sending now. Over.’ 

‘Thank you. Out,’ Ohara-san terminated the conversation.

As we moved in a panic away from the cracking concrete, we got too close to another warehouse that was still shaking from the earthquake that had started just over a minute ago. This warehouse, too, couldn’t stand the battering and fell to the ground but in the opposite direction to where we were gathered.

‘Get away from the buildings!’ Kumi said and we all moved once more to the middle of the road.

The earthquake had finally stopped but in just a couple of minutes, the damage was plain to see. Numerous warehouses and other port buildings had either completely or partially collapsed. The port’s concourse looked like a poorly laid pavement with whole sections sticking up in the same manner as the one I had seen as it happened. The siren and flashing lights from a port authority car drove past us and towards where Kinoshita-sensei was desperately trying to stop the bleeding.

‘Haruka, are you OK?’ I asked, turning towards my friend.‘Yes, I’m alright,’ she said and ran over to hug me. Kowakatta! ‘That was so scary! I’ve never known such a big earthquake.’

‘Yes, it really was frightening,’ I agreed as thoughts of Okāsan suddenly entered my mind and I hoped that she was safe. ‘I didn’t think it would stop.’

Kyōto-sensei ran towards us and told us to stay close together and not to move. He also said that there was a very high chance of aftershocks. I wanted to know what was happening with Hiroshi and tried to see what the first-aiders were doing. I felt sick again when I saw Kinoshita-sensei holding Hiroshi in his arms.

‘Noooooooooo!’ our teacher cried, cutting through the silence that had followed the earthquake’s end.

‘What’s happened?’ Haruka asked.

‘I don’t know for sure, but I think that Hiroshi is dead,’ I replied, surprising myself with the lack of emotion in my voice.

She put her hands to her face and drew in breath before standing there in that same pose looking towards Hiroshi whose lifeless body was still being cradled by Kinoshita-sensei.

‘Really?’ Haruka said in disbelief. ‘Are you sure? He can’t be dead. He can’t be!’

Kyoto-sensei, heard Haruka and walked over to hold her as she started to shake and sob. This shocked me into realising what had happened and I slumped to the floor tears rolling down my face. All around us, as the news spread, people reacted either by expressing their feelings through shouting and crying or by falling silent and staring at nothing in particular as their brains struggled to process the unimaginable horror.

Japan had been placed on a giant vibrating plate and had been shaken to within an inch of its life.

Then came the voice over the public loudspeaker:

This is a tsunami warning announcement.

Please move to higher ground immediately.

This is a tsunami warning announcement.

Please move to higher ground immediately.

***

Shoichi sat in the music room at Ōfunato Elementary School. The practice had started earlier than usual as the wind orchestra in which he played was going to be performing at the school’s graduation ceremony later that month. The music teacher, Sugiyo-sensei had chosen the Ōfunato town song “Yesterday” by The Beatles as it was a song that all the students would be familiar with as it played every day at five o’clock in the afternoon as a reminder to children in the area that they should return home if out playing with friends.

For the past fifteen minutes, the practice session had been going well although the timing of the percussion section was off and Sugiyo-sensei was spending some time with them making sure that they played at exactly the right point and to exactly the right rhythm.

‘You need to be careful with your timing,’ he said. ‘At this point, the high hat cymbal comes in slightly louder than earlier in the piece so you need to make sure that you get that entry just right. The rhythm is ta ta-ta ta ta-ta ta ta-ta. I’ll count you in.’

Just as Sugiyo-sensei raised his conducting baton, there was a bang at the back of the music room and the bookshelf that held all the sheet music toppled forwards, scattering paper towards where they sat. It took the students a little while to realise what had happened but once the panes of glass started rattling and the doors started banging in their frames, they went into autopilot following the earthquake drills that they had run through on numerous occasions.

‘Earthquake!’ shouted Sugiyo-sensei. ‘Get across the room and under the tables!’

Shoichi still had the presence of mind to gently lay down his clarinet on the floor before sprinting across the room and sliding under one of the tables next to a couple of the other band members. He held onto one of the metal legs as they had been taught; if this turned out to be a strong quake the table may start to jump around. The familiar sensation of rocking from side to side began and the noise of rattling windows and of doors grew louder and more violent sounding. All of a sudden, a pane of glass fell out of one of the internal windows and shattered on the music room’s parquet flooring sending dangerous shards of glass skidding towards where they sheltered. A large and jagged piece slid into the knee of Fumi-chan, an oboe player, and it started to bleed although not profusely. Shoichi pulled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and offered it to her without saying a word. Fumi-chan had closed her eyes with both pain and fright although was not in shock and therefore used the cotton material to place under her wound as she knelt.

The sounds of panic – people shouting and screaming – came from outside as some of the students who were on the ground floor had exited and run across the baseball ground to assemble away from the school building. A large industrial crumbling noise of glass, concrete and steel, like that from a planned demolition, indicated that one of the nearby buildings had already succumbed to the power of these seismic waves that after the event would be calculated to have contained enough energy to power Los Angeles for an entire year.

The wheels on the bottom of the piano had not been locked and the relentless multilateral vibrations caused it to jump and roll across the smooth floor, ploughing through music stands and instruments until it finally tipped and fell with a discordant crash just by the doorway which had been left open by Sugiyo-sensei who had the forethought to ensure that their escape route would not be blocked if the frame twisted with the door still in it.

Shoichi had never before experienced an earthquake that had lasted so long and with each second that it continued the propensity for destruction increased as structural engineers’ calculations were tested to the very limits of their mathematical assumptions. Looking out from under the table the music room had been completed ransacked by nature. His careful laying down of the well-loved and well-used clarinet bought by his mother once he had passed Grade Four with one borrowed from the school seemed almost comical as it, together with most of the other instruments, had been bumped, banged and crushed.

More panes of glass, both internal and external, had been shaken from their frames although fortunately none had shattered in the same way as the first. Fumi-chan had been unlucky. After what he later found out to be two minutes but which had felt like ten, the earthquake stopped and silence temporarily swept over the room.

‘Is everybody OK? We must get outside as there could be aftershocks,’ Sugiyo-sensei said, surveying the room for injured students. ‘Move quickly but please do not rush for the exit as there is a lot of debris in the way.’

Despite his words, there was an understandable element of panic as the orchestra members picked themselves up off the floor and headed towards the door climbing over furniture, books, instruments and finally the fallen piano before reaching the corridor. Shoichi descended the stairs as quickly as he could considering that he was supporting Fumi-chan who was limping on account of her earlier injury. Halfway down, one of the aftershocks arrived as Sugiyo-sensei has forewarned they might and this served to heighten the panic and resolve of students fleeing from what could be a death-trap to the safety of the sports ground. Shoes squeaked on the polished vinyl floors as students rushed toward the main entrance to the school and outside to collapse on the floor in exhaustion.

Looking at the number of children around him, Shoichi felt that most of the students must have escaped the building unharmed. The teachers came out last having inspected the areas of the school assigned to them under the evacuation plan.

‘Please arrange yourselves into year groups,’ said Hashimoto-sensei, the head teacher of Ōfunato Elementary, through a hand-held loudspeaker. ‘Your homeroom teachers will be taking register to ensure that everybody got out safely. We will start with year six to my right and then move across as we go down through the year groups to year one on my far left by the pitcher’s mound.’

Shoichi was relieved to see that aside from Fumi-chan, none of the other students was obviously hurt and having helped her to where the fifth grade were gathered, made his way to where his classmates were standing. On his way there, he overheard a second year teacher, who was just completing her third term fully qualified, talking with the school nurse about class 4-A who had gone down to the port that afternoon on a field trip.

‘I hope that they are safe,’ Yoshida-sensei said. ‘There are so many large buildings out that way and you only need to look around here to see that many have fallen down.’ 

As she spoke another nearby dwelling creaked as the wooden structure, designed to wax and wane with earthquakes, finally gave way and collapsed in on itself.

As Shoichi recognised 4-A as Haruka’s class, the blood drained from his face. The words from the public address system caused a black veil to descend over his eyes as he became dizzy, lost balance and then consciousness.

This is a tsunami warning announcement.

Please move to higher ground immediately.

This is a tsunami warning announcement.

Please move to higher ground immediately.

***

Can’t wait to find out what happens next?

Washing Over Me is available as a download for Kindle or as a printed paperback, both from Amazon:

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