Anniversary of the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

[betsuni]

"Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard, and smelled something subtly different. ... The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai ... . The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat. It stank of brine, mud, and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverized matter that floats above a demolished building. ... 'It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn't like the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.' ... 'What stays in my memory is pine trees, and the legs and arms of the children sticking out from under the mud and the rubbish.'

"For the first time in a century of human development, the land was in a historic, virgin darkness. No illuminated windows blazed upwards to obscure the patterning of the night sky; without traffic lights, drivers stayed off the unlit streets. The stars in their constellations and the blue river of the Milky Way were vivid in a way that few inhabitants of the developed world would ever see. 'Before nightfall, snow fell,' Kaneta said. 'All the dust of modern life was washed by it to the ground. It was sheer darkness. And it was intensely silent, because there were no cars. It was the true night sky that we hardly ever see, the sky filled with stars. Everyone who saw it talks about that sky.'

"'There were strange smells of dead bodies and mud. ... The men of religion began to feel self-conscious. ... 'The Christian pastor was trying to sing hymns, but none of the hymns in the book seemed right. I couldn't even say the sutra -- it came out in screams and shouts.' The priests lurched uselessly in the rubble in their rich robes, croaking the scriptures, getting in the way. 'And when we got to the sea -- we couldn't face it. It was if we couldn't interpret what we were seeing.' He said, 'We realized that, for all we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. ... I realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and the only way forward was to take it off.'

Richard Lloyd Parry, "Ghosts of the Tsunami, Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone"