Free Facing the Wave by Gretel Ehrlich

overturned truck, a makeshift used-car lot, a muddy rice field, a boat jammed into a shrine.
    A Japanese Rail employee checks the twisted tracks. “During the tsunami whole trains disappeared, buried in mud, passengers still aboard,” Abyss-san says. Police cars with lights flashing pass us. It’s “rush hour”—a rush away from this painful scene.
    Bumper-to-bumper traffic as we pass a house split in three parts atop a damaged overpass, a crushed semi, a tin roof, a bent guardrail dangling. The road is gravel and mud. “The riverwas the highway the Wave took,” Abyss-san says. “All along this coast there were famous beach resorts. Now it’s all a ‘last resort!’ ”
Laughter
. “I sometimes wonder if it’s worse to survive,” he says softly.
    I ask Abyss-san if he has a girlfriend and he shakes his head no. “But I’d like one,” he says. Down by the ruined port he tries to find the spot where his former house once stood, but he can’t figure it out. Except for warehouses, there are no buildings left at all, as if the world had been taken back to a blank slate. “If there are no clues, no reference points, how can I know where I am, if I exist?” he asks.
    One last look at the ocean. “Every time the tide goes out, more bodies are found,” Abyss-san says. Rain beats hard on the roof of the van. “The radiation is much worse when there’s rain,” he reminds us. “It carries the airborne particles down to the ground.”
    A woman in a long black funeral dress, carrying an umbrella, runs on a narrow bank across a rice field.
    On the way to Abyss-san’s mountain house we stop on a hill. The view of Kesennuma is of a flattened city. “Just after the tsunami I sat here,” he says. “Fuel tanks all over the port were exploding. One fishing boat caught fire. Then it got loose from its moorings and drifted. Everything it touched burst into flames. Soon, hundreds of trawlers were burning. It was dark, night, snowing. Fishing boats were pieces of fire floating. They lit the harbor; they were the only lights. The entire world was on fire.”

Two Waves
    A tsunami wave is born from displacement, not wind, and does not travel over the ocean’s surface, but rises suddenly from the rupture zone and drags bottom all the way to shore. As it comes into shallow water, the wave mounds up, and its height increases dramatically. There are stories of fishing boats going out too late and flipping. They faced the Wave and died. None of their crews were seen again. On shore, the Wave plowed through harbors, ports, parking lots, houses, stores, temples, graveyards, and schools. Spilling over bridge railings, it was not a wave, but a black waterfall.
    The Wave lifted up and became a mountain. The mountain was water moving, annihilating itself in a crescendo of striated, dissolving foam. I thought it was only one wave, surging and recoiling, but images from the satellite called GRACE recently revealed that “the Wave” was actually a composite.
    Two seismically generated wave-fronts merged, deflected from different undersea ridges and troughs. As they moved forward, they came together to form a single wave that, when focused by a narrow harbor, had run-up heights as high as 133 feet.

Radiation News
    When news of the tsunami came over the radio, the Greenpeace ship
Rainbow Warrior
turned from direct-action, antiwhaling protests to radiation monitoring off the coast of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Their mission is to get at the truth of what has been called by marine biologists the “worst marine radiation contamination in history.” TEPCO and the Japanese government have been accused of falsifying numbers and the extent of the marine and airborne radiation pollution during and after the reactors’ meltdowns.
    “Radiation is a core issue for Greenpeace,” Wakao Hanaoka, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, says. He’s in his thirties, with short-cropped hair and a big belly. His eyes sparkle with enthusiasm