The ruins of Miyagi prefecture’s Taga castle; at right, children in the same region a month after the quake share food rations.
July 13, 869
The land of Mutsuno-kuni trembled and greatly shook. Thunderstorms covered the night sky, lighting it up as if it was daylight. Immediately afterwards, the people cried and screamed, unable to get up from the ground. In some instances, the houses fell on them and they died under the weight, and in other instances, the earth sheared open and some died buried alive under the earth and sand. The cattle ran in surprise, stampeding each other. Numerous walls, gates, storage sheds, and the moat fell and were turned upside down. The mouth of the sea howled, sounding like thunder. And the violent waves and high tides arrived, going upstream into the rivers, continuing until, in the blink of an eye, they reached the wall of the Taga Castle. The scene of the flood that had extended several dozen li was so vast you could not tell where the sea ended and the land started. Plains and roads all turned into the ocean. There was no time to get onto boats or to climb the mountains; a thousand people drowned. Nothing -- property and fields -- remained; everything was utterly destroyed.
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— Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku (901)
A boy has been walking like this for several days now, going from one evacuation shelter to another, still shy around strangers, but he knows that if he does not do this, no one will. The missing person's report can be filed if someone is still alive and looking for them; if the entire family has died, then there is no one left to file the missing report. He does not know who told this to him -- maybe a helpful adult trying to cheer him up, maybe the man who took him in -- but the boy knows that he is the only person alive in his family. It was only a week ago: He remembers his parents in the front seat; he remembers his cousins and his grandmother in the backseat; he remembers the car speeding along the familiar road, away from the elementary school, as quickly as it could, away from the oncoming waves; he remembers his mother screaming, The waves, turn to the left, left, he remembers breaking the window open when the car was suddenly engulfed, underwater, tossed around, with so many familiar objects turning deadly: corpses, vending machines, telephone wires, shelves. He remembers holding his cousin's hands as they broke away from the car, and waves tossing them in, out, as his grandmother screamed for help, and the hands letting go. He remembers losing consciousness, then he woke up, and found himself adrift on a board.
That is all he remembers. He does not remember what happened to his family. Nor what happened to the car that was supposed to be carrying them to safety, but didn't. Now, he walks from one shelter to another, walking between homeless people, too shy to call out the names of his family on the sign he holds up, too scared to ask around whether anyone knows anything about his family. Who will look for them if he doesn't? He is the only one left, and even though he is only eight years old, he knows that he is the only person who can look for them, because there is no one else.
Wikmedia Commons; AFP/Getty Images
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