In Japanese folklore earthquakes are caused by a catfish, Namazu, that lives beneath the island archipelago and occasionally swishes his tail. He does so with ominous timing. In 1855 Japan was rocked by a big earthquake soon after American trading ships arrived on its shores, heralding the end of nearly three centuries of self-isolation. Namazu has historically been seen as a mischievous beast. Even when his thrashings don’t accompany events of earth-shattering importance, they often shake up a complacent elite and rebalance cosmic forces in favour of ordinary people.

Ten years ago, on March 11th 2011, Japan experienced the most powerful earthquake in its history. It triggered a 30-foot tsunami that killed almost 20,000 people in fishing and farming communities along the inlet-riven coastline of north-eastern Japan. The wave washed through the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power station, knocking out the power supply and causing a triple-meltdown. The worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl shook a country already in the midst of a prolonged political and economic malaise.

On the eve of Valentine’s Day this year the restless catfish struck again. Another tremor – which, remarkably, turned out to be an aftershock of the earthquake in 2011 – struck the same part of the north-east. In houses across Fukushima pictures fell off walls and bar owners were seen sweeping up bottles of whisky. Mercifully no one died. Yet in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, when many people were already feeling lonely and anxious, it stirred up memories of Namazu at his impish worst. A decade on from the near-biblical catastrophe, disquiet is still brewing.

Yokoyama Wakana was 12 when the tsunami killed her grandparents and swept away her village. Nearly one in ten of the 1,700 residents of Ukedo died as the wave barrelled through their homes and up the narrow roads, catching them as they tried to flee in their cars.

When the earth started trembling, Yokoyama was at school rehearsing for her graduation ceremony. The children, drilled for earthquakes, donned crash helmets and crouched under their desks. The school had no tsunami-evacuation plan, but quick-witted teachers made the children walk hand-in-hand for more than a mile over the swampy ground inland of Ukedo to a nearby hill, saving the children. Many older villagers later drowned trying to climb that hill.

The Fukushima nuclear-power complex is so close to what remains of Ukedo that on a clear morning its chimney stacks are eerily visible in the distance. In the days after the tsunami, plumes of radiation covered the whole area in an imperceptible carpet of caesium, rendering Ukedo uninhabitable, probably for decades. For a while it was too dangerous to search for the dead. Like so many others, the bodies of Yokoyama’s grandparents (her father’s parents), were left abandoned for weeks. For years, Ukedo was almost entirely off-limits to visitors. Radiation levels remain higher there than inland even now: former residents can return for day trips but are not allowed to stay.

The bodies of Yokoyama’s grandparents were left abandoned for weeks

I first interviewed Yokoyama a year after the tsunami, when I watched her dance in a Shinto pageant. The Amba Matsuri, or Festival of the Safe Wave, had been held in Ukedo each February, around the time of the lunar new year, for hundreds of years. According to tradition, schoolchildren would dress up in bamboo hats with red-and-yellow flowers, pink headscarves and spotted red robes, and dance through the village from the shrine to the sea.

The village’s fishermen, well-oiled and flamboyantly dressed to catch the attention of the gods, would carry on their shoulders a barrel of local sake atop a makeshift shrine, and plunge into the icy ocean with them, singing lustily. The dances evoked bountiful rice harvests in a place where yields were poor because of the sea breeze. The festival was also a homage to the sea, source of the village’s prosperity thanks to its modern fishing fleet. In effect, it celebrated rice, fish and booze: the three staples of a Japanese table.

The last Amba Matsuri to be performed with the usual jollity was in February 2011, a few weeks before the tsunami. It was particularly resonant for Yokoyama, because by tradition it was to be her last as a dancer. In mid-March she was due to graduate from her primary school. Once at junior high, she would be too old to dance.

The tsunami meant that Yokoyama never had a graduation ceremony, normally the first rite of passage in any child’s life in Japan. So she carried on dancing. Months after the tsunami, she and a group of fellow child-evacuees came together from shelters and new homes across north-eastern Japan to perform their traditional folk dances. The revival of the troupe owed everything to the children’s indomitable coach, Sasaki Shigeko, an auburn-haired woman in her early 60s, who also sung the haunting songs they danced to.

When I saw them perform in 2012 at Tokyo’s Meiji Jingu shrine, the capital’s finest, the summer heat was sweltering. The children, aged from five to early teens, were melting. Sweat washed lines through the white make-up on their faces. The heads of the youngest drooped with exhaustion. Yet none of them cried. As they danced they drew smiles and tears from those who watched.

At the time I was The Economist’s bureau chief in Tokyo, and when I interviewed Yokoyama she communicated her feelings as fluently and straightforwardly as she danced. She shone as she performed. She was proud of the responsibility she had been given: to keep alive her village’s traditions. Perhaps naively, I hoped that the dancers were emblematic of a new spirit of unity and regeneration in Japan.

Calamity can have a long and treacherous tail

In the aftermath of the tsunami, the question on everyone’s minds was how Japan could recover from the triple disaster the catfish had wrought. The country was already struggling to regain its former drive: the economy was stagnating, its workforce was greying and shrinking, and the political class was stuck in a rut. Youngsters had already fled the depressed rural backwater at the quake’s epicentre, moving to the cities to find jobs. And the nuclear accident revealed how the establishment, fully aware of the potent legacy of the atomic bombing of Japan, nevertheless stifled debate about building nuclear plants close to active fault lines.

Yet when I visited Tohoku, the region of north-east Japan hit by the tsunami, it was easy to see the potential for a rebirth. People showed an unusual openness when discussing the horrors they had suffered. Previously I had rarely been invited into people’s homes. Now villagers walked me through the remains of living rooms and bedrooms, and showed me photos salvaged from the wreckage. Nine days after the earthquake, when I visited a port that had been engulfed by oil fires after the tsunami, resilient residents were picking through the charred debris: “Just you come back in ten years’ time,” they told me.

Sadly, because of the pandemic, I couldn’t. Instead I did the next best thing and scheduled video calls with Yokoyama, now 22, as well as Sasaki, the doughty leader of her dance troupe.

The young dancers have continued to come together from around north-eastern Japan. Still shepherded by Sasaki, they have toured the shrines of Japan and appeared on national television. They have even performed in Ukedo. What was once an amateur, village-level celebration has become a sharper version of itself; the slow, stylised steps performed with pinpoint precision, in time with Sasaki’s songs.

Yokoyama is now a university student in Sendai, one of the biggest cities in north-eastern Japan. As the best-known dancer in the troupe, Yokoyama is often followed by television crews and takes part in local campaigns. These days she is frequently interviewed as the young face of the tsunami, rather than because of her dancing. A friend, slightly tongue in cheek, calls her “the Greta Thunberg of Fukushima”.

I wondered whether Yokoyama’s modest fame, coupled with the hurly-burly of student life, had eased some of the pain of the past. I hoped that I had been right to be optimistic ten years ago and that Japan, to borrow a vogueish phrase, had been able to build back better and recover its dynamism. Unfortunately, like the Namazu, calamity can have a long and treacherous tail.

The sea is a source of succour and strife in Japan. As an island nation it has historically offered protection from invaders. In its north-eastern waters, colliding currents of warm and Arctic waters make for some of the world’s richest fishing. But the ocean is also a vulnerability. Tsunamis are so common that the word originated in Japan: tsu means harbour, nami means wave. Even before the catastrophe of 2011, Japan’s coast was lined with concrete sea walls, standing like battlements.

Until the tsunami, Yokoyama’s life had been bound up with the sea. She lived in one of the biggest houses in Ukedo, so close to the shore that crabs scuttled through the garden. Her grandfather was the village shipbuilder. When she came home from school she would sit on a swing he’d built for her and watch him in his workshop, which adjoined the house she lived in with her parents, grandparents and brother.

The school clock was frozen at 2.46pm, the moment of the quake

She loved the way her grandfather wielded the tools. His craft was recognised across Fukushima. In the prefectural museum, I came across one of his small wooden sailing boats next to a wooden figure of a sea spirit made by Yokoyama’s great-grandfather. Yokoyama’s face lit up when I told her I’d seen them.

With her mask and glasses on – and speaking via Zoom – it was hard to see the face of the girl I once knew. Yet her laughter and manner are the same. When Yokoyama hears the crashing of waves today, she says, it brings back warm memories of her grandparents. She still cherishes them, and uses a replica of her grandfather’s licence plate on her car. She thinks of her grandparents whenever she sees tomatoes: Yokoyama’s grandmother would pile the table with them but she always hated the way they tasted, she says, chuckling.

Though Yokoyama hasn’t lost her sense of humour, the after-effects of the tsunami still haunt her. She confesses to having panicked last night when the fridge started to slide across the floor of the flat she rents near her university: she knew it was another earthquake. Yet as we talk it becomes clear that her loss runs far deeper than the response to a brief shock. Moving city, growing up, even becoming a minor celebrity has not softened her grief.

Part of this is a mourning for her childhood home. Ten years on, Ukedo is a “desert”, she says, spitting out the words. All traces of the houses are gone. She struggles to make sense of the peculiar boxes, painted brilliant white, into which radiated debris is shovelled and burned. Some smoulder eerily. The sea wall has been raised, widened and painted a garish pink; she vividly remembers the view of the sea from where her house had stood: “Now all I can see is concrete.”

Her family lived next door to the revered Kotobuki sake distillery, which lubricated the villagers during the religious jamborees. Close by was the ornate Kusano shrine, whose gods were supposed to protect seafarers and farmers. The shrine had once been the village’s most elaborate building: Yokoyama tells me dismissively that a newly built replica is no higher than my golden retriever, whose head had just popped up on the screen.

I ask about the primary school, a giant building on the outskirts of Ukedo and the only structure in the village left untouched by the tsunami (it was severely damaged by the earthquake). Yokoyama has campaigned to preserve the school as a monument to her vanished village; she hoped the site would one day be filled again with cheerful voices. Her father is a well-respected teacher, and Yokoyama was a good student. I remember her teacher telling me how painstakingly she worked on her calligraphy (she is amused by this memory, saying she gave it up as soon as she could).

I visited the school in 2012, disguised as someone involved in the nuclear clean-up in order to evade the roadblocks. One of the clocks inside the school was frozen at 2.46pm, the moment of the quake. Another showed 3.40pm, when the tsunami hit. Walking through the deserted building, I found Yokoyama’s desk and notebooks. Yokoyama went back to the school a few years ago. In the drawer of her teacher’s desk she discovered two compact discs, which had been given to her by her grandparents to play at the graduation ceremony. To her bitter regret, she left them where they were, deciding that she had no right to remove something from a teacher’s desk. Deference still bound her.

Perhaps naively, I hoped that the dancers were emblematic of a new spirit of unity and regeneration in Japan

There are other sorrows, too. After the quake, many Japanese adopted a mantra of gambatte, or “keep at it”, rather than encouraging people to express their pain or grief. Only once was Yokoyama offered psychological support, shortly after the tsunami. It was the first time that she acknowledged the “desperation and emptiness” caused by the events. The school counsellor helped “lift my burden”, she says, inspiring her so much that she decided to study psychology at university.

She is disdainful of the way the country treats people’s emotional needs: psychologists in Japan are poorly paid and undervalued; suicide helplines are engaged when people phone, she says. She once filled in a psychological assessment for people who had to flee the tsunami. She admitted to struggling with her emotions, yet no one ever contacted her.

There are occasional glimmers of a happier Yokoyama when she talks about hanging out with close friends, her basketballing brother or her love of anime. But after a decade overlain with sorrow, the pandemic has exacerbated her sense of disorientation. She feels “lost” and unmotivated, stuck alone in her one-room flat the size of “eight to ten tatami mats” and attending university classes via Zoom.

The past has cast long shadows over her future. When she finishes her degree this year she is considering abandoning psychology and trying instead to get a job at a new museum near Ukedo commemorating the earthquake. The tsunami had robbed her of the chance to attend her primary-school graduation ceremony. Now, covid-19 means her family and friends will not be able to attend her university graduation. She believes she lives in a cursed age.

Sasaki, the dance-troupe leader, was also rattled by the earthquake on February 13th. Her nerves had already been rubbed raw by covid (unlike a tsunami, you can’t run away from it, she tells me). The tremor jolted her: she put on her shoes, fearing a repeat of the giant quake, but the power was out so she couldn’t use the lift. As she was fretting, she heard a rumbling sound. She stored the children’s colourful dance costumes in a wheeled trunk in a cupboard; when the floor swayed, it burst out.

Now 70, Sasaki lives in a council flat in Iwaki, a small city a couple of hours’ drive down the coast from Yokoyama’s home. After the tsunami she moved to Tokyo to be near one of her grown-up children, but she returned to Fukushima in 2013. It was hard to manage her dancers from a distance.

When I spoke to her on Zoom, Sasaki had just come back from a bitterly cold, wet visit to Ukedo and her hair was windswept. She lamented that there was little left of the village apart from the untended headstones and marble urns in the graveyard. She showed me an unusual souvenir, a slice of fresh fish in a white polystyrene dish that she’d bought from a fishmonger in Ukedo: the only sign of life in the village. I asked her cheekily whether it was radioactive. No, she said, it had been checked for radiation. “That probably makes it safer than most fish in Japan,” she quipped.

When I last met her, in 2012, she was still in her one-room flat in Tokyo. The tower block had as many flats as there were houses in the whole of Ukedo. Shortly after she arrived, the body of a neighbour was found: his corpse had lain undiscovered for days. Yet she expressed surprise at how welcoming the people of Tokyo had been to her. It was different in Fukushima, she said. In rural Japan people were colder, more distant, less trusting.

There are occasional glimmers of a happier Yokoyama as she talks about hanging out with close friends or her love of anime

Villages like Ukedo are revered by some and reviled by others. They provide bonds of community, culture and tradition that are hard to replicate in cities. Yet they offer little chance to escape from the prying eyes of neighbours. Only deep indoors can people – particularly women – be themselves. The young tend to leave as soon as they can. It’s not unusual to see 80-year-olds in rural Japan driving tractors or piloting fishing boats.

People in Fukushima are proud of where they are from and keen to keep up appearances. When I first visited Ukedo, dressed in a hazmat suit to avoid radiation sickness, the family that showed me around then strapped weedkiller dispensers onto their backs and started blitzing what used to be the lawn of their house. The grass had survived the tsunami, but the radiation had made it a no-go zone for months afterwards. The surrounding areas were overrun with jungle-like vegetation, as well as foraging cows and bug-eyed ostriches that had fled from a local farm. In the middle of a wasteland, the family chose to attack the weeds. When a friend took a step inside their ghostly wooden house to take a photo, its owner hissed at him to take off his shoes.

Yet pride sometimes has a dark side. Close-knit communities can be unwelcoming to those they perceive to be outsiders. Sasaki grew up on a farm a few miles away and moved to Ukedo at the age of 20 to get married. Her house was built of wood chopped from her father’s land. Throughout her life in Ukedo, she says, she was treated as an outsider by villagers, including, at times, by her own husband. The village elders discouraged her from singing in the Amba Matsuri festival because she wasn’t local – until they realised she was the only option.

The tsunami swept away her home and all her mementoes of family life. It destroyed her job too – she worked in a hotel that catered mostly to workers of the nearby nuclear-power station (she was driving there as the quake struck, and at first she thought it was the rubbish lorry that was making the road judder and flex). But Sasaki has let neither local enmity nor disaster destroy her passion for singing and dancing.

Once she started running the dance troupe, she embraced it. In the winter she would rush home from work to gather the children for rehearsals. She continued even after her husband died of cancer and their children had left home. Yet for all her efforts, being a woman has often worked against her in a highly male-dominated village community. And even today, some of the old guard give her the cold shoulder. “I lived in Ukedo for 40 years and still they consider me an outsider. It’s very painful.”

Social divisions are an enduring theme in Japan. Fukushima is an area of stunning archaeological significance. The world’s first clay kitchenware, known as Jomon pots, originated in the region thousands of years ago. Yet throughout Japanese history, the people of Fukushima and farther north have often, like Sasaki, been treated as outsiders in their own land. They were considered insubordinate barbarians, often looked down on even after they were enfolded into Japanese society. It is no accident that Fukushima was the first prefecture exploited to provide water power to electrify Tokyo, and later nuclear power.

After a decade overlain with sorrow, the pandemic has now exacerbated her sense of disorientation

The conservative authorities in Fukushima were easily bought off with the promise of subsidies, turning a deaf ear even when campaigners warned that it could be dangerous to build a nuclear-power complex next to a fault line and tsunami zone. In pre-quake Ukedo no one complained about the nuclear-power plant on their doorstep. Each time a new reactor was built, the electricity company gave money to local fishermen, which paid for bigger engines in the fishing boats and enabled them to travel farther out to sea.

A decade after the tsunami, the legacy of nuclear failure remains in flux. Only nine of the country’s 54 reactors shut down in its aftermath have been switched back on. All the plants in the north-eastern region, the main sources of supply to Tokyo, remain closed (one is slated for reopening). When the tsunami struck, the initial response at the Fukushima reactor was paralysis rather than action. The concern is that even now, Japan has not learnt lessons about how to improve the safety culture.

Even the legacy of the tsunami remains in dispute. Though press attention in 2011 focused overwhelmingly on the nuclear emergency, there has been only one confirmed death from radiation exposure. Some reckon that the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, a high proportion of them elderly, from towns near the power station was an overreaction. According to the Japanese government, hundreds more people died because of stress, suicide or missing out on medical care due to the chaos of evacuation. Nevertheless, many people, especially parents, still worry about the long-term health effects of radiation exposure, such as the increased risk of thyroid cancer. Yokoyama holds up a certificate to show she’s been checked for radiation – but only occasionally.

I ask Yokoyama what she has struggled with most over the past ten years. She says “identity”, using a Japanese pronunciation of the English word because it is not one commonly used in Japan. She used to have “a very strong identity as an Ukedo resident”, she says. Now she’s older she has a “big dilemma”: she keeps asking herself, “Where am I from?”

The past intrudes in jarring ways. When she first applied for a driving licence, she said her hometown was Ukedo. “That’s just because you want to get compensation for the nuclear accident,” an official said, smirking. It infuriated her. Sasaki, who says she received no compensation from the company that ran the power station, quit a part-time job washing vegetables after her boss asked her, mockingly, why she still needed to work. And so the people of Fukushima are being treated as barbarians again, more quietly this time, shunned for reminding the rest of Japan of their national catastrophe, shunned for accepting compensation payouts from the company that exacerbated that crisis.

Yokoyama enjoys studying in Sendai because the city is big enough for her to blend in and not feel like an outsider from a forgotten village. She describes her memories of Ukedo as “precious”, but sometimes she wonders whether she should put them behind her and move on. She fell in love with dancing when she first watched a visiting tour group in Ukedo as a child, and was “deeply touched” when Sasaki contacted her and brought the children together after the tsunami. Dancing was a drop of joy in a bleak world – and a chance to see her friends again. She still enjoys performing: she keeps a record of her appearances on TV and in newspapers, which act almost “like a diary”.

But the connection between dancing and her past is a blighted one. Other members of the troupe, particularly her contemporaries, are envious of the media attention she has attracted, she says. This has also driven a wedge between her and Sasaki, who used to talk about one day handing over the reins to Yokoyama. Yokoyama dances less often now, and has smaller parts.

She believes she lives in a cursed age

Yokoyama would like to help manage the troupe and do the singing but says that Sasaki won’t let her: “She doesn’t like me anymore.” A few days before we spoke, the 83-year-old head of the Olympic committee, Mori Yoshiro, resigned after making sexist comments. Another octogenarian was put forward to replace him, causing a firestorm on social media, especially from young women, which led to a younger candidate being appointed. For Yokoyama, it’s a timely analogy: “Why does Japanese society not want young people on the main stage?”

Sasaki dismisses this idea. She thinks Yokoyama is “too young to be a leader” and isn’t capable of handling the complicated logistics of stewarding young dancers and coping with the demands of bossy parents. Yokoyama’s own parents continue to act as gatekeepers of her reputation and status; her father is her PR manager.

Understandably, Sasaki is reluctant to cede such a large part of her identity. The disaster “ripped the ground from under my feet”, she says. These days, she claims, “I only look forward, I don’t look back” although, for her too, the troupe is clearly a link to all she has lost. The dances have given her life meaning and stability: “I don’t need counsellors.” But she acknowledges that there are troubles: one of the biggest sources of tension, she says sadly, is with Yokoyama and her family.

Though they perform together, Sasaki and Yokoyama no longer speak to each other. It is a difficult moment for healing. Because of the pandemic, this February was the first time in years that the dancers were unable to return to Ukedo to perform the Amba Matsuri, which was another blow to morale. Ten years after they lost almost everything, the two women are fighting over a fragment of one of the few things they managed to salvage.■

Henry Tricks is The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist and former Tokyo bureau chief. His previous story from Fukushima can be read here

PHOTOGRAPHS: IRWIN WONG