In Germany as well as in many other countries, images of extreme floods often found their way on postcards. Here is a selection of postcards. (click on the image to find the online source)
1909
1910
1914
1920
1920
1929
2002
undated postcard from Tokyo, Japan
undated postcard from Panama, probably 1924
2019 Japanese anime movie “Children of the Sea” (original title: 海獣の子供, which translates roughly as “Children of Sea Monsters”) is set in a fictitious island in the Okinawa region of Japan. The movie directed by Ayumu Watanabe puts a lot of effort into creating the image of a culture and a way of life, that is aquatic or located in a fluid continuum between dry land and water, the city and the sea. Here are screen shots from two scenes of intense tropical rainstorm that blur the distinction between land and sea.
Another noteworthy scene is the following, set on a pier that is aligned with concrete tetrapopds. These tetrapods have been used since the 1950s all over the world to protect coasts against erosion and flooding. They are particularly prominent across Okinawa and have come to define the look of the coasts there. (See the wiki article here)
Since the movie’s plot is about the meeting and friendship between two brothers born in the sea and a city girl and the girl’s eventual emergence into the underwater world, the tripods here seem to symbolize the community’s effort to maintain the separation between land and sea and protect it’s people from the forces bur also the allure of the ocean.
“Hundreds of tsunami stones stand along the coast of Japan, stark warnings and reminders of the devastating impact of the country’s all too frequent tidal waves. The oldest were erected more than 600 years ago; some have been washed away by ever more powerful waves.”
This is a quote and image from an online article about this cultural heritage that came to prominence as a shocking example of the negligence of cultural heritage in our age. Of course these stones can be found as well in Kesennuma, the province that was hit hardest by the 2011 Tsunami, which also caused the Fukushima Nuclear Accident. I unfortunately do not remember, in which text I first found the reference.
The article goes on with the following list:
“Japan has borne the brunt of some of the worst tsunamis in history. In 1707, a tsunami caused by the Hōei earthquake killed more than 5,000 people. The Great Yaeyama Tsunami of 1771 killed 8,439 people on Ishigaki Island and 2,548 more on Miyako. In 1896, the Sanriku earthquake sent two tsunamis crashing into coastal settlements, destroying some 9,000 homes and killing at least 22,000. More recently, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 left 15,894 dead, 6,156 injured, and 2,546 missing.”
But there are also apparently cases, where people were smart enough to do follow the advice enscribed on the century old stones:
“One particularly well-documented tsunami stone stands in the village of Aneyoshi on Japan’s northeastern coast. Aneyoshi had endured two devastating tsunamis, one in 1896 and another in 1933. The stone was placed shortly after the 1933 tsunami, a four-foot-high marker located just above the tsunami’s highest reach. It reads: “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
When the stone was placed, the remaining residents of Aneyoshi—there were only four—moved uphill for good. Heeding the advice of the tsunami stone, they moved above the reach of the last tsunami, which undoubtedly saved them from being devastated once again in the tsunamis of 1960 and 2011.”
In her book published in 2013, Sri Lanka born academic and writer Deraniyagala describes her experiences as a flood victim in the Tsunami of 2004 in the Indian Ocean, refered to in English speaking countries as “Boxing Day Tsunami”. Much of the book is devoted to her struggles dealing with the loss of several family members, particularly her two sons and her husband. In one of the final chapters, the narator comes back to the coast of Sri Lanka. While being on a whale watching tour on a small boat out at sea, she eventually finds peace and comfort. The year is 2011: seven years after the events and just some days after the second major tsunami event in the 21. Century, the Tsunami off the Tohoku coast in Japan on March 11. This is an excerpt from the book:
“The men working on the boat tell us they haven’t sighted whales in this sea for some days now. Not since the tsunami in Japan, they say, and they wonder if these creatures were disturbed by it. It is five days now since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. And I’ve not been able to keep away from those television images. As much as they horrify me, I want to see the meanness of that black water as it crumples whole cities in its path. So this is what got us, I thought, when I saw waves leaping over seawalls in Japan. This is what I was churning in. I never saw the scale of it then. This same ocean. Staring at me now all blue and innocent. How it turned.”
“Where were these whales when the sea came for us? I wonder. Were they in this same ocean? Did they feel a strangeness then? Another whale who was in the distance has come closer now. I hear a loud, low bellow as it exhales. Now the whale inhales. Resounding in this vastness I hear a doleful sigh.”
“These blue whales are unreal and baffling, yet surrounded by them I settle awhile. Somehow on this boat I can rest with my disbelief about what happened, and with the impossible truth of my loss, which I have to compress often and misshape, just so I can bear it—so I can cook or teach or floss my teeth. Maybe the majesty of these creatures loosens my heart so I can hold it whole.”
In this passage, the whales take on the role of ambassadors or links between the two distant coasts and the two distant events, the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, but also between the ocean and the Woman on the boat. Without any false placation, she is even more aware of the dangers of the sea, she is reconciled with the sea and her own impaired identity.
The whole book is available for free online.
Waves are a popular element in Japanese arts and crafts, particularly in the many wood carvings from the 19. century, like the famous “Great Wave” (around 1830) by Hokusai. Here is an example, a small saucer from a random Asian food store in Germany:
In an insttruction book from 1903 Japanese artist Mori Yuzan displayed and explained hundreds of wave designs. the book can be viewed for free at archive.org:
Tōrō nagashi ( 灯籠流し or 灯篭流し) is a Japanese ritual usually performed as part of the Festival of the Dead – O-bon (お盆) or Bon – in summer but also in connection to various other important events. In the ceremony people set lit paper lanterns afloat on a river or on the ocean, simbolizing the souls of the deceased returning to the afterlife. According to traditional Japanese believe, all life comes from the water. The ritual is however not unique to Japan, it is also performed in various forms in China, Korea and Hawaii.
In Richard L. Parry’s book “Ghosts of the Tsunami” one of the interviewees makes a connection between the ritual and the destruction of the town Naburi during the tsunami in 2011:
“An old fisherman named Yuichiro Kamiyama had moored his boat and gone about the houses, chivvying the villagers up the steep hill. From there, they watched the water withdrawing from the harbour, and returning unstoppably to overwhelm first the sea wall, then the road and then the alleys dividing the wooden houses, until it lifted them up and spun them around on its frothing surface. The water rose and rose through the pines on the hillside towards the spot where the dumbfounded villagers were watching. A few feet below where they crouched, it slowed and withdrew.
The sight reminded Kamiyama of the summer Festival of the Dead, when illuminated paper lanterns are set adrift on the tide to guide the spirits back across to the far world. ‘The houses receded all together, along with the sea,’ he said. “They were all in a row, like the festival lanterns, floating out over the sea wall. And the electricity poles too, with the wires between them. Those wires are strong — they didn’t break. They were all taken back intact into the sea. Perhaps I shouldn’t say so, but it was beautiful.’”
from: Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami. (2017), pp 109
see also this post.
In his beautifully written account of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, northern Japan, and it’s aftermath, Richard L. Parry also describes the role of the cult of ancestory in grievance for those who died in the tsunami. Vacant home addresses for example play a recurring role in how people were dealing with grief and loss. Perry’s account gives an example of societies using old customs and believe systems in sometimes unexpected ways to help them deal with current loss.
The following excpert is from pages 99 – 102 of the 2017 edition of “Ghosts of the Tsunami” by R.L. Parry:
“Haltingly, apologetically, then with increasing fluency, the survivors spoke of the terror of the wave, the pain of bereavement and their fears for the future. They also talked about encounters with the supernatural.
They described sightings of ghostly strangers, friends and neighbours, and dead loved ones. They reported hauntings at home, at work, in offices and public places, on the beaches and in the ruined towns. The experiences ranged from eerie dreams and feelings of vague unease to cases of outright possession.
A young man complained of pressure on his chest at night, as if some creature was straddling him as he slept. A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who squatted in her house. A middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain, because of the eyes of the dead, which stared out at him from puddles.
A civil servant in Soma visited a devastated stretch of coast and saw a solitary woman in a scarlet dress far from the nearest road or house, with no means of transport in sight. When he looked for her again, she had disappeared.
A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died— and the ghostly calls ceased.
A taxi in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no long existed. Halfway through the journey, the driver looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the levelled foundations of a destroyed house and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.
At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbour would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.
Such stories came from all over the devastated area. Priests — Christian and Shinto, as well as Buddhist – found themselves called on repeatedly to quell unhappy spirits. A Buddhist monk wrote an article in a learned journal about ‘the ghost problem’, and academics at Tohoku University began to catalogue the stories. In Kyoto, the matter was debated at a scholarly symposium.
“Religious people all argue about whether these are really the spirits of the dead,’ [priest] Kaneta told me. ‘I don’t get into it, because what matters is that people are seeing them, and in these circumstances, after this disaster, it is perfectly natural. So many died, and all at once. At home, at work, at school – the wave came in and they were gone. The dead had no time to prepare themselves. The people left behind had no time to say goodbye. Those who lost their families, and those who died – they have strong feelings of attachment. The dead are attached to the living, and those who have lost them are attached to the dead. It’s inevitable that there are ghosts.’
He said: ‘So many people are having these experiences. It’s impossible to identify who and where they all are. But there are countless such people, and their number is going to increase. And all we do is treat the symptoms.’
When opinion polls put the question ‘How religious are you?’, Japanese rank among the most ungodly people in the world. It took a catastrophe for me to understand how misleading this selfassessment is. It is true that the organised religions, Buddhism and Shinto, have little influence on private or national life, But over the centuries both have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors.
I knew about the household altars, or butsudan, which are still seen in most homes and on which the memorial tablets of dead ancestors — the ihai — are displayed. The butsudan are cabinets of lacquer and gilt, with openwork carvings of flowers and trees; the ihai are upright tablets of black lacquered wood, vertically inscribed in gold. Offerings of flowers, incense, food, fruit and drinks are placed before them; at the summer Festival of the Dead, families light lanterns to welcome home the ancestral spirits. I had taken these picturesque practices to be matters of symbolism and custom, attended to in the same way that people in the West will participate in a Christian funeral without any literal belief in the words of the service. But in Japan spiritual beliefs are regarded less as expressions of faith than as simple common sense, so lightly and casually worn that it is easy to miss them altogether. ‘The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,’ wrote the religious scholar Herman Ooms. “It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do… even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.’
At the heart of ancestor worship is a contract. The food, drink, prayers and rituals offered by their descendants gratify the dead, who in turn bestow good fortune on the living. Families vary in how seriously they take these ceremonies, but even for the unobservant, the dead play a continuing part in domestic life. For much of the time, their status is something like that of beloved, deaf and slightly batty old folk who cannot expect to be at the centre of the family, but who are made to feel included on important occasions. Young people who have passed important entrance examinations, got a job or made a good marriage kneel before the butsudan to report their success. Victory or defeat in an important legal case, for example, is shared with the ancestors in the same way.
When grief is raw, the presence of the deceased is overwhelming. In households that had lost children in the tsunami, it became routine, after half an hour of tea and chat, to be asked if I would like to ‘meet’ the dead sons and daughters. I would be led to a shrine covered with framed photographs, with toys, favourite drinks and snacks, letters, drawings and school exercise books.
One mother commissioned carefully photoshopped portraits of her children, showing them as they would have been had they lived – a boy who died in primary school smiling proudly in high-school uniform, an eighteen-year-old girl as she should have looked in kimono at her coming-of-age ceremony. Another decked the altar with make-up and acrylic fingernails that her daughter would have worn if she had lived to become a teenager. Here, every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.”
In japanese culture, disasters are commonly interpreted as a call and chance for renewal. The then governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara published a statement only two days after the Tsunami of March 2011 calling “the disaster a punishment from heaven because Japanese have become greedy. […] We should avail of this tsunami to wash away this greed. I think this is a divine punishment. ” Shintaro was a controversial figure, an extreme right-wing politician, but also a popular literary author and former film maker. He later apologized for the statement and in 2012 resigned as governor of Tokyo. Still, this concept is quite popular among Japanese who are also very much accustomed to natural disasters. It is called yonaoshi (世直し) which translates as world renewal or great revolution.
Sources from: Christian Rumrich, Sichtbares und Unsichtbares, in: Mensch. Natur. Katastrophe. Von Atlantis bis heute. Mannheim: 2o14
Japanese culture has a long history of natural disasters, mostly earth quakes. Also the so called Triple-Disaster of 2011 was caused by an earthquake, which caused a Tsunami and then the explosions at the Fukushima atomic plant. In Japanese culture the catfish symbolizes the unstable ground the islands are built on. According to mythology a giant catfish, called Namazu (鯰) or Ōnamazu (大鯰) , lives underneath the island. the god Takemikazuchi holds it down with a heavy stone. When the catfish is released, he stirs violently and earthquakes happen. There is a whole genre of woodprint images called namazu-e depicting scenes from japanese life and politics always featuring one or more catfish.
In the US-American 2014 movie Godzilla, the cityscape – in this case the coastal city San Francisco – experiences an interesting reversal of the culture-nature-dichotomy. The city here is not the place of culture and humanity, but the battle site of a fight between two animal species (Godzilla and the Mutos) – a jungle where creators fight one another mercilessly. In this first image, the soldiers with their parachutes are descending from heaven like fallen angels. The imagery implies, that the city is in fact the underworld, hell.
Once the fight is over and nature has had it’s way (Godzilla killed the Mutos while apparently dying herself too) the shape of Godzilla’s body on the ground morphes with the ruins of the city. Animal and city appear as one. But the image also quote another deaster, that was caused by humans and NOT nature: 9/11.
The monster Godzilla is originally a Japanese creation and has been adapted by Hollywood. Gojira, as she is originally called, is part of the extraordinarily rich cultural heritage of desaster metaphors and narratives in Japan, reflecting the seismic instability of the islands and the long experience in dealing with natural desasters and extreme weather events. The US-american movie shows how the trope is adapted to a different cultural setting.