It’s Ohigan in Japan right now, the biannual Buddhist holiday that falls on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. As winter morphs into spring, the boundary between the spirit and physical worlds thins and deceased ancestors visit their relatives. Tombstones are cleaned and graves swept so that they are in good shape for the homecoming. The living, meanwhile, are called upon to remember “the other shore,” though this doesn’t necessarily mean mortality; crossing over to the spirit world is synonymous with enlightenment.
For the Buddhist temple Empukuji, in Iwaki City, the ritual of Ohigan brings daily visitors. Iwaki City, located on the northeast coast of Japan and about a hundred and twenty-six miles south of Sendai City, was hard hit by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. It’s an area I know well; I’ve been visiting Iwaki and Empukuji, which is run by my family, since I was four years old, and set much of my novel, “Picking Bones from Ash,” in Japan’s beautiful north. Most of Iwaki’s more than three hundred thousand residents evacuated long ago, but Sempou Mita, who is my cousin and the temple’s head priest, has staunchly refused to leave with them.
Mita is a kindly, round-faced man in his late sixties, and is not concerned with his own safety. His job—to tend to anyone who is suffering and in need of comfort—is a growth area in a shattered economy. “I would only leave if I were the last person standing in this town,” he says. Fear of radiation may make his prediction a reality. The temple, which is of the Sotoshu or Zen sect, is located about twenty-five miles from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The temple’s precise distance from the plant places it in bureaucratic limbo: outside the mandatory twelve-mile evacuation zone imposed by Japanese authorities, and just beyond the twelve-to-nineteen mile “stay indoors” zone. Skeptical of official pronouncements, residents at the twenty-five-mile mark have no particular reason to feel secure. And all the roads down from the temple, which is on a hill, lead to Iwaki; to get supplies, my relatives must cross into the “stay inside” zone.
Food, water, and gasoline in Iwaki City remain scarce. A few stores have supplies, but shopping requires standing in line outside for two to three hours at a time. Supply trucks reportedly refuse to enter the city for fear of radiation, forcing residents to find creative ways to cope. At the temple, the family survives in old ways and new. Mita’s wife, Ryoko, goes to her neighbor’s house once a day to pump water from a well and to fill up buckets and canisters so she is able to cook.
Their younger son, Masayoshi, plans a drive to the inland town of Nasu, famous for its hot springs. There he will bathe, stock up on fuel, and return home with fresh meat and fish.
Still, Empukuji is almost never short of dry goods or fruit. Visitors routinely bring fruit, sweets, and crackers when they come calling, as many do each day. One of the reasons that Mita refuses to evacuate is because he knows that he and his family can subsist on donated food, and they would have more than enough to share with others. It is an unspoken promise that the family will never abandon the temple, no matter the circumstances.
Many of Mita’s temple visitors are elderly. “I’m in my eighties,” one woman joked to Ryoko. “By the time the radiation gives me cancer, I’ll already be dead!” The support system for tens of thousands of older people like her living in Fukushima has been stretched thin, but an essentially Japanese spirit of compassion keeps the bonds intact.
Temple visitors don’t question the presence of Mita’s three young sons, who have also remained behind on the nominal edge of the radiation zone. Expectation is an invincible, invisible tie. The sons are made of the same stuff as the fifty workers (in our papers, described as “faceless” and “unnamed”) who stayed to wrangle the beast at the Daiichi plant. Such heroism may seem oddly self-sacrificing. We may wonder if, like the family in Iwaki, bound to their community by gifts of food and fruit, the nuclear-power workers are just stuck, unable to consider their own preservation in a way that we think of as free.
But there is another way to view this situation. The workers are parents, aware that they are leaving the world one day not just to their children but to all of ours. And that is exactly what we are supposed to think about during Ohigan.
Read more from our coverage of the earthquake and its aftermath.
