A NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES
I asked the man,
"Who are you?"
He said, "I'm at the bottom of the ocean."
And then he asked me, "Reverend, am I alive or dead?"
I told him, "There was an earthquake.
You were hit by a tsunami.
And you died."
Ishinomaki has oceans, mountains and rivers.
We have it all.
The Kitakami River is considered the mother of the town.
It created the port of Ishinomaki.
We receive wealth from
the rivers and the sea.
My relatives work with the ocean.
They make nori, the seaweed product.
The ocean has always meant prosperity to the people of Ishinomaki.
We all loved the ocean,
until the earthquake hit.
NHK SENDAI BROADCASTING STATION
People in this area have experienced a number of large earthquakes.
After an earthquake that large,
I knew a tsunami would come.
Using our emergency radios,
we told residents to flee as quickly as they could.
We gave evacuation instructions.
We did everything we were trained to do.
However...
what we couldn't expect was the size of the tsunami that followed.
This is a tsunami warning.
If you are near the ocean, please move to higher ground.
KESENNUMA, MIYAGI LIVE
The tsunami is coming!
Please go up the stairs!
MARCH 11 ABOUT 3:30 P.M. KESENNUMA
The tsunami was gaining force,
and growing larger.
Don't panic.
My ceiling caved in. All the lights started to break.
The moment I felt I was in serious danger,
the impact hit me.
The impact pushed me outside.
I couldn't tell what was up or down.
I thought I was going to die.
I saw the faces of my wife and children.
I tried my best to swim up for air.
THE DASHCAM SWEPT OUT BY TSUNAMI MIYAGINO-KU, SENDAI
EVENING OF MARCH 11
Eventually, I reached the surface.
I floated away, weightless.
I wondered where I was going
as I was carried away.
First the earthquake hit us.
Then the tsunami followed. So many lives were stolen.
On top of all that, it started to snow.
It snowed a lot.
And the snow wouldn't stop falling on these drenched survivors.
I was completely defeated.
Why is nature being so cruel,
so merciless, to people who are already suffering?
Great East Japan earthquake is one of the world's biggest, M8.8
The morning after the tsunami,
I found out that 54 of my co-workers
had died.
I felt like I was in hell.
I never want to experience that again.
Never.
I found my eldest daughter in this bamboo forest.
Some of the bamboos were bent,
and I saw my eldest daughter...
draped over one of them.
She looked like she was sleeping.
She looked so beautiful. There wasn't a single cut on her face.
The body of my wife was...
a three-minute drive away from here when it was found.
A week or two after the earthquake,
we were clearing up the debris
and I was looking for my youngest daughter.
And then I heard someone shout,
"I've found a baby!"
The baby's face was swollen and covered with mud.
So I cleaned her face
and recognized that it was my youngest daughter.
Due to lack of fuel and electricity from the nuclear power plant failure,
the crematorium wasn't functioning.
Therefore,
people couldn't have funerals.
In Japan, we traditionally cremate the bodies.
But we were forced to bury the dead in the ground.
And later on we'd dig them up
and cremate the bodies.
The bodies were carried in one after another nonstop.
It was devastating to see them all pass by me.
The first dead bodies I saw
were two fifth-grade girls.
I was not able to read a mantra, because I couldn't stop shaking.
I am the reverend at the Tsudai temple.
I am the 26th generation.
I've grown up in this temple.
I went to college and later trained as a monk,
but everything I've learned couldn't prepare me
for what happened after the earthquake.
I didn't know what to say to the survivors.
I arrived in Ishinomaki
in June 2011,
and I started hearing rumors of ghosts.
By October, there were dozens of them.
So I started documenting people who had supernatural experiences.
One day, a man named Endo
reached out to me.
He had experienced something supernatural.
On the day of the earthquake,
he visited a shelter to see if his mother was there.
He was told to wait there for her.
So, he waited.
While he was waiting,
he saw an older woman looking out the window
and wearing his mother's clothes.
As he looked closer, he realized it was his mother.
He took out his camera to take a photo of his mother
so his family would know she was safe.
But the woman's face changed into someone he'd never seen before.
He found out that the microbus his mother was riding in
was washed away by the tsunami
around the same time he took the photograph at the shelter.
Until August 2013,
I continued searching for stories of people's experiences with ghosts.
The people I visited would say
how desperate they were to see the spirits of their loved ones.
They said they were still looking for some kind of message from them.
For example, a woman who lives in Ishinomaki
lost her three-year-old son to the tsunami.
Since then,
she has suffered from depression and panic attacks.
Inside her home was her deceased son's toy.
Then one night...
Shall we eat?
Hold on.
Sho-chan,
let's eat together.
The toy had a manual switch
inside of an electric one,
so there'd be no way it could turn itself on
without any force.
Before that night, the mother was looking forward to dying.
She had a daughter who survived, and she'd tell her,
"Even though you might suffer when I die,
at least I'll be happy in heaven."
But that toy reminded her that her son was watching her at all times.
It helped give her purpose again.
Unlike Americans, the families of victims in Japan
don't seek out grief counseling.
They know that they'd feel much more at peace with a counselor
but they're afraid it would make them forget the deceased.
I think it's because of Japanese spirituality
and the way we perceive life and death.
Japanese people don't separate the dead from the living.
Shoji is a sliding door made of very thin paper.
To Japanese people, death is like shoji.
Once you open the sliding door
you go through to the other side
and the living can still see you through it.
Survivors tend to move on at their own pace.
I want them to move on with their lives, but for them,
three steps forward can lead to three steps back.
Many of us have lost loved ones without saying goodbye.
We don't think it's fair.
The deceased feel the same way.
There was a story told by
someone in a group of people
who had supernatural experiences.
One clear night,
a woman was preparing a meal.
The visitor asked for dry clothes.
Please take these.
My house used to stand
somewhere around there.
There used to be houses all over this area.
It was like a small community.
I don't see a trace of that anymore.
It makes me very sad.
After the earthquake they wanted to go home,
but the city had changed so much.
Spirits didn't seem to know how to find their home.
Many of them didn't know how to contact their families.
Lost souls don't have a place to go,
so they ask people on the streets for help.
Some people can see ghosts,
and others can't.
I...
have always been spiritual and a bit odd since I was a child.
I used to think everyone could see the dead
when I was talking with them,
but they couldn't.
People frequently ask me what ghosts look like.
They appear as a slightly transparent reflection through a glass window.
One night,
I was stopped by a group of young men who were killed by the tsunami.
They didn't seem to know that they were deceased
but I knew they were no longer living in this world
from how they appeared.
I could have simply ignored them,
but I felt sorry for them so I stopped.
I asked them what happened?
One of them said he wanted to go home,
but that he was lost.
I had to tell them the truth
because I didn't want them to suffer anymore.
I said, "All of you have passed away."
TOHOKU GAKUIN UNIVERSITY
My specialty is the sociology of disaster.
Then considering these realities,
let's have two of you today...
I regularly teach seminars,
and every year I ask my students
to come up with a different topic for their own research.
A student named Ms. Kudo suggested
the story of the ghosts in Ishinomaki.
The ones I found the most believable came from taxi drivers
because there were physical records connected to their sightings.
This is one of their taxi ghost stories.
Japan is pretty hot during the month of August.
A man around 20 years old wearing a thick coat
got into a taxi.
VACANT
The driver felt there was something strange about the passenger.
By the time they arrived, the sun had already set.
When he looked back, the passenger was gone.
There were several taxi drivers who had similar experiences.
ISHINOMAKI TOURISM
In all of these cases, the meters would continue to log their travels,
giving us evidence of these ghostly phenomena.
Someone needed to pay for these rides
because the meters kept running.
So who did?
It turns out that the drivers were the ones paying
for their ghost passengers.
Many taxi drivers had experienced the loss
of their families to the tsunami as well.
So they said they would welcome the ghosts with open arms
if they needed a ride again.
This disaster was very traumatic for the people of the Tohoku region.
I think the presence of ghosts
is a way for people to cope
with their PTSD as a community.
I believe that's what is being manifested here.
But if that were the case,
after the Great Hanshin Earthquake,
or the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
where many lives were lost at once,
data shows that ghost sightings
were never publicly reported.
So why do people experience these ghostly phenomena
after this particular earthquake in the Tohoku region?
In the northern region of Japan, Tohoku had the slowest development
compared to the rest of Japan.
There are still areas that are very rural.
I presume that's why this area still holds onto certain spiritual traditions.
The souls of the dead
are invited by a spiritual shaman using a kuchiyose ritual,
where these shamans act as vessels to tell their stories.
This tradition has been customary to the Tohoku area.
Death is not the end of the journey.
That's why the idea that death travels
between two worlds is not uncommon.
I believe it lies somewhere even deeper.
The relationship between the living and the dead,
is something that has existed from long ago.
It remains in some fundamental part of us...
and became shaken loose by this earthquake.
Perhaps you can say it's part of the DNA of religious sentiment,
but it all spewed out.
Those feelings are especially strong in the Tohoku region.
I don't really believe in ghosts.
I'm not the type of person who would see them.
However, in everyday life, there are certain things
that we can't file away in a box.
Although we can't process them now,
we all carry data that are somehow important.
In which case,
regardless of how undefined they may be,
we can leave them undefined.
I believe things like ghost encounters
can remain ambiguous in our lives.
Scientists complain about our ghost stories.
They tend to focus on evidence and logic.
"Why would religious people believe in this?
That's just superstition."
Some psychologists would say it's because of people's trauma.
But, that's their interpretation
based on what they've observed from outside of this chaos.
That kind of interpretation doesn't mean anything to us
or to the survivors.
Why can't we embrace them as they are
and help them find their own answers?
Why can't we help them in this process?
Oh, my. Please, come in.
Are you all right?
One night, my wife answered the door.
She said "Taio, a young woman is here.
She seems ill."
The woman said,
"I feel many people inside me and I can't stop them.
Please help me, Reverend Kaneta."
That was her plea.
During my long years at the temple as a priest,
people like her have visited me before.
But I never met someone who suffered as much as she did.
She was the first.
She said, "Many spirits are entering my body
and I can't stop them."
At the time, I didn't really understand what was going on with me.
All I could feel was pain.
It was so painful...
that I wanted someone to kill me.
I felt the spirit of a girl crying inside me.
And the spirit of a man
was holding her leg and wouldn't let go.
As soon as Reverend Kaneta grabbed my feet, the spirit said,
"Who are you?"
Reverend Kaneta said, "Me? I'm the reverend of this temple."
The man replied, "What is the reverend doing here?"
I was seeing this man yelling and screaming.
It was terrifying.
The prayer takes a long time.
By burning incense in front of Buddha,
Ami was released from the possession.
Possessed people I had seen in the past
were incomparable to this woman.
Her personality would change whenever she was possessed.
I asked if she lived near the disaster zone.
"Did you experience the tsunami?
Has anyone close to you died in the accident?"
She said no to everything.
Ami, herself, had nothing to do with the tsunami.
Even before the earthquake
ghosts would bother me.
It was a year after the earthquake when the ghosts of the tsunami
started invading my life.
I told her to come visit me anytime,
and she really came at any time.
It often started around 7 p.m.
and lasted until 2 or 3 a.m.
Through Ami,
I was able to listen to the solemn voices of the spirits
who lost their lives
in the tsunami.
After what happened at Kaneta's
more and more victims of the tsunami started to enter my body.
One of them was...
a girl who had to let go
of her brother's hand.
The girl heard her brother saying, "Sis, I can't run anymore."
But she wouldn't respond to him
because they had to keep running from the water.
I could see, hear, smell, and feel everything,
even the touch of her brother's hand.
She was so scared
and I was too.
She saw
her brother being washed away.
Reverend Kaneta spoke to the little girl.
She reached out to him,
so he held her hand.
But then she said,
"No!" and she let go of him.
"Mom! Mom! I want mom!"
I felt helpless.
Why isn't anyone helping her?
The little girl wanted
to apologize to her mom for letting go of her brother.
She kept saying "Mom, I'm sorry."
She was looking everywhere for her mom.
I was near her at the time,
so I chose to act as her mother
and held her hand.
She had a really strong grip.
I said, "Mom is right here. I will never let go.
You are always here with me."
I said to her,
"Let's walk towards the light."
And she started to follow me.
I told her, "Go to the light.
Everyone is there waiting for you."
Then, Ami was finally able to let go of my hand.
She--
Ami asked me if she was mentally ill.
I said, "I don't think you are.
You are just more sensitive than most.
More so than the rest of us.
I'm not going to treat you as mentally ill."
There's a range of what humans can actually hear and see.
But everyone is slightly different on that spectrum.
Some can hear and see more than others.
When big disasters happen,
people's ranges tend to expand,
enabling them to see what's not supposed to be seen,
and hear what's not supposed to be heard.
They feel rather than think.
In everyday life,
we sacrifice our need to feel without even knowing it.
Ami's story is neither a movie
nor a made-up story.
We don't necessarily share this story with the world.
I'll tell you if you ask me,
but only if someone asks.
These things just happen.
At the time,
I felt a sense of duty to confront the events
that happened during the earthquake.
That sense of duty is what gave me motivation to help Ami.
What I did with Ami does not follow traditional Buddhist teachings.
Some monks asked why I did such a thing,
but I really don't care.
When I see a woman who's suffering,
I feel obligated to help her rather than worry about my religious beliefs.
I don't believe any gods would get mad at me.
I think they'd say, "Good job!"
Since the earthquake,
I have been asking myself,
"What can I do as a monk?"
From my interaction with Ami,
I realized that
what we can do
is listen to people to help cure their pain.
That is something we can do.
If I have a table, a cup of coffee, and a delicious cake, people will gather.
I want people to talk about the pain they're carrying
in order to let go.
Was your husband washed away by the tsunami when he was at home?
It takes a while to accept the reality, doesn't it?
Sun shines onto us
because we have such a warm place for people to gather.
I advocate for more joy,
even if it's just for a moment.
Many survivors ask me,
"Why did I survive?"
"Why couldn't I save them?"
"Who's dividing this line between life and death?"
And many of them
were scared of ghost sightings.
"Reverend, I'm so scared."
"What should I do?"
I struggled a bit to answer,
but this is what I tell them:
"These ghosts aren't scary at all.
They appear in front of you
because they worry about you and long for you.
So there's no need to be scared.
If you see ghosts again, tell them...
'You are dead.
There's a world for you to go to.
We are still living.
We will remain in this destroyed city,
and will make sure to revive and restore
our relationship with the city.
Do not worry about us.'"
NEVER GIVE UP, ISHINOMAKI!