THE GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI it is the title of a book by the English foreign co
THE GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI it is the title of a book by the English foreign correspondent and writer Richard Lloyd Parry.These words refer to the restless ghosts of the people who died in the earthquake and following the tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011. Many of the survivors of the catastrophe began to see the faces of the deceased in the puddles, on the beach and even in front of the front door. Water-soaked figures walking in the fields where their homes used to be, or hailing cabs. Residents and sometimes even tourists began to tell stories of paranormal encounters. people’s grief, loss and sadness came out in the following months following the tragedy and many started to see ghosts. Yuka Kudo, a qualified sociologist, visited the places to collect the testimonies of the survivors. The first city she visited was one of the hardest hit: Ishinomaki. According to the scholar, it was also the place where the strangest encounters began. Most notably, most of the stories came from taxi drivers.One of them said that he was driving in an area where once there was a town and was amazed to see a woman in that desolate place move her arm to make him stop. The thing that surprised the driver the most was that the woman was wearing winter clothes even though it was now August and in Japan the temperatures are very hot and muggy. She had wet hair as well as her clothes, a detail that the driver only noticed when the woman took the back seat. She asked to be taken to Minamihama. When the man replied puzzled that she was now an almost deserted district and if she were sure of her destination, the woman replied in a voice broken by tears “Am I dead?” but when the man turned to look at her better she saw that there was no one in the seat.another said that he had given a lift to a very young boy with a bewildered look. He too was struck by the fact that despite being summer he wore a typically winter coat. When he reached his destination, too, he noticed that the back seat was empty. another concerns the testimony of some firefighters who received incessant telephone calls in which they answered but on the other side nothing could be heard. Sometimes multiple calls came in in one night so that they prompted firefighters to investigate the area and house where the calls were coming from. They managed to track down the place but when they got there they realized, as they suspected, that there was nothing, not even a house. They decided to stay on the site trying to communicate with possible spirits and from that moment they received no more calls. Japan is one of the countries with the highest percentage of atheists in the world but their relationship with the world of the afterlife and the spirits is very strong. They have a real connection with spiritism. In Japan, the world of the living and the world of the dead are not perceived as two separate worlds. They are worlds that live in close contact with one another and often come together. A comparison that is often made is that of the rice paper door (shoji). It is a very fragile, semi-transparent and delicate paper. Once this shoji opens and one enters the other world, it is always possible both on one side and on the other to “perceive oneself”. The funeral is an important rite in every culture. A farewell rite.Unfortunately in that case the funerals could not be celebrated because due to the lack of electricity due to the damage to the Fukushima power plant it did not allow the crematories to work, the bodies were then buried and then exhumed at a later time. The force of the water then swept away the houses and with them the memories of the dead, and even before that the butsudan, the memorial altars of other members of the families who died in previous years, where their memorial tablets (ihai) are displayed. The dead play an important role in the domestic life of a family: the descendants leave food, candles, incense and flowers to be protected and have good fortune. It seemed that both the living and the dead both needed to reconnect with each other, dying so suddenly didn’t allow people to finish what was left over.The place had changed so much, the houses destroyed that the spirits got lost and according to some, this prompted them to come out to seek help. An interesting episode on Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix talked about this phenomena of ghostly encounters in the most ravaged zones. While many people believe that ghosts are walking the streets restless and in pain, on the side of the skeptics was Dr. Kiyoshi Kanebishi, a Senior Professor of Sociology at Tōhoku Gakuin University, who believed the ghosts people reported were either mass hallucinations inspired by survivor’s guilt and Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder or the imaginings of people coming to terms with the death of their loved ones (a saying says that ghosts for some are more tolerable than the void created by death). There is still an open debate as to why there were so many ghost sightings after the tsunami compared to other tragic events of the Japanese past. According to some, because the most affected area, one of the least industrialized in Japan, is still linked to ancient traditions linked to superstition and spiritualism, according to others it is linked to the survivors and their way of overcoming the pain and loss of their loved ones.Sources: Richard Lloyd Parry - Ghosts of the Tsunami / Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix ( season 2, episode 2) Image: photo taken on in the internet, credit to owner. -- source link