For me the most enduring images of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami have not been the larger-than-life pictures of nature’s all-too destructive forces. These, certainly, are breathtaking in their scale and horror. Few will soon forget the footage of a 30ft wave, churning like an angry beast up the shore – cars, boats and even entire houses, some of them aflame, tossed in its muddy intensity. Nor will they quickly erase the image of the seaside town of Rikuzentaka in the tsunami’s silent aftermath, its wooden houses shredded into rough-hewn matchstick, a graveyard for the drowned.
But the two images that will stick with me longest are on an altogether smaller scale. The first is of a supermarket, caught at the moment the 9.0 magnitude earthquake unleashed its destructive force. As neatly stacked shelves began to writhe and wobble, staff did not rush for cover. Instead, they tried – mostly in vain – to stop bottles of soy sauce and packets of miso crashing to the floor. Their diligence is a reminder of the actions of quiet dedication one sees daily in less difficult times.
The second image, captured by a BBC cameraman, was the most poignant of all. A young woman, so confused she appeared to be blind, gazes in incomprehension around a field strewn with debris and fallen branches. She is wearing riding breeches since, not long before, she had been taking her horse for a canter. The horse is gone. So too are all the other familiar features of a landscape transformed beyond recognition or comprehension. “The things that are supposed to be here are not here,” she says, almost to herself.