The Lobster Dance

Content warning: 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, survivor’s guilt, PTSD, natural disasters, mentions of suicidal ideation, drowning, heights.

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I am afraid of deep water. I didn’t used to be. I grew up swimming in a pool that is literally the size of a football field. One “end zone” is nine feet deep, and our swim instructors used to have us retrieve pennies from the bottom of the pool as a game. I didn’t get into swimming as sport again until college, but nothing was ever spooky about the deep end of the pool.

Some people who are afraid of heights, including myself, are both afraid of falling as well as afraid of some innate compulsion to jump.

At some point in my life, the idea of swimming in deep water began to scare me. One of my friends is afraid of lakes because she doesn’t know what might be swimming there underneath you. I don’t mean in a Jaws way, just seaweed and fish and possibly a sunken boat, but it does creep me out when I’m out in a lake or a murky hotel pool. Pictures of the creatures at the bottom of the sea and knowing how much of the ocean is unexplored also unnerve me. But what is even weirder to me is the compulsion I have around clear, deep water: a quiet lake, a mineshaft filled with water, a tide pool in a rocky shore, an inlet by a waterfall. I feel compelled dive down until I know how deep it is, because not knowing things bothers me. I am not a diver. I hate cold water. I have never been snorkeling. I often find these places when I hike, and I stew about them for days. What would it be like to measure those places?

***

When the reports of the tsunami came in about 10-meter waves, even when I re-calculated their depths into feet and meters, I couldn’t fathom it. A tsunami doesn’t look like the tidal waves in disaster movies. The water rises and rises, but it doesn’t come in a giant wave. At least, that’s what I learned from watching the footage of the 2011 tsunami.

At first, I was just watching it on the news because I needed to know what happened. Then I watched it because I didn’t know what a tsunami looked like. I had been in an earthquake simulator up to shindô (振動) 6 on Safety Day. I could guess, to some level, that if I couldn’t stand up at level 6, I would be knocked to the ground at level 9. However, a tsunami was something I’d never seen before. I watched and watched because I didn’t understand.

Weeks later, I watched those videos to punish myself for being alive.

***

When the earthquake happened, I had just bicycled from a graduation ceremony back to the town hall. My town is situated on the inner curve of a bay that leads out to the Sea of Japan. The epicenter was on the Pacific Ocean side, but the way the northernmost region of my prefecture dangles into the Sea of Japan like a claw means that we feel earthquakes more than the “mainland.” I hadn’t been sleeping well because I was going through the first of two break-ups that would eventually lead to my divorce. I sat at my desk, feeling nauseous, figuring I drank too much coffee. When I looked up, everyone else was looking around. The office was vibrating.

Shindô 1, the mildest of earthquakes, feels like a mild inner-ear problem caused by a cold. A lamp cord may sway gently, which is how I learned to separate what was actually an earthquake from the stress and lack of sleep that was eating my body and mind alive. My predecessor had a glow-in-the-dark charm attached to the lamp cord in the bedroom. She had experienced the earthquake that hit our town in 2007, and, as if retracing her footsteps, I would stare at the lamp string into the night, trying to detect motion. A couple times there was a minor earthquake or aftershock, none above shindô 4, but mostly, my body was doing all the shaking of its own accord.

***

After we realized how bad the quake was, the JET community immediately tried to reach everyone to see if we were all okay. My friend in Akita had delayed a trip to Sendai because he woke up late. We sifted through sightings and Facebook check-ins, until eventually, weeks later, Taylor Anderson and Monty Dickson were confirmed missing, and then, dead. Taylor was biking back from a school, just as I had not 15 minutes prior, and was swept out to sea. Monty was at his town hall, just like I was; it overlooked the water, just like mine did, and was also swept out to sea.

I think about Taylor and Monty a lot.

***

As I said before, I started watching tsunami videos on YouTube to punish myself for surviving. The layers of my guilt and shame are a Gordian knot. I feel guilty because I survived. I feel guilty about feeling guilty because it’s not like I really “survived.” I didn’t outrun a tsunami or get rescued from my roof. I didn’t lose my family, my friends, my job, my home, or my belongings. I didn’t “deserve” to feel that guilt, and that made me feel guiltier. I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt because 15,000 people were dead, countless homes and farms and business destroyed, radiation was leaking into the sea, and all I felt was a vibration. PTSD, I thought, was for the real survivors, those people in photos crying at the rubble of their homes. Not me. I wasn’t doing enough to help them. I was fine.

***

My parents, who had planned a visit in late March, came to Japan, and we had a great time touring Kansai and Hokuriku. One night at home, they wanted to watch a movie, so I put on Ponyo for them because it had subtitles. I didn’t know Ponyo had a tsunami in it. They fell asleep at the kotatsu from jet lag, and I quietly had a panic attack.

Eventually my now-ex and I got back together. He was not in Japan during the earthquake. He didn’t understand at all how deeply I was affected, and I couldn’t make him understand.

I thought a lot about earthquakes when I was at the pool in Kanazawa. If an earthquake happened when I was walking down the stairs from the pool to the locker room, would I be okay? Would the pool fall out from under me?

***

The triggers didn’t stop, either. We watched a Rifftrax of The Day After Tomorrow, which also features a tsunami (as well as roaming packs of escaped wolves), which I didn’t know about, and I cried after he went to bed. I pictured myself being swept away; trying to climb to the top of the tallest hotel in the city; the sea rising up and swallowing Kanazawa.

Movies are bad enough, but you can pause or stop a movie. When we moved to Seattle, there was construction near my office and my apartment that felt exactly like a shindô 1, and it set me off, and then I felt guilty for feeling how I did. I tried for three years to explain to him why I felt the way I did, the guilt begetting guilt, the triggers, the shame, but, whether from lack of empathy or lack of experience, he never understood. It must be nice not to have those memories.

Eventually, the earthquake PTSD got wrapped up in other traumatic experiences: teenage medical problems, our terrible relationship, childhood bullying, office drama: rejection after rejection after rejection. Somehow I always survive, though perhaps not as whole as I was at the start.

***

One of the things that most people don’t understand unless they have aural triggers, is the AC commercial. During the weeks after the quake, Japan cut all the commercials out of respect through austerity–all but two. One of them was AC’s 「あいさつの魔法」, or “The Magic of Greetings,” which features animals doing proper Japanese greetings from “Good morning” to itadakimasu with puns – a mouse saying itadakimasu becomes itadaki-maus (mouse). Hilarious, I know.

I can’t listen to the commercial any more. When I clicked on YouTube to link it and heard it again, my inner ears hurt. My jaw clenched. My chest tightened. I couldn’t breathe. My heart is pounding as I write this.

The first time I saw a remix of it, I laughed so hard I cried, and I couldn’t ever explain why except to a few other CIRs and ALTs who were in the same position: sleepless nights translating and organizing charity events, feeling like we couldn’t do anything to help anyone, the constant visions of water rising on the screen in the background.

***

When I went to share a relevant link for the anniversary this year, just like every year, I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I tried to write about my experiences in the Facebook post with the article about PTSD in survivors of a destroyed town, but it felt tawdry. Self indulgent. Too wrapped up in my own private affairs. That’s the attitude that led me to hide my suffering from almost everyone, and that’s what destroyed me from within these last years.

I don’t even have confidence in saying that my feelings are valid, even when I know that, objectively, they are. I had a traumatic experience. I had many traumatic experiences. My existence is often a traumatic experience. So why do I feel like it’s not enough to justify my suffering?

***

I could have done more.

***

When I was looking for a good link to share, I saw the 30-foot wave statistic again. Thirty feet is about five of me. Thirty feet is more than three times the height of the bottom of the swimming pool where I spent my childhood summers.

I imagine myself at the bottom of the pool, looking up, so I can understand the scale of the wave, the weight of the water, but I can’t.