2011 East Japan Earthquake Disaster

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami is both a national disaster and a turning point in the novel’s intimate moral landscape. Its images of destruction and its aftermath sharpen Kido’s fear of death, lead him to volunteer legal help for displaced people, and push him to reconsider how personal identity is bound to inherited history. The catastrophe does not end with the news footage: its consequences persist in families separated by disagreement, in administrative rules that restrict assistance, and in the quieter work of living with loss.

Disaster and Historical Memory

The earthquake and tsunami disturb Kido even though no one he knows personally is harmed. News footage of entire cities being washed away makes it impossible for him to remain a detached observer. The scale of the disaster forces him to consider that the world continues without those who die: more than fifteen thousand people lost their lives in the tsunami, and Kido imagines their consciousness ending while the present proceeds for everyone else. His fear of sharing that fate makes him newly attentive to the small particulars of being alive.

The 2011 disaster also changes what Kido notices in the historical past. In its aftermath, media reports repeatedly recall the massacre of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Kido had paid little attention to this history before; now he learns that Yokohama was one of the principal sources of false rumors about a supposed Korean riot. The reports connect disaster not only with physical destruction but with the social violence that can follow it, when fear and rumor turn a minority population into a target.

That history reaches directly into Kido’s family life. His Japanese father-in-law had welcomed him by saying that, Zainichi or not, after three generations he was fully Japanese. Kido had received the remark as uncomplicated acceptance. After the disaster brings the older massacre to his attention, he wonders whether the words carried implications he had missed. Kaori’s grandfather would have been a young child during the 1923 earthquake, while her great-grandfather would have been an adult; Kido imagines them within the violence that devastated Yokohama, where fire destroyed 80 percent of the urban area. Yet he has never asked Kaori or her parents what they remember or know. The contrast between public commemoration and family silence leaves the past present but largely unspoken.

Mortality and Kido’s Response

The disaster reopens questions Kido last wrestled with as a teenager, when he wondered what kind of person he was and what he should become. He eventually became a lawyer on his father’s advice, and for fifteen years treated those earlier doubts as a developmental stage he had outgrown. The earthquake disrupts that settled account. When he tries to imagine his own death as the absolute end of consciousness, the thought overwhelms him; the people who died in the tsunami cannot perceive the world that continues after them. Kido names the mood that has persisted since the earthquake as existential anxiety.

That anxiety is not only abstract. Kido’s fear of death makes him sensitive to the conditions of living, but it also complicates his understanding of what he owes others. He is unsettled by the possibility that his identity as a Zainichi Korean could matter more to a hostile crowd than his roles as lawyer, father, or person judged good by those who know him. His thoughts turn to the 1923 massacre and to the possibility that, in another disaster, old prejudices could again become immediate threats. The 2011 catastrophe thus links personal vulnerability to collective memory: Kido cannot treat the past as finished when its patterns might recur.

Legal Work for Evacuees

Kido responds to the disaster by coordinating with Nakakita and his other partners at the firm to provide legal support to affected people. One particularly difficult issue is the situation of voluntary evacuees who leave areas with elevated radiation levels after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown, even though the government has not designated those areas as mandatory evacuation zones. Kido advises people seeking to change the temporary housing assigned to them free of charge under the Disaster Relief Act.

The rules make safety and support difficult to reconcile. Some subsidized apartments selected during the post-disaster emergency are dilapidated; others expose residents to noise or harassment. Yet evacuees who move may lose coverage unless they meet strict conditions, such as a finding of remarkable danger or a landlord’s request that they leave. The assistance Kido provides addresses this gap between the formal terms of relief and the realities residents face. The disaster’s aftermath is therefore administered not only through shelter and aid, but through classifications that can deny help to people whose reasons for moving do not fit official criteria.

The legal work also reveals how displacement can fracture households over time. Many of the voluntary evacuees Kido encounters are mothers who have left their husbands after disagreements about radiation risk and whether to abandon work. They live austerely with their children while hoping either that their husbands will join them or that they can return home together. In some cases Kido handles, that hope ends in divorce. The catastrophe’s consequences thus extend from damaged places into relationships, as families must make decisions under uncertainty and cannot always recover a shared life afterward.

Family Conflict and Unequal Commitments

Kido’s commitment to disaster-related work becomes a source of conflict with Kaori. She has already donated generously to the Red Cross, but she does not understand why he gives so much of his time and energy to strangers when he does not seem to feel a corresponding personal attachment to them. She suspects that his effort may be driven by professional appearances or shame at being unmoved, while Kido struggles to explain himself through ideas such as public good and social presence. Kaori hears those justifications as indirect ways of benefiting their own household; she also regards the work as a kind of hobby.

Their disagreement is intensified by the practical cost of volunteering. When the earthquake struck, Sota was two and a half, aftershocks were frequent, and no one knew when another major tremor might come. Kaori objects to Kido leaving his wife and young child to help other families at such a time. Her objection is not presented as indifference to suffering: she had given to relief efforts, and Kido respects her honesty and intelligence. The conflict instead concerns competing duties and unequal definitions of care. For Kaori, a father’s immediate responsibility to his own household cannot be displaced by an appeal to public purpose; for Kido, attending to strangers in crisis has become part of what he believes he must do.

The strain persists because the spouses’ orientations toward other people differ. Kaori is attentive to Sota and his circle of friends, but Kido sees a boundary in her kindness between family and friends, on one side, and unfamiliar people, on the other. He, meanwhile, cannot make his humanitarian activity feel emotionally transparent to her. The earthquake does not simply reveal a difference of opinion; it makes that difference costly, because aid work takes time and money that might otherwise go to their young family. Their dispute shows how a public disaster can enter the home through ordinary decisions about presence, obligation, and care.

Long Aftermath: Loss, Names, and Memory

The catastrophe’s human aftermath also reverberates through Rié and Yuto’s family story. Yuto’s life has been marked by changes of surname: he was born a Yoneda, became a Takemoto after Rié’s divorce, and began elementary school as a Taniguchi. When Rié announces that she will return to her maiden name, he asks to remain Yuto Taniguchi. The name is not merely a convenient label: he says that friends and schoolmates know him by it, and that changing it again would make him repeatedly explain himself. More deeply, he does not want the family to forget the father he knew after that father’s relatives turned away from him.

Yuto’s request is bound to grief as well as identity. He challenges Rié for leaving his father’s ashes in an urn and for not making a grave, and he asks her to let him keep the Taniguchi name even when she returns to Takemoto. Later, at Burial Mound Park, he remembers the cherry tree his father chose. The family had each claimed a tree after Rié remarried and returned to the park; from then on, their chosen trees acquired personal meaning, and they visited each spring to compare the blossoms. The year of his father’s death, Yuto’s tree lost to his father’s; the following year, it won. He had wanted to tell his father about that victory, but Rié had not brought the family back that spring. A tree and a recurring visit preserve a relationship that formal naming and burial have left unresolved.

Rié eventually recognizes that Yuto has been carrying grief without making it explicit. He tends goldfish after seeing his grandmother look at the aquarium, watches over his younger sister Hana, and reads. Rié understands that these acts help him hold himself together after losing his brother, grandfather, and the man he believed to be his father. His reading gives her another way to approach what he cannot easily say: after he describes Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Asakusa Park,” she reads it and cries when she imagines her son identifying with a boy separated from his father. She wonders whether Yuto sensed something about his own father’s identity before she told him the truth, but cannot know what he understood. The book nevertheless lets her draw closer to her son by attending to his emotional response rather than demanding a direct explanation.

Yuto’s poem about a cicada shell on a cherry tree makes that private form of remembrance visible. In his account, he listens among the singing cicadas for the voice of the insect that emerged from the shell, imagining how the shell might hear the body that had lived inside it. He then sees the shell as resembling a violin’s soundboard and develops the image into a poem. He does not mention his brother’s or father’s death, and Rié cannot be sure whether the scene describes an actual visit to his father’s tree or an invention. What she can see is that literature has become a way for Yuto to find solace and form for experiences she could not have taught him how to bear. The earthquake’s place in the novel is therefore not confined to one historical date: its effects join other losses in a continuing struggle over how a family remembers, what it can say, and how children make their own means of survival.