In the wreckage of the tsunami, two monks taking snapshots. It sounds like a koan Buddhist poem, yet it was one of the scenes Sunday in the Iwate Prefecture town of Ofunato, which was hit by 26-meter waves following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11.
In the wreckage of the tsunami, two monks taking snapshots. It sounds like a koan Buddhist poem, yet it was one of the scenes Sunday in the Iwate Prefecture town of Ofunato, which was hit by 26-meter waves following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11.
Dressed in a traditional black robe over jeans and trekking shoes, with a digital camera in one hand and prayer beads in another, Binryu Wakaomi and a fellow monk were walking through the debris of the town's harbor area, trying to make sense of the power that threw ships nearly a kilometer inland -- destroying more than 3,600 homes and claiming 278 lives -- and his own motivation for wanting to see it.
"Maybe it's impossible to grasp a meaning, at least not in a short time," says Wakaomi, who drove from the 7th-century Zenkoji temple in Nagano Prefecture overnight to deliver relief supplies to the displaced residents of Ofunato. Afterward he came to the town center to offer prayers and take pictures as well.
"As Buddhists we believe that the world is impermanent and that no one is spared from suffering. But witnessing it in person is another matter."
When the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, Wakaomi was waiting for a flight back from the island of Saipan, where he recited sutras over the remains of Japanese soldiers killed during World War II.
"The flight was delayed and someone started playing Simon and Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' on a piano," he says. "Everyone around me started singing along. I knew that they were sending a message to Japan. But what struck me most was the power of the images that could move people so far away."
As Wakaomi walked through the ruins, he was careful not to step on photographs and albums that were strewed about on the ground. Three weeks after the tsunami, many had been gathered in neat stacks in front of former homes, either by their owners or neighbors who knew them.
Although a Buddhism tenet is that the world is also illusory, photographs still have their place, says the monk.
"They are an attempt to connect to others," he says. "Perhaps that's why people here are so desperate to salvage what images they can. No number of photos could have prepared me for the enormity of what I see here now, but I'm still compelled to take some myself -- I hope that in some way they can help. The world may be impermanent, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't act. In fact it's a reason to do whatever way we can in the time frame we have."
With that he tucked his camera beneath his robe and posed for this photo.