ISHINOMAKI, Miyagi Prefecture--Yumiko Suzuki noticed the baffled look on her son’s face when a smaller child was bothering him. Then it was Suzuki’s turn to be puzzled.
Her son, Hidekazu, was wearing clothes that she had never seen before. And he appeared older than he did on March 11, 2011, the day he died.
“It is painful when I wake up to reality and realize that Hide has already passed away,” Suzuki, 48, said. “Does Hide appear in my dreams to tell me something?”
Such “reunions” with lost loved ones are common in the dreams of survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. And the dreamers want to share these experiences in the hopes of helping others recover psychologically from the disaster.
Sixteen people, primarily students who attend seminars of Kiyoshi Kanebishi, 42, a sociology professor at Tohoku Gakuin University, have published a book about these dreams covering 27 families.
Through interviews with relatives of people killed in the disaster, the students found that the dreams have given the survivors a way to stay in contact and create “new memories” with their lost ones, particularly the children.
Others say their more cryptic dreams seem to be sending messages from the deceased.
Hiroya Kataoka, a 21-year-old student who contributed to the book, “Watashi no Yume made Aini Kite Kureta” (You came to see me in my dreams), said he initially doubted that the dreams carried any significance. That attitude changed after he met with the survivors.
“Dreams enable bereaved families to feel a bond with the dead,” he said.
Kataoka interviewed Masami Odaka, a 38-year-old resident of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, and her husband, Masayuki, also 38, who lost their three children and Masami’s parents in the disaster seven years ago.
Masami said she dreamed that she was speeding through a dark tunnel when she saw her eldest daughter, Moeka, who was 8 when she died, standing in a bright light. Although Masami talked to her, Moeka did not reply.
Masayuki also said he met Moeka in his dream. She just said, “Dad, thank you for playing with me,” and then wandered off.
Masayuki said he often wonders what Moeka was trying to tell him in the dream.
Suzuki, who also lives in Ishinomaki, and her family tried to flee the area when the disaster unfolded. Their vehicles were washed away in the tsunami, and Hidekazu, her youngest child, was killed. He was 12 years old.
She says she writes down her dreams of Hidekazu on her smartphone.
In addition to the October dream of her son in strange clothes, Suzuki dreamed that a younger Hidekazu was spilling his milk.
The dreams are all brief, so Hidekazu always seems busy, she said.
Kyoko Aoki, 59, who also lives in Ishinomaki, jots down her dreams of her son, Kenji, in notebooks as soon as she wakes up.
Kenji was a 31-year-old police officer who was helping residents evacuate when the towering tsunami swept him away.
He first appeared in Aoki’s dream a month after the March 11 disaster.
“Kenji said in a dream, ‘Just joking,’ wearing his usual plain white T-shirt and dark-blue short trousers,” Aoki wrote in a notebook.
In the dream, Aoki shouted at her son, “You must return to us,” and she held his hand. The soft feeling of his hand was exactly the same as it felt when he was still alive.
“If I hope to make new memories with my son, the only way to do so is to have conversations or meals with him in my dreams,” Aoki said.
Her notebooks are now full of those bittersweet “memories.”
Professor Kanebishi studies how people in regions affected by the 2011 disaster attempt to get over the deaths of their families and friends.
A Tohoku Gakuin University student’s graduation thesis examining accounts of taxi drivers who met ghosts in the disaster zone was released in 2016. After that study drew much attention inside and outside of Japan, a collection of letters written by survivors to their lost loved ones was published in Japan last year.
Many of the letters described dreams. So Kanebishi and his students decided to conduct a study on the dreams of survivors.
A man who lost a family member in the tsunami told a student that sharing experiences will help other victims “emotionally recover from the disaster.”
“There are many people in the devastated regions who want to hear stories about dreams,” he said.
The book is published by Asahi Shimbun Publications Inc.