Whitney FI’s Reviews > Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone > Status Update
Whitney FI
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Its name was Okawa; it lay in a forgotten fold of Japan, below hills and among rice fields, close to the mouth of a great river. I traveled to this obscure place, and spent days and weeks there. In the years that followed, I encountered many survivors and stories of the tsunami, but it was to Okawa that I returned time and again. And it was there, at the school, that I eventually became able to imagine.
— Mar 24, 2026 06:21AM
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Whitney FI’s Previous Updates
Whitney FI
is 40% done
“The earthquake is the thing that all humans face: the banal inevitability of death. We don’t know when it'll come, but we know it will. We take refuge in elaborate precautions, but in the end they are all in vain. We think about it even when we are not thinking about it; after a while, it seems to define what we are. It comes most often for the old, but we feel it most cruelly when it takes away the young.”
— Mar 03, 2026 02:32PM
Whitney FI
is 25% done
It was the biggest earthquake ever known to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the history of seismology. It knocked the Earth ten inches off its axis; it moved Japan four feet closer to America. In the tsunami that followed, 18,500 people were drowned, burned or crushed to death. At its peak the water was 120 feet high. Half a million people were driven out of their homes.
— Mar 03, 2026 07:38AM
