In Japan, ghost stories often emerge after natural disasters. These tales help to mitigate grief. During these terrible disasters, loved ones often vanish, their bodies never found.
Story 99 from The Legends of Tōno originated in 1896's Meiji Sanriku Tsunami. The people are real. Three generations later, their direct descendant, Masaru, lost his mother to the 2011 tsunami. Her body was never found. She had long instructed Masaru to pay attention to Story 99. After she died, she visited him in a dream. The visit comforted him and eased his feelings of guilt.
Story 99
Kitagawa Kiyoshi, an assistant headman in Tsuchibuchi Village lived in Hiishi. His family had been itinerant priests for generations. His grandfather, named Seifukuin was a scholar who had written many books, and had also done a lot for the village. Kiyoshi's younger brother, Fukuji, who had been taken into the family as a son-in-law at Tanohama on the coast, lost his wife and one of his children in the tidal wave that struck the area last year. For about a year now, he has been in a shelter setup on the site of the original house.
On a moonlit night in early summer, he got up to go to the privy. It was situated at some distance on the path along the beach where the waves broke. This night the fog hovered low and he saw two people, a man and a woman, approaching him out of the fog. The woman was definitely his wife who had died. Without thinking, he trailed after them to a cavern on the promontory in the direction of Funakoshi village. When he called her name, she looked back and smiled. The man he saw was from the same village, and he too had died in the tidal wave disaster. It had been rumored that this man and Fukuji's wife had been deeply in love before Fukuji had been chosen to marry her.
She said, "I am now married to this man. "When Fukuji said, "Don't you love your children?" the woman's expression changed a little, and she cried. Fukuji didn't realize he was talking with the dead. While he was looking down at his feet, sadly and miserably, the man and the woman started on quickly and disappeared around the mountain on the way to Oura. He tried to run after them but suddenly realized they were the dead. He stood on the road thinking until daybreak, and then went home in the morning. It is said that he was sick for a long time after this.
https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2019.1572944
Reference
Thompson, Christopher. (2019). Folk spirituality, ghosts, and tsunami death-mitigation in Iwate, Japan: a local take on the legends of tōno - story 99. Asian Anthropology. 18. 1-19. 10.1080/1683478X.2019.1572944. https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2019.1572944
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