The Ghost Passengers of Ishinomaki's Taxi Drivers

March 11, 2011. An earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan. In Ishinomaki, 3,975 people were dead, missing or counted as indirect deaths.

Yuka Kudo was a sociology undergraduate at Tohoku Gakuin University. For her graduation thesis she went to JR Ishinomaki Station, where the taxis waited. Over about a year she interviewed more than 100 drivers. Many ignored her. Some got angry. Seven told her about passengers who were not there.

Early summer 2011. Late at night. A woman of about 30 got in near the station. She wore a heavy winter coat. It was summer. She asked for Minamihama, a coastal district the tsunami had flattened. The driver, a man in his 50s, said the area was almost empty and asked why she wore a coat. "Have I died?" she asked, in a shivering voice. He looked back. The rear seat was vacant.

A driver in his 40s picked up a young man who looked about 20. He pointed forward without speaking. Pressed, he said "Hiyoriyama", the hill where many people fled on March 11. When the taxi arrived, he had vanished.

Summer 2013. A girl of elementary school age hailed a cab late at night, in a coat, a scarf and boots. Asked about her parents, she said "I'm all alone." The driver, aged 49, took her to the address she gave. "Thank you, mister," she said. Then she faded away. He believed she had gone to visit her parents.

Every meter was started. The fares were recorded and left unpaid, and at least one driver showed Kudo the unpaid fare in his log. The passengers were mostly young. Their clothes did not fit the season. The drivers felt reverence, not fear. Many rejected the word "ghost" and spoke instead of the deceased, or of spirits. One, who had lost a daughter, resolved to treat any such passenger with compassion.

Kudo's chapter, "The town the dead pass through", appeared in late January 2016 in a book edited by her supervisor, Professor Kiyoshi Kanebishi. The Asahi Shimbun reported it on 21 January 2016. Then the story went around the world. Kudo concluded that young people who died "feel strongly chagrined" and use taxis as "private rooms" to express their grief. Kanebishi was clear: "The paper's subject isn't whether ghosts exist." He developed instead the idea of "ambiguous death", for those whose bodies were never found.

No official investigation is known, and nobody has accused Kudo or the drivers of inventing anything. Sceptics pointed to grief. A study by Agneta Grimby in Gothenburg of 50 bereaved people found post-bereavement hallucinations "very frequent" and "considered helpful". Others raised PTSD. Charles Figley of Tulane University noted that it is "not uncommon for fellow survivors of catastrophic loss ... to have common reactions." Writer Lucia Peters saw in the stories the old shape of the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend.

Journalist Richard Lloyd Parry had already described ghost reports in the disaster zone as "almost ... an epidemic". His book Ghosts of the Tsunami followed in 2017. In 2020, Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries told the story again in "Tsunami Spirits". Parry put it plainly. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, what is real is the suffering and the pain.