Asahi Shimbun [Japan]
21 January 2016
By HIDEAKI ISHIBASHI/ Senior Staff Writer
SENDAI--In early summer 2011, a taxi driver working in
Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which had been devastated by the tsunami a few
months earlier, had a mysterious encounter.
A woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near
Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama
(district).” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “The area is almost empty. Is
it OK?” Then, the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?”
Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at
the rear seat. No one was there.
A Tohoku Gakuin University senior majoring in
sociology included the encounter in her graduation thesis, in which seven taxi
drivers reported carrying "ghost passengers" following the March 2011
Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. […]
The seven drivers' accounts cannot be easily dismissed
as simple illusions. That is because if a passenger climbed in their taxi, the
driver started the meter, which is recorded.
If the passengers were indeed "ghosts," they
were still counted as riders. As a result, the drivers were forced to pay their
fares.
Some of the seven drivers jotted down their
experiences in their logs. One showed his driver’s report, which noted that
there was a fare that went unpaid.
As the "ghosts" the drivers encountered were
all youthful, it is believed they could be the spirits of victims of the 2011
disaster. […]