The Rift in the Sky over Shizukuishi (雫石の空の裂け目)

July 30, 1971. Approximately 8,500 meters above the town of Shizukuishi, Iwate Prefecture. All Nippon Airways Flight 58, descending southward on autopilot, and a Japan Air Self-Defense Force F-86F fighter jet on a training sortie merged together in a single, instantaneous crossing. The passenger aircraft broke apart in midair, and not one of the 162 passengers and crew members returned to the earth alive.

The wreckage and the dead rained down across the hills and fields of Shizukuishi. The farmers who first came upon the white fragments scattered among the summer-green grass could not, for some time, comprehend what they were looking at. To this day, certain elders in the area will say that on that particular stretch of land, the air feels strangely heavy — but only on afternoons like that one.

One hundred and twenty-two of the passengers had belonged to a tour group from Yoshiwara, in Fuji City, Shizuoka — a bereaved families' association traveling home from a memorial journey to Hokkaido. These were people who had already lost loved ones to the last war, now returning from a trip of mourning and remembrance, only to fall again from the sky. The cruelty of that coincidence has been carved deep into the memory of the region.

The crew member aboard the Self-Defense Force aircraft ejected by parachute and survived. That asymmetry — a sky in which only one side lived — lends the atmosphere around the site a quality that is somehow more than merely wrong. Among those who visit the memorial, it is quietly passed along that the flowers placed before the monument sometimes stir, even on days when there is no wind.

The memorial in Shizukuishi still receives visitors, but each summer, without fail, people standing near the monument complain of a ringing in their ears they cannot explain. As though something from the high reaches of the sky has never quite finished falling.