The Nine-Day Fog's 310 tapes get a stylus again: a 23rd-year re-analysis

In 2003 a fog covered the bay for nine days and the district was sealed. The twelve missing: five warehouse workers, three anglers, two residents, two TDA observers. The only effects ever recovered were two pairs of shoes, set neatly on the quay. The event drove the buildup of the permeation-index statistics and the observation network — but the cause of the fog has not advanced half a step in 23 years. The target now is some 310 tapes, about 1,400 hours, recorded continuously through those nine days. The analysis of 2003, constrained by the computing of its day, relied on hourly averages; everything on the scale of seconds and minutes went unread into storage. Digitization took three years and finished in June.

Asuka Urato, 39, the Wanyo University ocean physicist who identified a correlation between the bay's index and the tides, joins the team, which will also cross-reference tide and weather data from 2003. She was careful to fence expectations: "For the first time we can reread that sea and that sky with a second hand. Reading and understanding are different things. But there is no understanding without reading."

On Aug. 30, ahead of the announcement, the TDA briefed the families' association, the Kyumu-no-kai, which has gathered at the memorial on the bay greenway on the ninth of every month since the event for what it calls the roll call. The stone reads: "The fog has lifted. We are waiting." Kazuko Sakota, 70, whose husband was a warehouse worker of 47, said after the briefing: "For twenty-three years I have gone to every announcement there was. I will go to these too. We asked one thing only: whatever you learn, or if you learn nothing, come and report it to the same place. On the ninth of every month, we are in front of the stone." Some member families have taken the permeation-disappearance provision, which allows certain procedures without a finding of death; some have not. "Both kinds of family stand in the same spot on the ninth. Paperwork and waiting are kept on different shelves."

Director Makoto Hiura, at his press conference, reached back: "Twenty-three years ago I was a section chief on the observation side. The cart that carried those tapes to storage — I pushed it myself. Whether I pushed it believing a day would come when they could be read, I honestly don't remember. I remember that the cart was heavy. It weighed 1,400 hours." Then, in his usual register: "I cannot promise results. What I can promise is that this time we will finish reading." An interim report is due next summer; all findings will be published, with the families briefed first.