Because of its harsh climate and remoteness from the centre, Tohoku, Japan’s north-eastern region, has long been regarded as the country’s backwater. Along with that reputation comes a set of unflattering stereotypes about its people – that they are taciturn, stubborn, somewhat enigmatic. Rather than speaking their minds, they grit their teeth, bottle up their feelings and go about their business in gloomy silence. But those very traits were seen as an admirable asset in the immediate aftermath of the 11 March 2011 disaster that hit Tohoku’s coastal communities, when a magnitude-9 earthquake was followed by a tsunami, then a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

Journalists reporting from the disaster zone commended the resilience of Tohoku people, marvelling at the restraint demonstrated by survivors, many of whom had lost everything. Uncomplaining, they organised themselves at makeshift evacuation centres, queued to receive rationed food and took care of the weak and wounded. Observers were made to feel that Tohoku was coping.

Richard Lloyd Parry’s book reminds us, however, that such preconceived ideas about regions and their peoples are no more than half-truths. Other realities existed beneath the surface of post-disaster life. Lloyd Parry, a Tokyo-based Times journalist, travelled many times to Tohoku in order to understand what was happening there. The result is a compassionate and piercing look at the communities ravaged by the tsunami, which claimed more than 99% of the day’s casualties of 18,500 – the greatest single loss of life in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. One woman interviewed for the book reflects that it was not just lifestyles that were changed: “I mean our heads. Since that day, everyone has something wrong with them.”

Lloyd Parry tries to get inside those heads, and finds not so much “something wrong” as many layers of profound grief. He sees that “everyone’s grief is different, and that it differs in small and subtle ways according to the circumstances of loss”. It is also coloured by such factors as how quickly the bodies of family members were recovered and buried. In the case of bodies never found, many survivors sought the help of mediums in the hope of locating their loved ones’ remains.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The tsunami sweeps shores along Tohoku. Photograph: AP

Post-disaster Tohoku came to be overpopulated with ghosts, with multiple reports of sightings. This, some believe, was inevitable as the tsunami took the lives of so many people unprepared to relinquish their worldly attachments. Ghost stories were common: a dead woman would visit old friends in their temporary housing and sit down for a cup of tea, leaving dampness on the cushion she was imagined to have been sitting on. A taxi driver would pick up a man asking to be taken to an address that no longer existed, only to find, halfway through the journey, that the passenger in the rear seat was invisible.

Whether one believes in the supernatural is beside the point. The point, according to one Buddhist priest who exorcised many tsunami-induced ghosts, is that people really believed they were seeing them. Tohoku’s “ghost problem” became so pervasive that university academics started cataloguing the stories, while priests – Christian, Shinto and Buddhist alike – “found themselves called on repeatedly to quell unhappy spirits” that could, in extreme cases, possess the living.

There is another set of spirits that inhabit the pages of Lloyd Parry’s book – the ghosts of Japan’s political failures at every level of society, from village communities to local authorities to city and prefectural governments, all the way to the central government that proved unable to respond fully to the disaster. Nothing symbolised such failures better than the case of Okawa primary school, whose story is one of the engines powering this book, giving it the character of a finely conceived crime fiction or a psychological drama.

Without giving too much away of this tragic, engrossing story, on the day of the disaster, nine schools were overwhelmed by the tsunami, and of 75 children who died while at school, 74 were from Okawa primary. Their parents wanted to know what accounted for these disturbingly disproportionate odds: after all, there was enough time between the issuing of warnings and the arrival of the tsunami for children at other schools to have been evacuated to higher spots. Official accounts kept changing, and there seemed to be a reluctance to launch a thorough investigation. Grief-stricken and angry, some parents of the dead Okawa children decided to fight back. They filed a lawsuit against the city and prefectural governments.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Memorial prayers for the relief of the Tohoku victims one month after the disaster. Photograph: Christopher Jue/EPA

But those parents were up against a peculiar kind of historical ghost – the spirit of a powerful, state-centred ideology that had proved so useful in Japan’s catch-up modernisation of the 19th century. This ideology regards the people as servants of the state; those who quibble with the official line are seen at best as nuisances and at worst as selfish troublemakers who should be ostracised. It even survived the destruction of Japan in the second world war, despite the officialdom that thrived on that ideology having led the country into disaster. In such a statist universe, Lloyd Parry contends, even bad politics is considered a kind of a “natural disaster”, an “impersonal misfortune beyond the influence of common men”, meant to be “helplessly accepted, and endured”. The apparent danger is that people stop exercising the power of individual judgment, which can lead to deadly conformism, as was the case with the elderly family who parked their car on a hill after the tsunami warnings, and then dutifully walked down the hill to report at the evacuation centre, only to meet their death. The same traits – respect for order, a high tolerance threshold and aversion to making a fuss – that made the Tohoku people model evacuees, one might argue, hinder the making of active democratic citizens.

Yet hardship can also ignite the desire to fight for one’s rights. It is little remembered today, but Tohoku has a history of struggling for its democratic dues. In the 1870s and 80s, when Japan’s fledgling civic society was considering what kind of a constitution it would need, Tohoku thinkers who had experienced the region’s endemic poverty, inertia and bloody defeat in the 1860s civil war, led a grassroots debate, the subjects of which ranged from whether a female emperor should be installed, to press freedom and how a “backwater” like Tohoku could be integrated into the rest of Japanese society. Many of the problems debated then are still relevant today.

Of all such Tohoku-inspired democratic movements, the Itsukaichi constitution is worth noting now. This was a proposal in 1881 for a constitution drafted by the Tohoku native Takusaburo Chiba. More than half its articles are devoted to people’s rights. Chiba died at the age of 31 and his constitution had to wait nearly 90 years before being discovered in a neglected archive. It is to reformers such as Chiba that Tohoku and the whole of Japan today should be looking for inspiration.

Eri Hotta’s Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy is published by Vintage.

• Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.