Takuya Matsunaga’s emotional state had plunged to depths where he harbored thoughts of suicide and experienced graphic hallucinations about how his loved ones died.

He sometimes grew ill and could not even stand up.

It has been five years since his wife, Mana, 31, and 3-year-old daughter, Riko, were killed in a high-profile traffic accident in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district on April 19, 2019.

The two were crossing a street when a speeding car driven by an elderly man ran a red light and plowed into them.

Matsunaga now promotes traffic safety activities to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy.

“Since then, I have been living with the determination not to waste the deaths of Mana and Riko,” he said.

Norihiko Kuwayama, a 61-year-old psychiatrist who has treated victims of overseas wars and natural disasters in Japan for about 30 years, read an Asahi Shimbun article about the fifth anniversary of the Ikebukuro car accident, and he wanted to talk to Matsunaga.

The dialogue was held in June in Tokyo.

LIED TO HIMSELF IN FIRST YEAR

“I tried to jump from a rooftop soon after the accident, to be honest,” Matsunaga told Kuwayama.

However, when he read a picture book to Riko when her body was in a coffin, he imagined her telling him, “You stay alive, Daddy.”

During the five days between the fatal accident and the funerals, Matsunaga opened the lids of the coffins holding Riko and Mana to talk to them.

One particularly difficult thing for him to do was to watch the dashcam footage from the car that ran over his wife and child.

“At the moment they were hit, Riko was looking toward the car. I wonder how scared she was,” he said.

The initial shock of their deaths soon became feelings of numbness, and he kept his emotions bottled up.

“Looking back on those days, I think I was telling lies to myself during the first year after the accident,” he told Kuwayama.

When he went to the accident site one year after their deaths, he put his hands together to pray—and then had a flashback of the moment when his wife and daughter were hit by the car.

He could barely stand up for two to three weeks after that experience.

He also realized he was imagining details of the deaths that he never actually saw.

“I know that these are just from my imagination, but I feel pain inside my chest,” he said.

Kuwayama provided an explanation for what Matsunaga had experienced.

“When you have the same symptoms for more than half a year after the accident, it is believed that you have developed post-traumatic stress disorder,” Kuwayama told Matsunaga. “Your imaginations become part of your memories. That is one symptom of PTSD.”

SHARING HIS PAIN

Matsunaga resumed work a month after their deaths.

His hands trembled when the clock reached the times when the accident occurred and when he received the call from police about the deaths.

“I wonder how I managed to endure the first week, the first month, and the first year,” he said.

His friends and others who have lost loved ones in accidents provided support.

Once a month, Matsunaga talked with a clinical psychologist at a support center.

In the discussion with Kuwayama, Matsunaga looked back on things he shared with people at Kanto Kotsu Hanzai Izoku no Kai, a general incorporated association nicknamed Ai no Kai, which consists of bereaved family members of traffic accident victims.

“It was huge that I could share my feelings with people, like me, who have lost their loved ones,” he said.

Five of his close friends from his hometown took turns visiting and walking with him soon after the accident.

Matsunaga recalled the discussions he had with his friends at that time.

“Only someone directly involved could understand the problem they face. But it is the best treatment to respect and listen to your friend’s feelings,” he said.

Matsunaga said he can now go to places where he has special memories of his wife and daughter.

“Time has passed, and I can now consider experiences I shared with them as good memories when I visit those places.”

NO MORE HATRED

Matsunaga also discussed his traffic safety activities with Kuwayama.

“I’m told that ‘it is great that you’re serving the people and society,’ but it is not like that. I’m doing it for myself,” he said. “Not wasting their lives is one of the measures I take to look toward the future.”

He received a letter from the man who caused the accident and met with him in prison in May.

Matsunaga said he visited the man because he didn’t want to “waste the experiences and voices of perpetrators.”

“I fought in the courtroom by biting the bullet because I didn’t want to feel regret. But he was judged under law, and he met with me with sincerity. He understood my intentions and said he would never do it again. So, I feel something different from hatred toward him now,” Matsunaga said.

Kozo Iizuka, now 93, a former top government bureaucrat, received a five-year prison sentence for negligent driving resulting in death and injury.

Iizuka blamed a mechanical failure for the crash, which injured nine others, but the Tokyo District Court concluded that he kept mistakenly pressing the gas pedal instead of the brake.

Matsunaga said: “We can’t erase all trauma, but we can accept it, find meaning in it, and use it for the benefit of society. In my case, that means serving to prevent a recurrence.”

After hearing Matsunaga’s experiences, Kuwayama described him as “a person who has psychological scars and has reached the favorable state we hope he would achieve.”

“After accepting trauma and learning that you can live the rest of your life, the road is open,” Kuwayama said. “With all of my heart, I’d like to keep an eye on Matsunaga’s next five years, 10 years and 20 years, as one of the role models for recovery.”

(This article was written by Shoko Mifune and Hiraku Higa.)