While teaching in Shizuoka I began a weekly journal with an adult student who soon became a good friend of mine. One week, on a sad anniversary, she wrote to me about a former friend of hers who had died saving a child in the ocean a year earlier. “I think the sea has mysterious power,” she wrote. It was probably because of this, more than any other, that a peculiar chill ran through me as I saw the first footage of the churned ocean water spilling over the sea walls, crashing through villages and into the city of Sendai, casting ships into bridges and buildings like bath toys. The sea, instead of waiting for victims to come to it—as my fictional heroine had done—had instead come to the Japanese people, bringing death and destruction in a crushing surge of water that has changed millions of lives, if not ended them.
There is a word in Japanese, shouganai, that is used similarly to 'c’est la vie' for English and French speakers. Or, more bluntly, 'that’s life.' The word undoubtedly originates from a history full of natural disasters beyond the control of man, namely earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and typhoons. It points to another aspect of the Japan though, besides the tragedy it has at times endured as a result of sitting on the ring of fire (typhoons notwithstanding): its people’s ability to keep moving and get on with living in spite of any hardship. Anyone with a moderate idea of history knows that this is far from the first time Japan has been devastated. Besides a geologic parade of furious earthquakes that have killed hundreds of thousands in modern history, Japan was also burned to the ground, as it were, during the second world war: her major cities carpet bombed into scorched ruins and twisted metal, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all but ashes and rubble, a lifetime of radiation poisoning for survivors and a swath of mutation or illness for the succeeding generation. It took me a long time to realize that shouganai isn’t always as simple as c’est la vie though: it can be a quiet word of defiance as one pushes on in the face of ruin and hardship, muttered under the breath in a time of incredibly stacked odds.
I am fortunate enough that none of my friends and former students were hurt or killed during the disaster, and that engineers risked, and are risking, their lives and health in order to avert a nuclear meltdown and keep them safe. I am fortunate that I’m still receiving emails from former students excited about beginning university next month, or elated that they passed their high school entrance exams—young people who refuse to let tragedy get the best of them. There is a common thread, however, that runs through the messages coming out of Japan: thankfulness for being okay, and believing that at this time all that can be done to help those less fortunate must be done. If that means donation, it’s a donation, if that means prayers, its prayers. This doesn’t mean that Japan will fall to its knees and clasp its hands together for weeks in immobile mourning though, because it’s a place where things get done. Japan doesn’t stop for anything, and it doesn’t look back into the abyss. It may grind down, perhaps so slow that it appears to come to a halt, but it is always moving, and it is moving because its people know that no one person makes it on their own, not when it all comes down to it.
Japan’s past shaped it to be the place it is today, just like any other nation. For centuries, as civilization continued on the coastal plains and fertile valleys between the mountains, the line between life and starvation was more or less defined by community and the harmony in its dynamics. Villages cooperated as wholes to harvest rice and vegetables—which in most places constituted the bulk of the diet--made clothes and built homes against the cold. Most civilizations had this interdependency amongst its members throughout most of history, the difference here being that when Japan screamed into the latter half the 20th century with the rest of the industrialized world, its citizens didn’t completely flip the game board off the table in the name of personal success at all costs. There’s still an underlying commitment to the nation as a whole and to each other, backed by a deep sense of honor, that trumps actions that would upset social harmony. Children are taught from a young age that, quite simply, everyone’s needs and wants are equivalent to their own. We probably don’t realize the problems that come attached to certain Western ways of thinking until it’s too late, as we can see with the looting, pillaging, violence, rage and finger pointing that erupts in the wake of natural disasters in some other parts of the world. During my time teaching, even as I conveyed many of my own cultural values to students and friends, I was much more starkly aware of what the West could stand to learn from Japan. To look at it one way: Japan has westernized a great deal over the last 70 years, partly in a materialistic sense and partly in culture, but this has been a one way road.
Over the last twelve days I’ve watched as a nation comes together to get through a horrendous natural disaster, displaying the very best of who they are through altruism, kindness and dedication to one another, and I wonder if we still don’t all have something to learn, not necessarily only from Japan, but from some other countries in this part of the world as well. Certainly Japan has its own problems and injustices, but like many other countries this doesn't remove the fact that it might have something very real and very valuable to share with the world that surrounds this once very isolated and still indelibly unique island in the sea. At the same time, I’m hardly surprised at what I’ve seen—I didn’t doubt for a moment how these people, who I’ve come to care about very much over the last few years, would act in the face of tragedy. This is why I know that no matter how many billions of dollars in debt Japan has been cast, no matter how much grief has been brought on by lost lives and homes, and no matter what happens after this, they will rebuild and move on, because the Japanese people will never let themselves drift off into the darkness like that. Sometimes the dark is shouganai—you keep moving, back towards the light.
The first report after the quake I read was that at the moment it struck Tokyo, passengers on a subway train all took each other’s hands. In that moment they had no idea what would happen next—perhaps that was the very end; perhaps the power would snap out and the tunnel collapse. It made me think of a part in Stephen King’s novel The Dome. Near the end of the story a wall of fire sweeps downward towards a mass of villagers trapped behind the barrier of an inescapable prison. A soldier, safe on the other side, reports that in the instant before the fire was upon them, he saw that they had turned to face it together and were holding hands. It reminded me of something that had come to me often and that I still hold true in my thoughts: when the lights go out in Tokyo, and the world—in darkest hour—I hope I might be somewhere in Japan.
The first report after the quake I read was that at the moment it struck Tokyo, passengers on a subway train all took each other’s hands. In that moment they had no idea what would happen next—perhaps that was the very end; perhaps the power would snap out and the tunnel collapse. It made me think of a part in Stephen King’s novel The Dome. Near the end of the story a wall of fire sweeps downward towards a mass of villagers trapped behind the barrier of an inescapable prison. A soldier, safe on the other side, reports that in the instant before the fire was upon them, he saw that they had turned to face it together and were holding hands. It reminded me of something that had come to me often and that I still hold true in my thoughts: when the lights go out in Tokyo, and the world—in darkest hour—I hope I might be somewhere in Japan.
Sometimes I wish we could all be
