Not Hope but Will

Prime Minister Naoto Kan referred to the disaster as the worst crisis ever since WWII. He may have been correct. But Japan has always been able to overcome tremendous hardships. Japanese people's fortitude and perseverance have been admired all over the world. Economic stagnation? Political deadlock? Yes, these are problems, but nothing compared with what Japan has accomplished since the end of the war.

The Kobe earthquake in 1995 is still fresh in my memory. It devastated the beautiful city out of recognition. But people got together under the banner of "We Love Kobe" and made herculean efforts to redeem the city's beauty and dignity. Now Kobe is a far more wonderful city than before the disaster struck.

The most important thing about this is that those who lived in Kobe at that moment, including myself, never doubted it would recover from the damage it suffered. Indeed, eventual recovery was so natural to me that it didn't occur to me to have any doubt about it. And Kobe did emerge from the crisis a stronger city.

The NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof, who witnessed the resuscitation of Kobe in person as a correspondent, attributes this resilience to a form of fatalism. He observes that Japanese people tend to accept quietly what has happened. This is reflected in such Japanese phrases as “shikata ga nai,” which we often use to express the view there is no point in grumbling about what has come to pass. Indeed, one old survivor of this Tohoku earthquake is reported to have said, “It is no use complaining about what happened, we can rebuild our city.”

This aspect of Japanese culture has long been pointed out by Westerners, but almost invariably in a negative light. For example, Sir Laurens van der Post suggested, in his autobiographical short stories that are based on his own experience as a POW, that this kind of self-effacing fatalism has been responsible for Japanese people’s fanatical behaviors in the war. What makes Mr. Kristof’s observation special, therefore, is that it draws attention to the remarkable feat this Japanese character could accomplish in a crisis. And Mr. Kristof cannot be so wrong, as is evidenced by the case of Kobe and the survivor mentioned above.

So why should we be so pessimistic? I am confident, and I believe everybody is confident, that Japan will regain its strength. True, there is no denying that this disaster will be a traumatic event for the entire nation and that it will be extremely hard for those who suffered serious damage, be it physical or mental, to stand up and move forward. But still more difficult for me is to imagine that they will never stand up again.

In the face of this unprecedented crisis, let us remember an important truth, fully articulated in the superb Japanese comic "ARMS": "What prevents people from moving forward is not despair but resignation; what prompts them to move forward is not hope but will."

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Appendix:

The following comment is on Mr. de Botton’s article “Tsunamis and Stoicism”
(http://theschooloflife.typepad.com/the_school_of_life/2011/03/alain-de-botton-on-tsunamis-and-stoicism.html)

Tokyo was affected by the earthquake that hit Japan five days ago, but the damage it suffered was relatively small, especially compared with the colossal havoc wrought upon the northeastern part of Japan. Basically, I can go about my daily business as before. Therefore, I do not realize what it would truly mean to see one’s own house falling down or one's own relatives and friends being swept away by tsunamis. In other words, despite my nationality, I am as objective an onlooker as anybody else.

From that onlooker's point of view, I couldn't agree more with Senenca. When an unexpected, catastrophic event happens, people tend to complain of its unfairness and unreasonableness. Some even say that they don't deserve it because they didn't do anything wrong. But they at least know that those events have happened over and over again in the history of human beings. For example, great earthquakes have recently struck such countries as Indonesia, China and New Zealand, causing many innocent people to die. Even if we confine ourselves to Japan, the Kobe earthquake happened in 1995 and the Niigata earthquake in 2004, in both cases resulting in large casualties. So for a disaster to strike is not unreasonable at all. What is truly unreasonable is the groundless assumption we often fall into the trap of harboring that it is impossible for us to fall victim to such disasters. And Seneca's purpose, from my understanding, was to rectify that unreasonable attitude.

Still, I cannot help but think that I can say this so calmly because I have never seen my beloved ones being engulfed by death waves. It might be a piece of sentimentality to say this, but I am not sure whether, if I should experience the tragic events that happened to the northeastern part of Japan a few days ago, I could say the same thing with as much equanimity. And if I couldn't do that, isn't my current agreement with Seneca a spurious one? A tough question.