In one of my favorite books, Shogun by James Clavell, there is a passage where one of the characters goes on a soliloquy about how Japan is an “island of death.” Granted, this is coming from a character that in the story wants to commit suicide pretty much the entire story, but there is a little bit of truth in her speech. Japan’s history is filled with war, massacres, and suicide. Read a little more into her speech though, and you’ll find that she isn’t really talking about wars and killing, but the battles that the people have to face, the biggest and most imposing being the natural disasters that can face Japan on a daily basis.
Though, Shogun being a historical novel, the biggest thing about natural disasters back in the 17th and 18th century is that when an earthquake and or tsunami hit, it could swallow entire towns. It is not just that it could erase entire homes and families, but also any trace that the people there even existed. It is the sort of existential terror that has been in Japanese culture for ages. Throughout history, Japan has had many different ways in dealing with this both practically and culturally. There is a reason why classical Japanese furnishings usually imply movable, put away-able furniture with paper doors and walls; it’s because those things are easily replaceable. With all the typhoons, winds, and disaster waiting at every turn, the traditional Japanese life is full of evidence of trying to deal with the elements. Japanese concepts like Wabi Sabi (the art of making new objects look old) and Mono no Aware (the transience of things) are rooted in the idea that in Japan, you can’t really rely that something one day will be there the next.
While I was reading Lafcadio Hearn’s Kororo: Japanese Inner Life Hints, which is primarily about 19th century Japan, it surprised me to hear him describe Japan much like more modern scholars described Japan in the 1980’s. Japan being an “economic miracle” is not nearly the modern idea as many people thought it was. Hearn ascribed the Japanese market doing very well to how mobile the average Japanese person was. If resources and/or money dried up in one place, a Japanese worker could pack up and move to another place without a second thought. It was the flexibility of the average Japanese worker that Hearn attributed the Japanese economic success both at home and internationally. He also remarks that the Japanese worker’s ability to easily react and move at a moments notice is also why Japanese people have been able to adapt and take on foreign cultures as their own. One could then argue that it is state of always being prepared for the worst as far as natural calamities and disasters go could have been what has made the Japanese who they are to themselves, and to the outside world.
While Japanese history and culture is filled with natural disaster, that doesn’t make the latest quake and tsunami that hit the north of Japan any less terrifying. In the past, these natural occurrences could be accepted as a part of life in Japan, but now that people have settled and built more and more modern structures on land, the damage and loss of life is much more pronounced than it was. It is honestly hard for me to watch whole structures get washed away, and impossible to watch if I think that there may be people involved. That being said, I find it a little surprising that various journalists and other professionals find the Japanese reaction to this to be as calm and collected as it is. I have read many people attributing this to almost formless ideals of the “Japanese spirit” but I am not so sure that the idea that Japanese people did not loot and cause violence in the wake of the disaster to be such a mysterious ideal that outside people can’t relate too.
The fact is, even Japanese pop culture is filled with disaster and people surviving the aftermath. Even one of the latest, and most popular children’s film from Hayao Miyazaki, Gake no Ue no Ponyo, dealt directly with people surviving a tsunami (though because it is a children’s movie, it did not really deal with the more violent aspects). One of the most popular shows in the last 20 years Evangelion is about a Japan surviving one disaster and preparing for another one (though both are rather extra-ordinary in nature). Even on a surface level, there are many examples of Japanese culture trying to deal with the specter that is dealing with the idea that everything could change in an instant.
Even myself, though I am miles and miles away from being physically affected and no one I knew personally was physically hurt, I found myself having to deal with the emotional repercussions of what hit Japan. It wasn’t until I read Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake that I began to understand why I felt this way.
I actually ran into After the Quake while I was writing my thesis for my college degree. I only skimmed the first story and used it as an example, and did not really give it much thought after that. After the quake and tsunami hit, I decided that I should read this book to see if I could relate to it in some way. After the Quake is a collection of short stories Murakami wrote after he heard about the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and moved back to Japan. It is mainly about people outside the physical range of the quake (in some cases, even in different countries like Murakami was) and how they deal with the quake.
In that way, After the Quake became an absolute revelation to me, and I would recommend it to anyone trying to emotionally sort out their own feelings or trying to understand the feelings of others. It is about people trying to piece their lives back together when they begin to realize that perhaps the ground underneath their feet is not nearly as stable as they are lead to believe. It is about waking up to something that is utterly terrifying and realizing how much people kind of “fall asleep” to most of the real troubles of the world. To be completely honest, it would be rather challenging to try and give a real critical review of these pieces for me because it is a book that takes a nebulous feeling I had and gives it shape. Even at its weirdest, After the Quake manages to provide insight into dealing with people’s emotions during this recovery period.
In one story, a giant frog quotes Joseph Conrad by saying that true terror is the kind that men feel toward their imagination. It is a great quote because while it mainly is about how people manage to whip themselves into frenzy because of their own worries and thoughts, but it has a subtext that the giant frog is sort of talking about himself. The idea that a 6 foot frog exists and can talk is real is a sort of terror that speaks to how people define reality can be based on something that is completely false. I think for a lot of people, having what they thought as unfounded terrors and fears come to life is too much to handle. While it is very troublesome that after effects such as the current crisis with the nuclear plant in Fukushima were partially due to the nuclear workers relying on their own predictions rather than internationally accepted way of predicting disasters, it speaks to the very human folly of not excepting that the very depths and fears of your imagination have a root in a very real place. It is something that makes the foreigners returning back to their native lands make a lot of sense. Much like Murakami returning to his home after the Kobe quake, realizing a person’s fear makes them want to hold on to those things most precious to them, which for many people is friends and family at home.
For me, I am not sure if it is due to my education or my naivety that I stay in Japan. Though I also recognize for me it is the path of least resistance. No one in Southern Kyushu as far as I can tell is panicking about the north, and the only real physical effect is that at every store now you can donate to the relief effort. I remember even before coming to Japan joking about my friends about a documentary called “Japan Sinks!’ (translated title) about how, with the rising sea level, that Japan may not even exist in the future. The joke being that I am pretty much devoting a lot of time and energy into a country that may not even exist one day. That joke was my way of dealing with the fear that my dream is to live and work in a country that is not the most stable in the world, and in turn, was my way of dealing with that uncertainty. I am not sure how many other people working here from other countries were aware of Japan’s balancing act of dealing with the natural occurrences that are always on the doorstep, but it is something I do not blame people about leaving when they realize it. I am not sure if I lost my home or someone I was close to the tsunami how I would even react, but that is why Japan is filled with literature and media to deal with those emotions. There is a reason that Japanese culture mainstays such as Mono no Aware, the idea that things are truly beautiful because they are transient and cannot last forever, remain the important concepts that they are today.
I think my realization of why I want to stay in Japan came to a head when I was talking a walk and decided to stop at a local convenience shop. As the lady was ringing up my items she remarked how happy everyone is because they are at peace. She used the word “heiwa”(平和), which made me realize she was talking more about a more serious type of peace, and not just frivolous happiness. It then made me think that instead of being afraid of what could happen, I should be happy for what I do have. It is a tough pill to swallow sometimes, mostly because I don’t want to seem insensitive to those who are suffering, but the only thing I can do is try the best I can to help those in need and keep on living. Maybe in the end, that is the only thing any of us can do.
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