Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Page 3
Part III, ‘Decades Found and Lost’, begins by briefly tracing the country’s remarkable recovery from the ruins of war to economic might in the 1970s and 80s. More recently, that has been followed by a long period of relative stagnation after the collapse of the bubble in 1990 and the twin crises of 1995, when an earthquake brought much of Kobe crashing down and a religious cult targeted commuters on the Tokyo subway. That year, as Murakami said, was a turning point for Japan: it brought home to ordinary people a realization that there was no going back to the pre-bubble era. During its fast-growth years, the drive to catch up with western living standards was, to a fault, the central feature of Japan’s post-war national project. Though Japan has basically succeeded in that goal, the bursting of the bubble has deprived it of its sense of national purpose. It has lost what the Japanese call its konjo – its ‘guts’ or its ‘fighting spirit’.
Part IV, ‘Life after Growth’, deals with how contemporary Japan has sought to adjust. The book will contend that the country has not stood still, as some would have it, though its transition has been imperfect and is far from complete. Two chapters dealing with the economy – ‘Japan as Number Three’ and ‘Life after Growth’ – argue that Japan has preserved living standards and social cohesion better than commonly acknowledged. Its economy, though hardly robust, has not performed as badly as many think. Japan has become a sort of lazy shorthand for everything that can go wrong with an economy. Yet, when considered from the point of view of Japanese living standards, rather than investor returns or the size of the Japanese economy in relation to others, the past twenty years have not been all that disastrous.
Japan has avoided deep damage to its living standards partly – perhaps largely – through the as-yet-unknown cost of accumulating a huge public debt. Some argue that this will inevitably end in crisis. At some point the state is likely to renege on these obligations, either by outright default (unlikely), cutting social welfare, or eroding it away through inflation. At that stage we may look back and conclude that Japanese leaders ought to have moved much more quickly to tackle deep-seated structural problems. Japan has prioritized stability over radical change. It might perhaps have done better to allow more bankruptcies and aggressive industrial restructuring in the interest of longer-term economic rejuvenation.
As Europe and the US are now finding out, however, recovery from a severe financial shock is not easy. When push came to shove, even the US, for which adherence to the free market is a creed, was not willing to allow its banks or its car industry to go bust. At the start of 2013, US unemployment was roughly 8 per cent and the economy still fragile, though showing signs of recovery. In Britain, unemployment was also nearly twice Japan’s. The UK’s economy had contracted 4 per cent since 2008. The situation in countries such as Spain and Greece was far worse still. Like Japan, then, other countries are having to grapple with higher deficits, lower growth and previously undreamed-of experiments in monetary policy needed just to keep their economies afloat. Japan is often viewed as a cautionary tale. The true lesson, though, may not be how badly it has coped with the collapse of an asset bubble, but, more worryingly, how relatively well. When it comes to asset bubbles, the most important lesson Japan may have to teach the world is: at all costs, avoid them in the first place.
The chapter ‘Samurai with a Quiff’ deals with the years from 2001 to 2006 when Junichiro Koizumi, the most charismatic prime minister in a generation, led the country. It was an extraordinary period when people rallied around a leader promising radical change. Koizumi sought to breathe new life into a political system that had festered in the new, lower-growth era. His threat to destroy his own party and end a fifty-year-old political hegemony eventually came to pass, though no robust two-party system has yet taken hold to replace the old status quo. Japan’s political system remains unequal to its task. Two subsequent chapters – ‘The Promised Road’ and ‘From Behind the Screen’ – deal with the social change that followed the breakdown of Japan’s post-war model. Life has become less certain and, for many, particularly women and young people, less secure. But with the erosion of old certainties comes opportunity. These chapters look at how Japanese people are grappling with these issues.
Part V, ‘Adrift’, discusses Japan’s severe diplomatic challenge in an era when its power has faded and that of China is on the rise. China’s awakening is uncomfortable for Japan given the unresolved issues of memory and territory that still reverberate around the region. A dispute with China over a tiny group of uninhabited islands between Okinawa and Taiwan has become a new focal point of rancour between the two countries. The perceived threat from China has opened old wounds in Japan about its place in the world and its sense of identity.
Part VI, ‘After the Tsunami’, attempts to look more closely at what has changed in Japanese society, and what has not. The events at Fukushima suggest that much of ‘old Japan’ remains intact. The failure to deal properly with the nuclear crisis or to act honestly with the public is evidence of a highly flawed political and bureaucratic system. Yet some good things emerged from the disaster too. Japan became more aware of its links with the rest of the world as donations poured in from far and wide. One foreign ministry official was nearly in tears when she told me that the city of Kandahar in Afghanistan had scraped together $50,000 to help reconstruction. The Japanese rediscovered the northeast of their country, revered by poets for its spectacular beauty, but long ignored by the rest of Japan as rural and backward. Now they came to appreciate the incredible endurance of its people: in Japanese it was called gamanzuyoi – steadfast patience. Volunteers flocked to the area to help clear up the rubble and dig out the mud. Civil society, bolstered by new laws passed in recent years, also came out stronger after the tsunami. Japan has not always been the harmonious society of repute. In the immediate aftermath of war, there were frequent ideological clashes between left and right over how the past should be remembered and how a future should be built. The fast growth of the 1960s dulled dissent, but in recent years, Japanese have begun to rediscover what it is to organize, to debate and to challenge the consensus. That came out more powerfully after Fukushima as an anti-nuclear movement gathered force and as people affected by the tsunami and nuclear contamination pressed for compensation.
Finally, in the fishing towns of northeast Japan, once the debris had been cleared and the bodies counted, ordinary Japanese citizens revealed tremendous humanity and fortitude as they tried to put their lives back together again. One Japanese playwright said their actions drew on ‘an intriguing tradition of forging onward while holding on to a sense of our own impermanence’.6 The only thing they could count on was that, one day, a tsunami would come again. In many cases, they showed a pioneering spirit more reminiscent of the rugged American West than the uniformity and dependence on top–down authority sometimes mistakenly associated with Japan. After the great quake and tsunami of 2011, the people of the northeast didn’t wait for a government in which they had little faith anyway. Instead, they took control of their own situation and started from the ground up. It is in their stories of perseverance and survival that we should seek both hope and inspiration.
PART ONE
Tsunami
1
Tsunami
It was in 1666 that the local potentate, a former engineer by the name of Heitazaemon Yamazaki, ordered the wealthy merchants of what became Rikuzentakata to plant pine trees. The sturdy black pines were to be located on a one-and-a-half mile strip of sandy beach that stood between the small town and the vast Pacific Ocean. The jagged stretch of coastline in this distant and isolated northeastern part of Japan, itself in those days a remote feudal island, was then, as it is now, among the world’s richest in seafood. All along the coast, the waters were abundant in kelp and a startling variety of fish and crustaceans. But it could also be a deadly place. The salt winds and high tides were poison to the farmland. And once every generation or so – infrequently enou
gh to push to the back of one’s mind, but not so uncommon as to forget entirely – a monstrous wave would surge in from the horizon to wreak destruction upon the town.
And so, some 350 years ago, the residents of Rikuzentakata planted trees in the hope of providing their homes and farms with some protection from the wind, the salt and the sea. In the first seven years of their endeavour, 18,000 pines were planted. Subsequent generations added to the natural barrier. The project became more urgent when the goldmines in the nearby mountains were exhausted, obliging Rikuzentakata to step up its production of rice and other crops. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were no fewer than 70,000 pines lined up like a defensive army in close formation beside the ocean. Locals strolled through the grove’s shaded pathways or took picnics by the shore. Young couples doubtless courted in its secret shadows. In more modern times, the 70,000 pines became a tourist attraction. In 1927, the year after Emperor Hirohito came to the throne, the beach was designated as one of the 100 most beautiful landscapes in all of Japan. The venerable trees stood along the white sandy beach, between the wooden houses of Rikuzentakata and the narrow cove that, together with the other steep inlets along this wild and beautiful coast, form a serrated pattern like the teeth of a hacksaw.
In yet more recent times, in 1989 to be exact, the year of Emperor Hirohito’s death, a building went up just behind the beach. At seven storeys tall, built of little white bricks and boasting a spiral staircase to match the one on the Titanic’s first-class deck, the Capital Hotel was the tallest – and certainly the grandest – structure in town. In the lobby was hung a large painting depicting young children playing, carefree, by the beach. Glass doors led out to an oval-shaped swimming pool on the veranda. There was even a special retreat for the use of young brides as they changed for the wedding ceremonies that were held in the hotel’s sumptuous surroundings. The room’s location was such that, as the young women prepared for their nuptials, they were afforded a perfect view of Rikuzentakata’s celebrated pines.
The Capital Hotel had been built with money made during the go-go years of the 1980s bubble era, a time of legendary excess. When the bubble burst, the hotel was taken over by the local municipality, as were so many bubble-era follies. The principal investors had been the president of a construction company and a local singer of tear-filled enka ballads, both of whom had wanted to put something back into the local economy. And the Capital Hotel was certainly something. In the rugged town of 23,000 people, its white-painted façade and beachside location made it the natural place for locals to hold their celebrations, their trade association dinners and their funerals. As Kazuyoshi Sasaki, the hotel’s sales manager, said, ‘For a small town in the countryside, this really was a beautiful hotel.’
Sasaki was stockily built for a Japanese man, with a pleasant round face and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Even when he was talking about the gravest of matters, there was always the faintest flicker of a smile on his lips. Now in his late fifties, he was born in Rikuzentakata, as were his parents and their parents and their parents before that. Indeed, it was in 1734, when Japan was almost completely shut off from the outside world, that Sasaki’s ancestors had established a small business to extract tea-seed oil from camellias. Their shop was called Aburaya. Over the years, the business grew to become a general food manufacturer and wholesale distributor, passed down from generation to generation into the nineteenth, twentieth and, finally, into the twenty-first century. In 2006, after more than 270 years in business, Aburaya went bust, brought low as Rikuzentakata’s population dwindled and amid stiff competition from bigger, slicker outlets. Sasaki’s first impulse was to flee the town, unable to stand the shame, as he saw it, of having let down his employees and his ancestors. But the company needed to be wound up in orderly fashion. And so he and his wife stayed on in Rikuzentakata, and Sasaki found another job – at the Capital Hotel.
On the morning of 11 March 2011, a Friday, Sasaki had gone on behalf of the hotel to pay his last respects to Yukio Shimizu, a city council member who had just passed away. Many people had gathered for the vigil in which friends and relatives bid farewell to the deceased so that the soul can more readily make its journey to yomi no kuni, the other world. Mourners burn incense and stay up through the night, chanting prayers to keep the deceased company. Sasaki had gone to the house to discuss the final seating arrangements for the Buddhist funeral service that was to take place at the Capital Hotel on the following day. The house where Shimizu’s vigil was held was on higher ground in the hills above the flat valley floor in which the town of Rikuzentakata was spread out. Sasaki would later note the irony. ‘If they hadn’t been at the wake,’ he said, with a half smile, ‘many of those people would likely have died.’
Sasaki himself did not stay long at the house. Instead, in the early afternoon, he returned to the Capital Hotel, where he entered his office at 2.46 p.m. He recalls the time exactly, to the minute in fact. For it was at precisely that moment that the ground started shaking.
• • •
The Japanese have long been accustomed to earthquakes. In years gone by, they blamed these periodic events on Onamazu, a giant catfish on whose back the Japanese islands were said to rest. Usually, the catfish was pinned beneath the mud by a mammoth slab of rock held in place by the powerful Shinto god of the earth, Kashima. But when Kashima let down his guard, Onamazu would twist free and thrash about, causing the earth to heave and shake.1 Within days of the Great Ansei Earthquake of 1854, which caused damage from Kyushu to Tokyo, woodblock prints of catfish went on sale in the capital. The Japanese also live with constant reminders of the tsunamis that frequently follow large earthquakes. The monumental bronze Buddha at Kamakura sits open to the elements, the hall in which it was once housed washed away by a giant wave in 1498. Japan’s coastline is dotted with gnarled stone tablets, the size of mini-tombstones, warning future generations to build their houses further from the shore. Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish-Greek who spent fifteen years in Japan in the late nineteenth century, described it as ‘a land of impermanence [where] rivers shift their courses, coasts their outline, plains their level’.2 One Japanese seismologist calculated that, since the fifth century, the archipelago had been subjected to some 220 earthquakes of catastrophic force.3 In modern times, the Japanese learned that the islands on which their ancestors had settled are, in fact, located on the most unstable section of the earth’s crust, at a confluence of several tectonic plates along what is termed the Pacific Ring of Fire. Nine out of every ten earthquakes occur along this volatile section of Earth, making Japan the single most vulnerable nation to such disasters. On most days of the year, some part of Japan suffers a minor tremor. So used are people to these distractions that short earthquakes, even if they set wooden screen doors rattling or light shades swinging, barely elicit a pause in conversation.
But the earthquake at 2.46 p.m. on 11 March was no minor tremor. Everyone who felt the ground turn to liquid on that afternoon knew instantly that this was something entirely out of the ordinary. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, it was the fourth most powerful earthquake in recorded history, unleashing the energy equivalent of some 600 million Hiroshima bombs. The epicentre was beneath the seabed, about forty-five miles off the northeast coast of Japan, somewhat to the south of Rikuzentakata. Geologists later said the so-called undersea megathrust earthquake – the sort that happens at the boundary of tectonic plates – had occurred where the Pacific plate had been pushing under the North American plate on which Japan rests.4 That slab of the earth’s crust had been pushed upwards as if, as one commentator put it, a playing card were being squeezed between thumb and forefinger.5 When it bent too far, it suddenly released the pent-up tension, forcing the North American plate to snap back. In an instant, parts of the Japanese archipelago shifted as much as thirteen feet to the east.
This sudden rupture had occurred some twenty miles beneath the seabed, a relatively shallow depth that meant much of the energy w
as released to the surface. Throughout a large part of Japan, the earthquake went on for a time-stopping six minutes. Many later recounted how the earth’s movement seemed to build in intensity even as they prayed for it to stop. In Tokyo, the modern skyscrapers, many built on rubberized or fluid-filled foundations, lurched towards each other like bamboo in the wind. So violent was the swinging that, in the midst of their terror, some office workers felt as sick as if they had been on a boat in the heaving ocean. In Rikuzentakata, far nearer the epicentre, the shaking was more violent still. One witness described the accompanying sound as being like thunder.6 When the hellish shuddering finally stopped, there was only one thought in most people’s minds: tsunami.
Sasaki, still clutching the papers relating to Shimizu’s funeral, clambered up the staircase towards the roof of the Capital Hotel, three floors higher than the next tallest building in town. The lights of the hotel had gone out, as they had across all of Rikuzentakata, and the stairwell was dark as he and some thirty hotel employees fumbled upwards. From the roof, they looked out. Despite the intensity of the earthquake, there did not appear to be extensive damage to the buildings. Out at sea, the water looked flat and calm, though a tsunami-warning siren was already sounding. A few minutes later, the hotel manager announced that a bus was waiting below to evacuate staff. At around 3 p.m., after hotel employees had checked to see that no one was left in the building, the bus departed. The road directly in front of the hotel was blocked with cars trying to escape. The gate at the level-crossing a few blocks inland was down, causing traffic to back up behind it. So the bus took an alternative, longer route, skirting the coastline for a few minutes before heading inland towards the hills that ringed the cove. By 3.08 p.m., all the staff of the Capital Hotel, Sasaki included, had reached safety.