The Big Japan Quake, Part 2 (First Week)

Thursday, March 17, 8:30 a.m.

If I was in the States, I’d be pinching myself today for forgetting to wear green. Instead, I am in the land of the rising sun and pinching myself to keep warm in a dim teacher’s room at the junior high I work at, as this area deals with an early-morning rolling blackout on an abnormally cold St. Patrick’s Day. The temperature last night dipped below freezing and inside the mostly concrete school building, a building that, like most buildings in Japan, lacks good insulation, it feels it. Chilly.
I’d heard the blackout would start at 6:20, so woke at 5:55. Enough time to toast some bread, heat some coffee, soup and a bit of my apartment and download a slew of mid-week podcasts. 6:20 came and went and I began to have hope that, like Monday and Tuesday but unlike yesterday, the planned blackout would not come to fruition.
By 7, I’d stopped thinking about it and was sitting on the toilet when the lights went out. Great. I’d been lazy about finding a new roll of toilet paper and now had to do it in the dark.
Oh, don’t overstate it, man. I did have a flashlight and there was some natural light from outside. Still, I couldn’t find the TP, so resorted to using some tissues instead.
It was now 7:10, about 45 minutes until I had to leave for school, so fed and full of coffee, I crawled back under my blankets and listened to the “It Only Ends Once” podcast, which briefly touched on the disaster here in Japan as well as the uprisings across the Middle East and tied it in to the period of the early-to-mid 1990s in Los Angeles, a time of riots, floods, fires and earthquakes, not to mention the media apocalypse known as the OJ Simpson trial. I was a college student in LA at the time and reflecting on it now, I can see that my occasional considerations about the so-called end of the world must have blossomed then and there.
Yet here I am, listening to a Phish show on my headphones so I can drown out an annoying buzzer coming from the corner of the room that no one seems to know how to turn off. Here I am, still here.
Because I’ve come to realize that, in the end, the love you make…er, sorry, that, in the end, endings are often beginnings if you look at them differently.
I have a feeling many people reading this can remember the intensity of September 11, 2001 and the weeks following it. Do you remember how ‘everything has changed’? How the world we knew it had, just like that, been transformed? And how, even amidst the uncertainty, among the ruins, there was hope, compassion and maybe even deeper connection to the world around us?
I can remember buying some groceries and the checkout clear looking me in the eyes, no, the heart, and asking ‘how are you?’ and how good that concern made me feel, how it made me hope that perhaps what would emerge out of 9/11s ashes would be a more caring society.
Before the cynic in you complains that this world didn’t emerge (and, full disclosure, the cynic in me often makes this complaint), consider that below the surface, there are thousands of personal stories relating to how 9/11 changed people’s lives for the better (link: ). Yes, below the surface.
Because on the surface, the world the mass media loves to focus its lens on, there is a lot of tragedy, destruction and doom and gloom in Japan this week. As Alex Hahn of the aforementioned podcast said, the triple tragedy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis is a disaster rivaling any other of the 21st century.
I am hoping this essay doesn’t come across as indifferent or callous to the deep suffering of millions on the northeastern coast, some of whom lost loved ones and houses, many of whom have been without adequate food, water, electricity and heat for almost a week now.
Yet amidst all of that, there are beautiful reports like the one I read today from an English teacher in Sendai about how generous and caring people have been, some leaving food and water on stranger’s doorsteps without even waiting for a thank you. And how many elderly are saying that it is a return to the caring, community spirit of Japan in years past.
Sure, there are reports of panic buying, people fearing the worst and stocking up on more things than they really need, leading to a lack for others. But there are no reports of looting and, in fact, some people are even leaving their doors unlocked in the hardest hit areas.
Here in Gunma, an inland prefecture about 200-300 kilometers southwest of the main disaster area, there is a resigned ambivalence about the various inconveniences we are dealing with—the food and gasoline shortage, the blackouts. On one hand, we are reminded when we watch video of the tsunami-destroyed villages, how much we still have we feel we have no right to complain. On the other, it’s no walk in the park waking everyday and wondering if a radiation cloud may have descended on one’s area overnight.
But still … still there is hope and a sense of shifting consciousness. There is gratitude, there is a real-life recognition of just how fragile our interdependent society is, and there is knowledge that conserving energy might be more than just an abstract environmental rallying cry.
Even as I discuss with my wife a possible return to the States to ride out the storm, even as she half jokingly apologizes to me for reeling me into a life in Japan, I feel a wiser, more human Japan will emerge. It’s the paradox of natural disasters—they can cause such havoc, yet create hope. Here’s hoping…