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Yes, Japan will recover materially but what of the national psyche?
Damian Flanagan,14 Mar 2011
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has responded to the major disaster in Japan by referring to it as "the greatest disaster since the Second World War".
His words implicitly call for the Japanese to show the same resolve as in 1945. Kan is no Winston Churchill, but nor is such monumental rebuilding of their entire urban landscapes anything remotely new to the Japanese.
Japan's sacred shrines and temples have been rebuilt countless times. Destruction and rebuild are cyclical and endemic in Japan. When the ground shakes and the dust settles however, things that governments would rather keep covered up are revealed.
In 1923, the Tokyo earthquake led to massacres of Koreans, blamed somehow as scapegoats for the disaster. In 1995 in Kobe the areas where most buildings collapsed, where fires started and most people died, were the poor working class districts. Previously the overwhelming majority of people in Japan had laboured under the delusion that they were all 'middle class'. Today the myth of Japan's supposedly safe nuclear programme is called into question.
Japan is not the land of blindly obedient automatons it once was. We should be in no doubt that Japan will materially recover from the latest disaster; but how will the Japanese recover from the psychological impact? Japan was overtaken last year by a resurgent China and saw itself as powerless to resist the inexorable re-balancing of history.
The latest quake is sure to also cause a similar quake in the Japanese national psyche, leading to a further re-examination of Japan's path in the last 140 years and a fumbling towards a new, more open, artistic and complex personality rather than the anodyne "economic powerhouse" of old.
Damian Flanagan divides his time between Manchester and Osaka. His latest introduction to the Japanese classic The Three Cornered World is published this week by Peter Owen.
