Japan and the Tsunami

It's difficult to articulate the scenes we have seen coming from Japan; with rolling 24hr new coverage, we see the disaster unfolding before our eyes. Of course, Japan is no stranger to earthquakes; for nearly half ah century after the great earthquake of 1923 devastated Tokyo and the surrounding area, causing the deaths of more than 100,000 people, no new buildings were allowed of more than two or three storeys and when, in the 1960s, skyscrapers were eventually allowed, they had to be built to the most exacting standards to cope with earthquakes of the most extreme violence.

Whatever is said about the safety precautions in the construction of nuclear plants and the shaking that people experienced in the earthquake, there have been few reports of large buildings collapsing as they did in New Zealand.

But then perhaps that has tended to lull the Japanese, as it has so many people in advanced economies, west as well as east, into thinking that they had nature tamed. In the post-Second World War years of prosperity and expansion, millions moved from the villages and the fields to the cities and the suburbs.

Japanese culture remains ever-conscious of a rural past and the world of nature. Vengeful spirits and overwhelming forces is the stuff of theatre, cinema and popular art. But it is no longer preoccupies everyday life, until now.

The vast majority of people live in the cities and work at commerce, their lives filled with the sounds of the modern world and the electronic gadgets. Japanese culture is now an urban one and a modern one, just as is happening now in China. No more than in Europe or America does the rhythm of life allow for major disasters where the power of Man and his machines is made to look puny. That is going to be a shock to Japanese society once it recovers from this catastrophe.

Nearly every reporter has commented on the orderliness and apparent calm with which most Japanese reacted to biggest seismic shock for a century. That is no doubt a tribute to the training every child and citizen undergoes for just such an emergency. But it is too easy to confuse that with a spirit of obedience in the populace.

The earthquake and tsunami have struck after nearly a generation of economic stagnation and political paralysis. Japan has had five prime ministers in four years and a change in government two years ago has brought little sense of change or new ideas. The Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, is widely dismissed. The government's standing has been dented by a series of corruption scandals. If it wasn't for the growth of the Chinese market, the resilience of its manufacturing industry and a propensity of its citizens to save, Japan would be on the list for the next crisis in the financial markets. Voters don't expect the system, or the politics, to open up in the foreseeable future.

The fact that Japan's population has borne this situation so patiently to date is less as a consequence of obedience than because there has been no great reason for uproar. The country is wealthy and cohesive enough to maintain a relatively high standard of living, with few external pressures. There is, and always has been, in Japan an overiding sense of fatalism about life, which induces resignation and political passivity.

It is hard to believe that a catastrophe of this magnitude will have no effect on the society and politics. Anyone who knows the way Japan revived after the Second World War and became such an unstoppable success in the 1960s, or who witnessed the way it responded to the oil shocks of the 1970s, can doubt the determination and the ability of the country to pull itself round.