Japan and the Reality of Suffering

Pico Iyer, essayist, novelist, and resident of Japan, reflects on how the country's culture of resilience and stoicism helps it weather cataclysms like the March earthquake and tsunami

Life among the ruins: A cherry tree blooms in Ofunato, Japan, two months after the disaster James Whitlow Delano/Redux

By Pico Iyer

The scenes around the northern Japanese city of Sendai are still shocking. Clothes set out to dry hang outside two-story houses whose first floors are entirely crushed and hollowed out; the second floors are generally untouched. A solitary chair sits in the smashed wreckage of what must recently have been a living room. Cars can be seen floating on small rivers, and telephone poles teeter at crazy angles. Giant rectangles of scrap metal stand all along what were in January typically spotless and sleek Japanese highways.

In November, I traveled up to the little fishing village of Ishinomaki, an hour from Sendai, with the Dalai Lama. Almost eight months after the earthquake and tsunami of Mar. 11, the sense of devastation was hard to bear. An old wooden temple still stood firm against a hill, but the gravestones in front of it were broken or tilting over. Tidy boxed remains of the recently departed, accompanied by snapshots—here a teenage schoolboy, there a smiling grandmother—sat in rows by the altar, but no survivor had come to claim them, and there were perhaps no homes to take them back to.

When the Dalai Lama stepped out of his car to greet and console the hundreds who had gathered in the street to see him, women began wailing and sobbing, “Thank you, thank you.” He told them to look forward, not back; to honor the dead with something more concrete than tears; to rebuild their community as their nation had so stirringly rebuilt itself in the wake of World War II. As he turned round, however, I noticed that the usually unshakable Tibetan was wiping a tear from his eye.

Only two weeks earlier, by chance, I’d gone up to the little town of Iwaki Yumoto, just outside the “exclusion zone,” which surrounds the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant for 20 kilometers in every direction. Three of the plant’s six reactors melted down in the wake of the tsunami—and fires broke out in a fourth—making it the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a quarter of a century earlier, and ensuring that uncertainty would continue for decades.

Once a hot springs resort, Iwaki Yumoto is eerily deserted now. Most of the people I saw had traveled from all over Japan to work in often very dangerous conditions clearing up the plant. They’d come to rescue their nation in its time of need, several told me, but another reason was surely that jobs are scarce in Japan today. The tsunami came along just as the country was beginning to recover after two decades of economic misery.

The year just passed might have been a terrible cosmic test for Japan: In Sendai, people were just beginning to rebuild their houses (and lives) when a typhoon in September reduced the new structures to rubble. Some young people I know in Tokyo were so traumatized by the earthquake that, the following day, they moved to the southern island of Kyushu. Many elderly people fleeing the devastation around Fukushima came to the nearby prefecture of Yamagata, a Japanese friend who lives there told me. Having safely arrived, they looked around—their families gone, no homes to return to, not much of a future—and some quietly took their own lives.

Yet for all the sadness that will not go away, I can’t help feeling, after almost 20 years of living in Japan, that it’s the country’s strengths, more than its weaknesses, that have been and will be highlighted by the recent cataclysms. For a thousand years or more, after all, the island nation has weathered earthquakes and fires and wars and nuclear bombs; in some respects—a little like the Britain in which I grew up—it almost seems made for dealing with calamity. Resilience, stoicism, and community-mindedness have been binding and guiding the nation for centuries.