Rising Sun-Japan and the Art of Survival

Three years ago this March, a 9-­magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to hit Japan, created a tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people outright, displaced hundreds of thousands more and removed entire villages from the map. By triggering the failure of the Fukushima nuclear plant, it also left the landscape contaminated and led to Japan’s curtailing of its nuclear-power system.

I was living in Beijing when the quake hit, and I saw Chinese coverage shift from its normal churlish outlook on Japan to growing respect for the stoic discipline with which its people bore hardship. One photo ran on TV and front pages across China. It was an aerial shot of the Japanese, very young to very old, forming a long, snaking but always orderly line for disaster supplies. The amazed Chinese reaction was: Imagine a society in which people would patiently wait their turn for hours rather than rushing pell-mell to the front.

David Pilling, who from 2002 through 2008 was The Financial Times’s bureau chief in Tokyo, also learned of the earthquake in Beijing, his new post. He quickly returned to Japan to report on the disaster and its consequences. He conceived of this book, whose ambition, he says, is “to create a portrait of a stubbornly resistant nation with a history of overcoming successive waves of adversity.”

As anyone familiar with Japan knows, tenacity is highly celebrated as an individual and a collective trait. Words like ganbaru (“to endure”), ganbatte (“keep going”) and gaman (“plucky resolve”) pop up ­routinely in conversation. In Japan’s accounts of its own history, setbacks and the resulting brave rebounds play a central narrative role (much as the constant ­movement westward does in America’s understanding of its past). This is also the way Pilling structures his story, with opening and closing sections about destruction and recovery in the devastated Tohoku region. Between them come extended ­discussions about Japan’s long record of dealing with adversity, and the recent politics and economics of what is often — and, as Pilling shows, misleadingly — referred to as Japan’s “lost decades” following its 1980s boom.

The book author David Pilling

The ground-zero disaster reporting will command the attention of any reader. ­Pilling vividly recreates the waves of ­different sorts of destruction. First the earthquake itself, which “went on for a time-stopping six minutes.” Then the tsunami, which was not the single cresting “Great Wave” famous from Hokusai prints but a rise in sea level of as much as 130 feet in some ­areas. Pilling describes a multistory gymnasium where towns­people were waiting out the tsunami. Water filled the building, and more than 60 people were trapped and drowned. Pilling arrived in Tohoku in time to witness the next stage, in which survivors walked across a flattened landscape searching for any sign of the people, belongings, entire neighborhoods that had disappeared. For me, these scenes powerfully recall John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” — and although the causes were obviously different, in each case the longest-lasting source of damage came from radiation.

At the end of the book, Pilling returns to Tohoku and, of course, finds people defying hardship and persevering. They include a photographer friend who ­daringly makes repeated trips into the “exclusion zone” around the failed nuclear plant, to document what has happened there.

Please read the while book review by James Fallows at Tmagazine. 

Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival ,by David Pilling

 Penguin Press HC, (March 13, 2014),$20.15