Almost a year ago, a few days after the tsunami hit Tohoku and the Fukushima Daiichi Plant started to go into meltdown, I quoted to my friends and family part of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, written in Germany in the years following the First World War:<\/p>\n
The sap is mounting back from that unseenness<\/p>\n
Darkly renewing in the common deep<\/p>\n
Back to the light and feeding that pure greenness<\/p>\n
Hiding in rinds round which the winds still weep.<\/p>\n
The inner side of nature is turning<\/p>\n
Another sursum corda will resound;<\/p>\n
Invisibly, a whole year\u2019s youth is striving<\/p>\n
To climb those limbs that looked so iron bound.<\/p>\n
I first read that part of the poem as a student. Turning those words over in my mind in the days following 03\/11, I felt I could keep at bay the horrifying images of destruction being broadcast from the north, and the frightening news from Fukushima. And I was even more moved by the poem\u2019s\u00a0message of hope and renewal after desolation.\u00a0However, I knew there was one more stanza in that poem, and I have been thinking about it lately as well:<\/p>\n
Preserving still that grey and cool expression,<\/p>\n
The ancient walnut\u2019s filling with event;<\/p>\n
While the sapling trembles with repression<\/p>\n
Under the perching bird\u2019s presentiment.<\/p>\n
Those last two enigmatic lines strike a discordant note, even souring the emotional tone of the poem. How to reconcile the growing exultation of its first two stanzas with the comedown of its last lines? Over the years I wondered what they meant. That even in nature\u2019s renewal we have to expect suffering and loss? Or \u2013 and this was a more literal interpretation that occurred to me in the past year \u2013 that in the renewal of the old and firmly established, genuine youth can be overshadowed?<\/p>\n
Like many foreigners and Japanese, I hoped a year ago that in the wake of the tsunami\u2019s devastation there was a chance to reform Japan\u2019s society and economy, beginning with the rebuilding of Tohoku. During my times as a volunteer in Ishinomaki City working alongside students from my university, I have been proud to play a small role in activities which will bring about local renewal. I have seen Japanese and international NPO\u2019s working together with the citizens of devastated communities to clean and rebuild their towns, and to lay out strategies for their economic and civic future. And as long as I keep my thoughts fixed on the tremendous work being done\u00a0by people I have come to know and respect, then I can believe \u201canother sursum corda will resound\u201d. But I can\u2019t wish away the disconnect between those local activities and the lack of a national vision for reconstruction. The Japanese government is too weakened by factional troubles and a petty zero-sum struggle for power with the opposition to do much more than offer large sums of money for reconstruction. At the same time, prefectural and local governments cannot arrive at a consensus about where and how to spend that money rebuilding their communities. So for the foreseeable future,\u00a0hundreds of thousands of Tohoku people will remain in cramped, uncomfortable temporary housing, often far from their home towns and friends.<\/p>\n
One of the saddest dilemmas for reconstruction is presented by the traumatized, mostly elderly residents of the wrecked rural and fishing towns along the coast of Tohoku. Many quite naturally want to preserve as much as possible of their traditional way of life. They have had the numbers to vote down urban consolidation measures that would see dying villages abandoned and they oppose liberalizing reforms to the heavily protected but declining agriculture and fisheries sectors. The dilemma is that in exercising their democratic rights they are trying to restore a status quo that was already demographically and economically unviable before 03\/11. Even worse, their choices will help speed up the migration of young people from Tohoku for better opportunities in the south. This is a microcosm of what some of my students have called Japan\u2019s silver democracy: that the conservatism of elderly voters hoping to renew the \u201cold and firmly established\u201d will overshadow economic reforms needed to secure the future for Japanese youth. So yes, there are those words from that last stanza of Rilke\u2019s poem turning over in my mind.<\/p>\n
That overshadowed future is what I worry about when I think of my daughter\u2019s life in this country. A year ago\u00a0I was preoccupied by\u00a0other thoughts\u00a0\u00a0– that\u00a0she\u00a0would be poisoned in utero\u00a0by iodine 131 blown out from Fukushima Daiichi. Given what we now know of Tokyo Electric\u2019s unbelievable proposal to evacuate its staff from that plant on the 14th of March, and of then secret government fears of what was likely to happen following such an evacuation, my anxiety was not irrational. However, my fear for Japan\u2019s society now\u00a0is that, even after experiencing the terrible shocks of the tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, it will remain too wedded to an inflexible economic nationalism to accept readily \u201cforeign-looking\u201d reform ideas; that its political classes are too factionalized to make a forceful case for such reforms; and that at a deeper level,\u00a0habits of excessive\u00a0loyalty and deference to authority will\u00a0remain fixed\u00a0in its\u00a0civic, educational and business life.<\/p>\n
In the next few decades this society might just waste its tremendous economic and intellectual capital, muddle through without taking on the risks of reform, and gradually expose its poor, its unemployed youth and its frail elderly to greater poverty and social isolation as it runs down the revenue needed to fund their welfare needs. Beginning, I am afraid, with Tohoku, where the tsunami shattered the community life of its elderly people and blighted the already narrow employment and life opportunities of its youth. In my volunteer work in Ishinomaki I have tried to give something back to a society which, for all the faults I have listed, has still been very good to me. I don\u2019t feel confident that it will be as good for my daughter and her generation.<\/p>\n
I\u00a0don\u2019t want to finish\u00a0on such a negative note. I began with a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke, and I will\u00a0finish with\u00a0some words\u00a0from Maruyama Masao, Japan\u2019s greatest post-war political thinker,\u00a0who as it turns out was\u00a0a lover of German poetry and literature.\u3000A critic of Japan\u2019s wartime political system and an advocate of individualism,\u00a0his thought went out of fashion during the heyday of Japan\u2019s economic nationalism after 1960. What he wrote in his essay \u201cBeing and Doing\u201d just before 1960 still reads like a promise awaiting fulfillment, and points to the renewal of a\u00a0civic\u00a0activism\u00a0that I believe is the way forward for Japan\u2019s recovery: \u201cThe application of the standard of democratization as \u201cdoing\u201d is, that leaders will provide unstinting service to citizens and society, and citizens will check their leaders for rights abuses and critically monitor their conduct\u201d.<\/p>\n
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