Special to The Asahi Shimbun
Special to The Asahi Shimbun
A few days after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck the Tohoku region, an acquaintance of mine took a Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo. He noted the car was filled with mothers with infants and toddlers, and many baby carriages were parked along the center aisle. At first, he thought the women were traveling as a group.
But from their conversations he overheard, he soon realized that was not the case. They briefly exchanged information and talked of donating money to disaster relief organizations. And they got off the train at different stations along the way, wishing one another well.
As it turned out, these were mothers evacuating with their children, fearing exposure to radiation that was leaking from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The person who told me about this Shinkansen episode is a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing of March 10 in 1945, which killed 100,000 people. He barely escaped the inferno.
He told me he was most favorably impressed by those mothers who were wise enough to think and act on their own, refusing to swallow any information they were being fed.
The Japanese word "rondan" may be translated as the press or the mass media. But if the word is to be understood in its broad meaning as a public forum of discussion for subjects that relate to society, I would say every corner of our country was turned into a rondan after March 11, 2011.
Not only quality opinion magazines, mainstream television, mass-circulation newspapers and news websites, but even weekly magazines that usually specialize in showbiz gossip and color photos of young starlets in skimpy bathing suits, ran endless comments about the quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. We were all expected to participate in the "debate," or were sucked into it, willy-nilly.
I saw a few distinctive traits among the deluge of comments concerning the March disaster. One was to liken it to Japan's defeat in World War II 66 years ago.
For instance, Takashi Mikuriya, a political scientist, wrote a piece titled "Sengo ga Owari 'Saigo' ga Hajimaru" (The postwar ends and the 'post-disaster' begins) in the May issue of the monthly Chuo Koron magazine. Mikuriya compared "3/11" not only to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but also to other epochal events such as the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the 1945 Tokyo firebombing and the defeat in World War II.
And Mikuriya wasn't the only person. As if on cue, expressions such as "defeat in the war," "air-raids" and "burnt-out rubble" were revived all over the media.
What struck me as odd was that even people who were born after the war and couldn't possibly have experienced those things spoke and wrote as if they were recalling them.
I have heard that people plunging to their death from a cliff invariably flash back to all sorts of past scenes from their lives. If that is true, perhaps the tremendous "fall" caused by 3/11 unlocked the memories the Japanese people had forgotten.
If we are to accept the premise that 3/11 is our "second defeat in the war" following the first that happened 66 years ago, all we have to do is to aim for "the second national reconstruction." The task will be formidable to be sure, but it should be pretty straightforward.
The problem, however, is that this premise could be false.
Novelist Hiroki Azuma sensed it and tweeted his honest confusion: "Like many people say, the series of events since March 11 seem to vaguely resemble what happened at the time of Japan's defeat 66 years ago. But (as I tweeted a few days after the quake) my problem is that I can't really tell if our situation is more like what it was after the war or during the war. If it's the former, we can hope for reconstruction. But if it's the latter, things are pretty dismal."
Could it be that we are heading for "wartime" for the second time, not the second "postwar"? If so, what is this "war" that lies ahead of us?
Is it the difficult struggle for reconstruction that our country must embark on, now that our days of sustained growth are over and we have started down the path of decline? Is it the seemingly endless nightmare of trying to bring the nuclear crisis under control? Or does the "war" represent the mean-spirited back-and-forth between proponents and opponents of nuclear power generation?
It could be all of the above, too. Do we sense a "war" looming because our future remains shrouded in fog and we can only remain standing, paralyzed?
As far as I could see, the mentality of our country's opinion leaders, as verbalized in the rondan media, was no different from what it was before the March disaster. I had to conclude that most of those people didn't know how to verbalize their thoughts when it came to explaining the new situation.
Perhaps because of this, the only words that made me sit up over the last month were what I read outside the rondan media. One of them was, for instance, a declaration on creating a society without nuclear power plants announced by Johnan Shinkin Bank, a Tokyo-based credit association. There also was a message from the bank's president, Tsuyoshi Yoshiwara, distributed on YouTube.
Nuclear power generation has become a highly politicized issue, but the bank aims to have ordinary citizens discuss it as their own issue. To ensure the safety of communities, Yoshiwara said, his bank will do what it can "as a corporation with its own ideals and philosophy."
There was nothing new or difficult to understand about what Yoshiwara and the declaration said. But he stated that the nation's energy policy was "distorted," and I felt this was where the true worth of his message lay.
We have been conditioned to regard the nuclear issue as something so political and unrelated to our daily lives that it's only for experts to deal with, not for us to even think about.
But it took just one business enterprise to point out to us, in words that were completely devoid of sensationalism or hyperbole, that it is actually our own responsibility to get involved. In Yoshiwara's message, I felt I saw a path to a new form of "public service."
Reconstruction is necessary not only for communities devastated by the March disaster, but also for the way we use words to communicate with fellow members of our society.
* * *
Genichiro Takahashi is a novelist who is also highly regarded for his social and political commentaries. He received the Mishima Yukio award for "Yuga de Kanshoteki na Nihon Yakyu" (Graceful and sentimental Japanese baseball). His other works include "Aku to Tatakau" (Fighting evil) and "Kanno Shosetsuka" (Writer of erotic novels).