On 9 July 2011, nearly four months after 3.11

On 9 July 2011, nearly four months after 3.11, I toured the book stores of Jimbōchō, the popular used and new book outdoor supermall in downtown Tokyo. In the dozens of small, specialized used book shops bulging with popular culture of decades past, I hoped to get a sense of how previous disasters had been characterized in the popular media. I found several statistical reports and not a few academic histories and novels, but perforce I missed a great deal. In one of my favorite haunts from years (and projects) past, I found a cache of several thousand photo postcards in a crate labeled simply “shinsai” (disasters). The overwhelming majority of these cards were photos of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. They included views from the hills above Ueno of the flattened plain below, photos of smoldering buildings in the Ginza and Otemachi, as well as the gate of the powerful Finance Ministry with nothing left behind it. Photos of citizens streaming away from the fires, of officials organizing relief supplies, of the young Crown Prince (later the Showa Emperor) surveying the damage with municipal officials and military officers, and cards depicting charred corpses were all available. Horrifying parallels to the current crisis-- literal and metaphorical-- constructed themselves for me. The new bookstores offered a contemporary account of much the same story. All have a shinsai section just off the main entrance filled with the photo collections rushed to publication by the major houses—Mainichi, Nikkei, Yomiuri, etc. In one of the two largest book stores, that section was in a corner at the shop’s northwest entrance under a large poster of the now familiar rising sun with the words “Ganbarō Nippon” (Hang in there, Japan!). The poster promised that a portion of the proceeds of the sales of the products in this “shinsai corner”—six shelves of them-- would be donated to the Japan Red Cross. In addition to many magazine-style photo essays of the 3.11 tsunami carrying trucks and buildings and other sadly hypnotic attractions-- including volumes devoted to the widely appreciated rescue and relief efforts of the Self Defense Forces-- there was a hastily produced manga of a Tokyo journalist interviewing ordinary citizens who had performed heroic feats during the crisis, as well as several “emergency food guides,” instructions on how to conserve energy, and an “anywhere light” (dokodemo raito) for emergency use. Clearly, the Japanese understand that endurance is not a national option.