My Heart is in Japan Right Now

I have watched a lot of international news coverage of the earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan. One correspondent was talking to what sounded like a young Japanese woman by phone yesterday. She was in Sendai, at the heart of the devastation. She sounded quite calm and was reporting what she knew, but apparently the "outside" world has more information than she because she was without power and water...and she mentioned that she/they hadn't had the courage to leave their home. At the end of the conversation, the correspondent asked her what she wanted the world to know. Only then did emotion come into her voice. In quiet desperation, she said, in a tearful voice, that there were people who had lost their homes and everything, and for countries to please send help. She wasn't asking for herself. Only others. And my heart broke for her.

I lived among the Japanese when I was 10 years old. My father was to be stationed in Sasebo on the southern-most tip of the southern-most island of Japan (Kyushu), and we were to go with him. This was a mere 12 years after the end of World War II--12 years after the United States had dropped devastating atomic bombs on two cities in Japan that ended the war and broke the spirit of the Japanese people. (Yes, I know all about Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March and all of the other horrible war experiences that Allied forces suffered at the hands of the Japanese military...and yes, I know that use of those nuclear weapons saved many American lives...but the long-term suffering created by those bombs will forever be etched in my brain.) I'm fairly certain that there had to be resentment against Americans in those days, but if there was, it didn't show. They were a "conquered people" and behaved with the humility and respect that one would expect from that. (Think about your relationships with people who have harmed you. Isn't everything okay after they have apologized and behaved as if they were truly sorry?)

What you won't see on the news is hysterics from those in the affected areas of Japan. Their culture forbids that. They are a stoic people who suffer in silence. There is none of the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that you sometimes see--even in the US--of people in dire straits. They have honor to protect. (Trust me: even as a 10-year-old, I went to bed every night thanking God that, by accident of birth, I was born American...but sometimes I wish we Americans were more about honor than self!) I remember one day in Sasebo that my mother trusted me to go down to the town alone. I walked past a Japanese "Papa-san" who had obviously been drinking. All he did was bow. I would NOT have felt so at ease were I passing a drunken American sailor!

We have had our own disasters in the US. I'm not sure that we ever adequately prepare for them in the same way that the Japanese do. Japan is earthquake-prone and well acquainted with tsunami. We could learn a lesson from them, but being stubborn (as is OUR culture), we probably wouldn't learn for long. Unless we are smacked in the face with that stuff every day, we would pass it off, in time. (Of course, if we WERE smacked in the face with regular disasters, some of our religious leaders would say it is our punishment for keeping God out of schools and government. Don't even get me started on that!) Mother Earth is a powerful force that we mere mortals hardly understand. All we can do is roll with the punches and pray for deliverance.

My heart is in Japan today...