Nightmare and Defiance

by Paul Theroux Info

Paul Theroux is a travel writer and novelist whose best known work, The Great Railway Bazaar, is a travelogue about a train trip from Britain through Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) he retraced that trip. His latest novel is A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta.

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Vulnerable, shaken Japan has attracted the sympathy of the world. In this week's Newsweek, Paul Theroux describes how, until now, the country has never been pitied.

All of it—the towns and cities tumbled flat in a torrent of mud and death—is appalling, and almost ungraspable. But, looking for a coherent image, anything to understand it better, I found an echo in the sight of besieged and brave figures, wearing white full-body jumpsuits and respirators among the sizzling reactors in the Fukushima nuclear plant at the devastated town of Okuma.

Called the “Fukushima 50,” they are standing fast and directing seawater onto the fuel in the process of meltdown, risking death. The New York Times reported, “That kind of response is not out of the normal for some workers in the nuclear energy sector.” Perhaps. But it is also a classic stance in Japanese iconography. The Last Stand of the Kusunoki Clan, a battle fought at Shijo Nawate in 1348, is one of the enduring images in Japanese iconography, occurring in many woodblock prints (by, among others, Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the 19th century and Ogata Gekko in the early 20th), the doomed warriors defying an immense shower of arrows.

Japanese soldiers recovered the body of a tsunami victim on March 16. (Credit: Q. Sakamaki / Redux for Newsweek) These samurai who were defeated—their wounded leader committed suicide rather than be captured—are inspirational to the Japanese, representing courage and defiance, and the samurai spirit. So the Fukushima 50 are braving 250 millisieverts of radioactivity, five times the permissible dose, in the way the Kusunoki defied enemy arrows.

The popular notion of Japanese life is one of order, where tranquillity is the ideal made into an aesthetic, whether in poetry, gardening, flower arranging, the tea ceremony, or tittuping geishas. Yet Japanese history, a chronicle of disasters both natural and man-made, helps us understand why it is also a culture of defiance. The Japanese know that they live precariously on these steep volcanic islands. Their iconic mountain, Fuji, is a volcano. Mount Asama in central Honshu has been erupting regularly for 1,500 years—the last time in 2009. Vulcanism, an aspect of their uniqueness, is celebrated; their sense of being offshore, apart, at risk—fires, earthquakes, floods, storms, as well as catastrophic bombings—is part of their culture, not as survivors but prevailing and making themselves better.

With this acute sense of limited land and few natural resources, and the hostility of nature, they have taken pains to put off the evil day by manipulating their weird geography, even if it means a disfigurement. The result makes the strange Japanese landscape even weirder: it is the most possessed-looking place imaginable, its awkward-seeming features ordered and buttressed, the human hand visible everywhere.

“We will rebuild,” Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said after the recent tragedy, and promised that the country would be stronger, improved in its preparedness against this sort of disaster. You might say he could hardly have promised anything else. Japan is almost without hinterland. Its population lives mainly on its coast. The mountains are for tunneling through, not residing on. And where there is open landscape, as in the low rolling hills of Hokkaido, it is thinly settled. From the carriage window, as the train travels north from Tokyo, through Sendai and the coastal towns of Minamisanriku, Kesennuma, Okuma, and others—the ones now swept away—the Japanese can be seen living in unusual urban density, the low, snug houses cheek by jowl, traversed by narrow lanes, as they have been throughout history. My sense is that they have been able to live closely together because of their elaborate good manners, mutual respect, self-sufficiency, and work ethic. A less polite society would require more space or higher fences or guard dogs.

More than most countries, Japan is one family, one language, one set of rules, believing in the greatness of its destiny and overcoming any obstacle to achieve it. This unifying metaphor encourages envy that is voiced in facile mockery (look no further than the belittling film Lost in Translation) depicting Japan as a farce of funny accents, where Western culture is mimicked as though in a funhouse mirror; or else robotic, unsmiling, a sniffy, xenophobic society of salarymen and whale slaughterers. “I thought that was the whole point of them,” a woman says in an Alan Bennett play, seeing a weepy Japanese man in an English café, “that they didn’t cry.”

Drudges, overachievers in a well-oiled machine—that is the superficial first impression of the traveler. Certainly the surface reveals something of the inner state, but after a while one sees more similarities than differences, and a great deal to admire. Their national pride is so strong, it’s possible to go overboard in seeing Japan as a bastion of rituals. The fact is that it has an aging population and a low birthrate, and labor costs are so high that most of the traditional brands of electronics and cameras are outsourced to China. Far from feeling superior, the Japanese feel somewhat jinxed and vulnerable, hemmed in by social pressures and the high cost of living (for someone in Tokyo, it’s cheaper to go to Honolulu than Sapporo), and consequently always seeming to be living as though squinting against a high wind.