March 11th, 2011 – Tokyo, Japan
My wife’s friend had just stopped over for lunch with her youngest daughter when the house started to slowly sway to-and-fro. No big deal. This was Japan after all, so we were quite used to these kinds of small tremors. That all changed the instant that books, glasses and appliances started flying off the shelves. The girls were already panicked. I didn’t really think it was a big issue until I saw the refrigerator slide across the kitchen floor and my 42-inch plasma TV fell face flat. Houston, we had a serious problem and mother nature was obviously pissed!
Time to head for the pantry with the kids.
In the aftermath of the 9.0M earthquake and following tsunami in Fukushima, which killed over 15,000 people with 6,000 injured and over 3,700 missing while simultaneously destroying six nuclear reactors on Japan’s eastern coastline and causing them to fail to the point of meltdown; many foreign nationals quickly packed-up, abandoned the country and returned to their homes abroad; leaving the rest of the Japanese population with just one question remaining: “What do we do now?”
The answer came much quicker than anyone would have expected and much easier than it really should have. The answer was; “Let’s just do what we’ve always done”.
While this answer was good in many respects in terms of keeping the Japanese population calm, unwavering and faithful to each other in the face of a major natural disaster, the potential future impacts of that answer are what disturb me now.
The Japanese culture for the most part is a very simplistic society; simplistic meaning “highly intelligent but not driven by any specific purpose or goal in life”. I refer to them as a “drifter society”. This is mainly due to the overall outlook of the society as a whole and childhood upbringing. The general rules of thumb in Japan are; “Don’t be different”, “Don’t stand out” and “Don’t want more than what you can see around you – live within your means and live within your space”.
Even in a bustling metropolis like Tokyo; full of partying, nightlife, lights, top fashion; a place where every relevant guy in town owns a Mercedes-Benz and every girl out of Junior High school seems to own a Gucci (or other brand name) handbag; at the end of the day, these rules still apply for most people. Go home, sleep it off, repeat the same process the next day. Japan is a highly methodical and repetitious society. That’s the way most people like it here – which admittedly, really isn’t such a bad deal per say, unless you’re one of those people can see where this pattern will eventually lead and the problems it will cause for future generations in Japan.
Japan is an industrial nation. Most of the island country’s economy is based on manufacturing, production, import and export of goods. With little to no land mass and a huge population, Japan doesn’t have …
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