Stoical and fatalistic, the Japanesenational character will rise to the challenge
When I was a banker in Tokyo in the mid 1980s, it was my occasional pleasant task to tour the provinces visiting local banks which kept sterling accounts in London. I had nothing to sell, but my colleagues and I carried bags full of golf balls to hand over as gifts at each stop, where after a ritually polite meeting with the bank’s president, we would be treated to an evening of karaoke and misowari (weak, icy whisky and water) by whichever of his underlings spoke the most English.
I have fond memories of Fukuoka in the south, Kanazawa during cherry- blossom season and frozen Aomori in the north, where the karaoke songbooks were printed in Russian. I can’t remember whether we ever called on the Sendai Bank or the Fukushima Bank, both now perhaps evacuated because of the nuclear threat — because, to be honest, most Japanese cities looked alike, and most karaoke-night conversations followed exactly the same script.
The townscapes looked so uniform partly because of the earthquake risk. Traditional Japanese architecture was timber-framed, and its modern domestic equivalent used light steel and prefab cladding, relatively easy to rebuild in case of quake damage and routinely replaced from time to time by new owners creating bespoke houses or shops. But offices and public buildings were built four-square to withstand a repeat of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed more than 100,000 as it flattened Tokyo and Yokohama. That meant massive steel frames and foundations that move with the earth: if your office was on a high floor (mine was on the 17th), the sensation of a tower block swaying rhythmically from its base was horrible, even in a minor tremor.
So what we saw on television last week were smaller, lighter buildings being swept away like cardboard, and larger ones standing firm as they were designed to do. We also saw a remarkably stoical reaction from Japanese people whose fatalistic island-nation character, undiluted by external influences, was formed by the immemorial threat of earthquakes. That was a topic much discussed over misowari — our hosts often drawing parallels with the island character of the British, who looked a lot more stoical 25 years ago than they do now.
But what we have seen too these past few days is a highly organised response by Japan’s emergency services and self-defence forces which Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, standing beside a line of giant fire-trucks, was moved to describe as ‘awesome’. To Japan hands of my generation, that came as a favourable surprise: let me explain why.
Root-binding
I arrived in 1985 just a month after Japan Air Lines Flight 123, a jumbo packed with 524 passengers and crew, flew into a mountain between Tokyo and Osaka. A nearby US air base pinpointed the site within minutes, but American offers of assistance were curtly rejected. Media helicopters got there, and there was newsreel of struggling survivors on the mountainside. But the self-defence forces did not reach the scene until the following morning, by which time only four crash victims were still alive.
It was widely said that more would have survived if the rescue had not been so ill-managed. The failure was interpreted in terms of national character: all organisation in Japan was the product of adherence to hierarchy, ritual and the process of nemawashi, or ‘root-binding’: forming a consensus before action can move forward. There was also deep reluctance to tell the unvarnished truth or admit fault, and where foreigners were involved, a powerful streak of nationalistic chauvinism.
As a formula for postwar reconstruction and industrial success, it had been unbeatable. It was the reason why airport bookstalls in 1985 were full of lurid theses about how Japan was about to overtake America as the pre-eminent economic power. But it meant that nothing could be spontaneous; everything had to be done according to a meticulous plan. In the hours after the JAL crash, the authorities embarked on just such an exercise — having first made sure the Americans would not get there before them.
That was in the prime ministership of the sinister Yasuhiro Nakasone, when Japan Inc — the nexus of political, corporate and bureaucratic power — had an ironclad belief in its own superiority and took no heed of criticism at home or abroad. Then came the Nikkei collapse of 1989, an extended recession, and the rise of China as Japan faded. Fast-forward to the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,000 people, and not much seemed to have changed: again the government was criticised for responding slowly and rebuffing foreign assistance — while many supposedly quake-proof structures were found to have failed the test.
Orderly response
But since then, evidently, mighty efforts have been made to respond to public unease. Construction standards have been tightened, contingency plans have been drafted and rehearsed. Despite the rising death toll and the continuing nuclear risk, rescue work is proceeding in a orderly way that has been admired by the international media, and foreign help has been welcomed.
The disruption to Japanese economic activity is profound, but the wider sense of a world rocked by one upheaval after another will be even more damaging. Consumers are fearful, investors demoralised; insurers face uncountable claims; the nuclear industry is in turmoil. And the debt-laden Japanese government, still unaccustomed to telling citizens the whole truth, will be overwhelmed by the task it faces…
Or will it? Japanese savers will surely buy the bonds that will finance the replacement of shattered infrastructure. In a Keynesian way, such a massive project will be a positive long-term stimulus. There’s no more potent nation than Japan when it sets its collective mind on a big objective. This is the biggest it has faced since 1945 and there might, just might, be an economic silver lining.
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