Any other business | 19 March 2011

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.