Disasters as Change Agents: Three Earthquakes and Three Japans

In the aftermath of the recent Japanese tsunami I was asked for interviews by a number of Southeast Asian broadcast journalists because I had written a book on Japanese earthquakes. Most of them politely gave me their questions in advance. This was not just politeness, of course, because writing out all one’s questions in advance predetermines the course of the interview, constructing a narrative ahead of the conversation. One narrative that I was continually invited to contribute to could be called “the admirable stoicism of the Japanese in the face of natural disaster.” My role as a historian, I was signaled, was to help viewers or listeners understand how the long history of earthquakes, disaster, and simply hardship had inured the Japanese people to sublime misfortune. One interviewer (who had an undergraduate degree in history) actually asked me to begin in the Tokugawa period and tell viewers how each successive period and its crises had made the Japanese more stoical. Another wanted me to explicitly contrast the behavior of the Japanese with that of other peoples who had faced similar crises and (supposedly) had not behaved so admirably (he mentioned Haitians and the citizens of New Orleans).

I did my best in every interview to complicate the narrative of a unitary Japanese people inured to crisis, but to no avail. I mentioned, for instance, that the mayor of a northern town had complained of the slow response of the central government, whom he claimed was leaving elderly residents of the town to die. I reminded reporters that there had been a string of nuclear accidents in Japan and that there were many activists (and just regular people) who deeply mistrusted the nuclear industry even before the disaster. I suggested that the same Japanese who appeared stoical on television screens today would punish the ruling party at the polls tomorrow if it did not perform well in this crisis. The fishing villages most affected by the disaster, I mentioned, were indeed used to hardship, and could weather the crisis as fishing and farming villages around the world have weathered crises for centuries. But they were only one of many Japans. In any case, any comment that I made which could be construed as complicating the narrative of a unified stoical people was edited out of my eventual appearances on television and radio, and the final broadcasts always presented a Japan without tension or conflict and waiting to follow a common path to recovery.

This experience has caused me to reflect not only on how the news media cover and presents natural disasters but also on how “national character” and moral tests have so often been adopted as framing devices for such crises. Of course in this instance “the Japanese people” are being complimented and collectively sympathized with, and no one would begrudge solace to victims, particularly if it also helps overcome historical barriers to empathy. At the same time, we have a duty as academics (and journalists) to see and report complexity and, if we’re historians, to chronicle change over time. We have a second duty, as human beings, not to denigrate the victims of one disaster while praising the behavior of others. I suspected that the impetus behind the desire on the part of some local journalists to contrast looting in Port-au-Prince or New Orleans with the calm formation of queues in Tokyo was to reactivate “Asian values,” civilizational and even race-based narratives that have great purchase among certain viewers but are ahistorical, decontextualized, and hardly explanatory.

Contemporary news reporters are not the first to seek explanations of “the Japanese character” in the violence of Japan’s natural environment. The British geologist, seismologist, and ethnographer John Milne, who worked in Japan as an oyatoi (hired foreign expert), proposed in the late 1880s that the Japanese were an “earthquake people.” He attributed many of their “national characteristics” to their long experience with seismicity, including what he perceived to be fatalism, unpredictability, and a fascination with the temporary. Although he would later modify some of these views, particularly regarding the “temporary” nature of...