Now, is this preparedness a credit to Japan’s forward thinking? Perhaps. Mostly though, I think it’s simply a function of living under constant duress.   If you’re going to live in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, right over the junction of no less than five tectonic plates, where earthquakes happen almost every week, chances are you develop some pretty effective coping mechanisms.   The Japanese call this ganbaru (“resilience”) and it pervades much of their culture.

Here then, is a poignant example of the value of adversity, and a hugely important lesson for any Better Man.   There’s a lot of people like me who think bad things couldn’t happen to them, and are completely ill-equipped to cope when they do.   Failure, crisis, disaster – call it what you want, but it butches you up.   That way, when shit goes bad you can weather it with grace.

The challenge of bad times, then, is to keep them from making you cynical.    At the risk of blowing my experiment in hubris out of the water,  I think the answer lies in humility.  When you realize you’re as susceptible to bad times as everyone else, you feel a little less isolated, and you’re inclined to both help and be helped – another prevailing Japanese trait, expressed very elegantly in their habit of bowing to each other, called otagai ni rei (loosely translated as “we are equals” but can also mean “in it together” or “for each other”).   You see it in the fact that, rather than exploiting the misery of others, supermarkets close to the  disaster zone are actually cutting the price on bottled water for disaster survivors.   There’s also been virtually no looting, a regular occurrence following natural disasters.

This pervasive habit of humility in crisis has re-oriented Japanese thinking – they can look at mistakes clinically and without bias, and figure out what they did to make it happen and avoid that sort of behaviour.  If the crisis was inevitable, then the lesson is how to make it sting less in the future.  This is an attitude we don’t necessarily embrace in North America. Despite aspirations to Christian charity, we are still a culture that still emphasizes individuality and personal pride over empathy and responsibility to your neighbor.   That’s not to say it doesn’t exist here – one need only talk to someone who lived through WWII to hear stories of personal sacrifice and the merit of working together to achieve a common goal – only that up until recently we had forgotten how to use it.   We’ve enjoyed a lot of prosperity for a long time, to the extent that we fooled ourselves into thinking things could never go bad.  We congratulated ourselves for being so smart, when we were probably just lucky.  It’s that kind of thinking that led to the subprime mortgage crisis, or the kind of harsh reality I live in today.

Over the last year, I’ve tried to be grateful for hard times, remembering that not only will I be stronger and smarter for the experience, but I’m going to cherish good times that much more.  I think most Japanese get that, which is why they’re going about the cleanup with such efficiency and poise.  This is not to say that they will be perfect in this crisis – the inherent Japanese penchant to keep up appearances makes me wonder if the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor isn’t worse than is being publicized. We might see some ugly revelations and bureaucratic blame shifting in the coming days, especially if  it isn’t contained. But for the most part, I think you’re going to see more examples of amazing fortitude and grace.  I, for one, will be paying attention. I think it would behooves any person wishing to be Better to do the same.

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