The Earth And The Moon

The Japanese earthquake, awful isn't it? I first got news about it from Twitter then the BBC. And I think it's the first time someone could turn on the TV and see destruction and obliteration on such a massive scale in real time. The helicam shots of the tsunami sweeping across Sendai was mind-bending. The wave must have been traveling at hundreds of miles an hour as it simply fanned out across fields. Terrifying. Maybe we have seen too many movies about world disasters and Armageddon to fully appreciate the magnitude and power of the tsunami - that's in the first 30 seconds. Then it hits - this is real and those are cars, lorries, trees, houses and people. Terrifying.

Watching the news in bits over the weekend, I gathered the worst was yet to be revealed. Whole towns seemed to have been wiped clear off the Miyagi prefecture coast. 10,000 were missing from a town of 17,000. Then the nuclear plants started to make headlines and in the most dramatic fashion, with a steam explosion beamed across the planet. Radiation leaked and more people were moved to a safer radius away from Fukushima 1 station. 170,000 people.

The scale of this quake and its effects are enormous. 8.9 on the Richter, waves 10m high traveling at 800km/h, affecting the whole span of the Pacific with 53 territories were on alert, hundreds of aftershocks. The 2004 Christmas Sumatra quake was equally massive and would perhaps remain the most destructive in recent history but the images and news came in days after (though I remember the number of reported dead was increasing by 20-30 thousand each hour back then). The instantaneous way we got updates about Japan fuelled the news frenzy and fed the info-hungry masses. The pictures and videos are still making their way out, each more tragic and stupefying than the next.

The channel 5 news guy on the ground at Sendai said there was 'stoic calmness' among the Japanese people. There is a certain strength about Japanese people in times of adversity isn't there? I suppose it's the impact of highly localized social fabric knit over millennia. There must have been countless natural calamities that these islands faced, disasters borne by the same thread of people, a regular genetic hardening or strengthening of character. The word tsunami is Japanese anyway, perhaps an indication of their broad acceptance of a certain destiny.

There is a famous Japanese haiku by Ryokan:
The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

It's about a thief stealing things from the home of a monk when all that mattered to the monk was the view of the moon from a window, something the thief could not take away. Detachment, a teaching common to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism (at the least). A concept very hard to stick to in this age of materialism, judgement by facebook status and one's 30s of fame. Perhaps it is the Buddhist background of the Japanese that helps them through adversity and change. For come what may, they still have the moon.

May we have the strength to let this go.