POLITICAL RESPONSE:HOW JAPAN must long for the time, a few days ago, when its only crisis to worry about was the possibility of yet another prime minister resigning.
Such mundane political uncertainty has been swept aside by seismic calamity.
The man who was last week under threat from a funding scandal has been thrust into the role of commander in chief in a battle against Japan’s most formidable peacetime enemy: the forces of nature.
Yesterday, the people who had half-expected prime minister Naoto Kan to join a string of ignominious exits, were watching him make an unusually passionate plea for unity and resilience – the same qualities that had lifted Japan from postwar despair.
“Japan is facing its worst crisis in the 65 years since the war,” Mr Kan said in a televised message to the public.
“All of the people [in] Japan face a test to see if we can overcome it. I believe we can.”
While raw emotion guides the behaviour of the millions of people caught up in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake, the rest of the country is responding with determination and a communal grief that is as genuine as it is understated.
Among the distant observers in areas that have been spared the misery, there is no suggestion of vicariousness; only recognition that as residents of a country whose ground shifts with alarming regularity, they had been granted a reprieve.
All other news, and practically all other programming, has been ditched so that public and private broadcasters can bring updates and earthquake warnings to a transfixed and frightened public.
In Tokyo, the talk among neighbours who might otherwise barely have spoken to pass the time of day was now animated, dominated by the disaster that had befallen all.
While the streets are apparently returning to a kind of normality, as train and subway lines resume service, the course of events several hundred kilometres away are being viewed with as much anxious self-interest and foreboding as with horror and sympathy for victims of whose lives and fates they had been in ignorance of until now.
The threats of further strong earthquakes and a nuclear accident had residents of Tokyo scrambling into survival mode.
It was next to impossible to buy such emergency necessities as batteries, bottled water and candles or even fresh food in the shops of central Tokyo, while there were reports that large numbers of expatriates were heading overseas or, with their Japanese colleagues, relocating to other cities even farther from the epicentre.
After a weekend defined by fear, public and commercial life will begin the working week today racked by uncertainty.
The Tokyo stock exchange will open, but much else will feel alien to citizens of a country stereotyped but envied for its convenience and efficiency.
Manufacturers accustomed to lower output in the financial crisis now have to deal with total shutdowns.
Homes and businesses in each of the 23 wards in Tokyo will be without power for three hours on a rotating basis; areas will have to share blackout duties until power supplies return to normal, which may not be until the end of April.
Amid the show of unity, a few voices of dissent are heard.
One newspaper devoted space to the government’s “inept” handling of the radioactive leakage in Fukushima and the slow pace of the evacuation effort.
Campaigners have resumed their criticism of Japan’s dependence on nuclear energy and, in particular, of the wisdom of building nuclear power plants on the coastline of the world’s most seismically active country.
Japan is gripped by fear about nuclear meltdown and anxiety over what the post-earthquake future holds for its economy and battered energy infrastructure.
However it is coming to terms with the tragedy in the only way it knows how: with a restrained tenacity.– (Guardian service)