Madam, – The Japanese are well versed in the art of picking themselves up from catastrophe. They have had a lot of terrifying practice. They recovered from the Kobe earthquake of 1995; they rose from the atomic ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the bitter medicine of military defeat to take an honoured place amongst the nations of the world.
The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, though probably not as strong on the Richter scale as Friday’s, will still hold the gruesome record in terms of loss of life and material damage caused. It struck at two minutes to noon, when practically every household had its charcoal brazier lit in preparation for the midday meal. Tatami mat floors and all-wooden houses, ideal for withstanding earthquakes, were no match for the ensuing fire, and in a short time almost the whole of Tokyo was ablaze. To escape the fire, tens of thousands of people fled to the port, to the safety of water, where they were engulfed by a tsunami. The death toll then was in the hundreds of thousands. They came back even from that.
My wife and I, with three young children, lived in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, where I worked as a missionary priest with the Japanese (Anglican) Church. Our two eldest went to the local kindergarten, and even at that age they were given regular instruction on what to do when an earthquake struck.
For us, besides being yet another item of news of woes that pour in from every corner of the globe hour by hour, there is an added dimension akin to personal bereavement in this disaster. Knowing the Japanese, although they will surely have been knocked down, they certainly will not have been knocked out. There will be many others in this country who feel the same. – Yours, etc,