The Magnitude of Japan

There isn't much you can write or say about Japan unless you're updating the news. There is no opinion, editorial, theorization or speculation that will make any difference to the mounting body count and tens of thousands missing. The only things that matter are the facts, and the facts seem to be getting more grim as the days go by. Everyone is waiting for rock bottom, so that at least you can say it can't get any worse. But it does. The nuclear reactors, the evacuations, the air patterns, the aftershocks. Natural disasters of magnitude are nothing new to the world, they happened in Haiti, Thailand, New Zealand, and Turkey. But with these, there was always a sense of disregard, be it from writing a nation off as being "used to it," or by irrationalizing it as God's vengeance. Just send them a check, they'll recover eventually.

Japan, not so much. To date, over two thousand are dead and over ten thousand missing. Ten thousand. That's a higher population than some cities. Imagine hearing everyone in Oakland is missing, or Sacramento or Green Bay. With the advancement of media, the world watched as the tsunami washed away a city full of people's homes like sand on a beach. The hardest part about this, aside from the human devastation, is not ever knowing why. There is no why, it just happened. It wasn't God striking vengeance for Japan's offshore whaling, it wasn't something routine, and it isn't something you can explain to your children in hopes of teaching a lesson, unless the lesson is "stuff happens." During an interview I did with film-maker Patrick Shen, who went back to Haiti(post-earthquake) to film a documentary called, La Source, he spoke of the difficulty in grasping the magnitude of disaster, how organizations could only approach helping one person or community at a time or else be paralyzed by the overwhelming magnanimity. How does that occur with Japan, when one tragedy triggers a seemingly endless chain reaction of disaster?

Mother nature can be beautiful, but she can also be a beast. Every so often she will send up a reminder that as big as we think we are, we are nothing compared. All the things we hold dear to us and important to us can be washed away in an instant, making us re-evalute our priorities. Then, time goes on, we forget, move on, and get caught up in the inane once again, until she sends out another reminder. But this was no Post-It note, it was a third-degree scar.