Tepco Officials formally apologize for the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daichi.


Japan must be the most fascinating country in the world. It has these formal stylized rituals which are almost medieval. See the formal, ritualized apology of the Tepco officials for the nuclear disaster.


Of course, they were not responsible for a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, though it is surprising that their nuclear contingency plans did not account for it. 
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My father, a Chartered Accountant, who worked at Tatas, India’s largest steel company, was responsible for bringing in the first computers to Tatas. His official designation was “Controller of Accounts, and Manager of Data Processing.” He frequently travelled to Japan and Pittsburg, as well as Europe. 


Japan’s mixture of refined aesthetics, practical ingenuity, discipline, and a society totally opaque to the foreigner fascinated him, and my chess-loving husband too, who bravely did his final year of school in Japan, in a Japanese medium school to improve his Go. (That’s another story!). 


I was fascinated by Japan, the politeness and decency of the people, and its sheer impenetrability and opacity to the foreigner. I felt I would never really understand these people, and what makes them tick.


But it is a wonderful honourable culture, isn’t it?
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Interestingly, if honour and saving face weren’t so important, I wonder if they would have been more forthcoming about the disaster.


I am troubled about their kamikaze exposure of their workers to what is potentially “lethal” doses of radiation according to Jazko’s testimony to Congress. They have officially reported 20 to the IAEA as having radiation contamination.


 I wonder what the US would have done? Would she have sent workers in knowing that they would be very likely to die. Or ? Evacuate the environs and declare it a wasteland? However, evacuating Tokyo, where a quarter of the country’s population live , 150 miles away from Fukushima is probably unthinkable for the economy. 


Every so often, in the lives of nations as in individual lives, we come to the limits of what human intelligence, ingenuity and discipline can accomplish. I wonder if we are seeing that in Fukushima.

 A man cries next to his destroyed house in Onagawa, where his mother is still buried in the rubble h/t The Guardian


Sometimes, a picture gets you more than a thousand words.


Looking at this Japanese man in the snow, crying for his mother, his destroyed house and his lost life, 


you cannot help echoing one of the ancient primal cries of all creation,


“Why?”
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On other days, however, in other circumstances, Creation, of course, sings a different song, no less ancient, no less primal. And the refrain of that song is just as mysterious:


“Glory.”

This is a longer essay I wrote a few years ago, which I am posting in installments
  Part I The Magic Kingdom I–The Varieties of Magic

Wren-tit

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


Mary Oliver