I have a feeling that people will remember where they were on 3/11/11 like they remember where they were on 9/11/01. Not with the same horror of mans inhumanity to man, but awe and horror at mans infinitesimal insignificance in the face of Mother Nature. I woke up early in the morning for some reason and saw something about the earthquake posted on facebook. I turned on the tv and watched with horror and fascination for hours when I should have been asleep.
I was wondering why I was so fascinated by all of what was going on in Japan. I had felt bad for the people in Haiti last year, and for the tsunami of 2004 and even contributed a bit to charities but I hadn't truly thought of it very much. I watched Katrina hit the coast with horror and amazement but I had visited Gulfport more than once and loved the city. But Japan is around the world, I knew no one there and was related to no one or so I thought.
The theory of six degrees of separation was brought home to me though in a photo of tsunami refugees in a shelter the other day. Many of the Japanese people do not have strong oriental features or what I think of as strong oriental features, and these two elderly ladies looked like my grandmother and my aunt. This stuck in my mind till I put 2 and 2 together and did manage to come up with 4. I do have relatives in Japan and they are related to my grandmother and aunt. It's a long story but there is a family disease (Machado Joseph Ataxia) that is transmitted genetically. Everyone who has it is related to a group of Portuguese sailors, everyone. There are families with this disease (which I do not carry the gene for, thank goodness) in Germany, Portugal of course, Japan, and the United States among others. So through a wandering Portuguese sailor I do have relatives in Japan.
All of that didn't explain why I was so fascinated by this disaster. The people enchanted me, their stoicism in the face of horrible deprivation and loss, the ability to go on after witnessing that horrible black wall of water was so different from what we expect to see in a disaster. The nuclear disaster is giving them more worry but their attitude is one of Gaman which means quietly enduring difficult situations. This seems to work for these people. The lines for food, water, and gas are orderly, no shootings, no looting, the idea the squeaky wheel gets the grease is not even an option there at this time. I wonder if perhaps we could all take note of their dignity in the face of tragedy and perhaps learn a lesson from it all?
If you want to read more about Gaman and Japan's history of disasters you can go to this link. Macado Joseph information is located here. There is also a wonderful article about Japanese stoicism here.
