The Weekly Screed (#534)

How is a tsunami like a Jewish mother?
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — The post-tsunami crisis in Japan calls to mind my favorite Jewish- mother joke (which could also apply to Irish, Italian, German Catholic mothers).

“How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“None. Never mind! I’ll sit in the dark.”

For Japan, your straightline goes: “How much international help does it take to repair a Japanese power grid shattered by a 9.0 earthquake and a 30-foot tidal wave?”

The punchline? Same thing: “None. Never mind. We’ll sit in the kurayami.”

Grudgingly, the Japanese have acquiesced to some outside aid. But note that they looked down their noses at $34 million from the American Red Cross. The irony here is that, although the Japanese are averse — almost to the point of hostility — to the kindness of strangers, they are probably the gift-givingest culture on earth. In Japan, you can’t visit your Aunt Yaeko in Yamaguchi, or drop in on Mrs. Moshimoshi next-door without bringing along a cake, or a giant orange, or a set of flowered hankies boxed in paulonia and wrapped like one of Princess Masako’s wedding gifts.

The foundation of this self-abusive ingratitude is a sort of island neurosis whose sufferers meet every hardship by dredging up from their gut the spirit of “gaman.”

Gaman calls to mind another bit of comedy, this one from Monty Python, in which a group of hardy Australian outbackers take one-downsmanship to absurdist lengths. After one describes his cruelly deprived (but character-building) childhood in a one-room shack, sleeping on the bare floor, a second Australian scoffs, “Floors? You had floors?” He boasts that he slept on dirt, the wind whistling through cracks in the walls.

“Walls?” wails the third Aussie. “You had walls?”

And so on.

Gaman is a similar pride in one’s miseries. It can be translated as “fortitude,” “stoicism,” “resignation,” or more negatively, “false pride.” It is the national ethos that compelled Japan to refuse help after the devastating Kobe earthquake in 1995.

Gaman is truly a form of courage, because it demands that each of us suffer our pain — whether great or small — in silence, sharing it with no one outside the smallest possible circle of family and friends. Gaman forbids me telling my troubles to strangers, under the assumption that my aching back ain’t nobody’s business but my own. Besides, the stranger who listens to my blues might have it even tougher than me.

If so, I sure don’t want to listen to that song.

The dark side of gaman is its tendency to atomize and isolate. If the good opinion of society requires every bloodied victim to crawl into a corner and lick his wounds without crying “Medic,” the result is a merciless milieu. It’s world in which the dying traveler, with his last ounce of strength, drives away the Good Samaritan.

Japan, fortunately, is not so heartless. In a crisis like this, the national distaste for outside help tends to knit together people who are normally pretty insensitive to their fellow Japanese. Even as it disdains foreigners, gaman enlarges the Japanese family.

The weird Jewish-mother spirit of gaman assures me that the Japanese will recover faster than anyone would dare predict — with a minimum of bellyaching — from the greatest natural disaster in their national experience. It guarantees, moreover, that the Japanese will renew their franchise as the most put-upon, long-suffering, lonely and misunderstood country in all of Asia, and probably the whole wide world.

It is little known but incontrovertible that Japan’s real national anthem is: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

When it’s all over and Japan — a few years from now — is cruising along in its familiar rut, Japan-watchers will look back quizzically and wonder how it all got done? Who was in charge? Who do we nominate for the Nobel Prize?

Well, nobody. That wouldn’t be “Japanese.” In Japan, taking credit is considered gauche, if not outright creepy. Give a Japanese swimmer an Olympic gold medal and the first thing he’ll do is apologize for showing off.

In most countries, people look to their national leader in times of crisis. Typically, they come through —as President Obama recently did in response to the National Rifle Association’s latest travesty in Tucson. In Japan, however, no one is looking for anything inspiring — or even competent — from Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister.

Kan-kun is the latest in an 60-year string of party hacks elevated to Prime Ministerhood by survival tactics and a talent for collegial mediocrity. Japan has not had a natural leader, capable of altering the nation’s course in a single stroke, since Emperor Hirohito ended World War II with his heartrending August, 1945 radio broadcast.

The commander of the U.S. occupation that then took over Japan was General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur recognized the power that Hirohito retained over the minds of his people, even in defeat. Almost instinctively, MacArthur undertook a series of gestures that shrank Hirohito into a figurehead and forever diminished the power of the Imperial Palace. MacArthur was Japan’s last true emperor.

Japan is a nation run not by its elected chief, nor by its parliament, nor even by the military. As a precaution against the national hubris that led to Pearl Harbor and ended hideously in Hiroshima, MacArthur’s minions fashioned a bizarre government ruled by its Cabinet, an elite network of functionaries whose only purpose is to advance their petty careers until they retire. The one sure route to that cozy outcome is to deliver the mail, make the trains come and go exactly on time, and keep everybody’s lights on.

Right now, that dull but seductive routine has been shattered by plate tectonics. Leadership will not save Japan. There are no leaders. The nation must fall back — as it has since MacArthur — on bureaucrats, diplomats, bean-counters and paper-pushers.

Somehow, it’ll all work out. The queues will tail off. The blackouts will whiten. The funerals will trickle to a precious few. The nameless drones will come through.

And meanwhile, Japan’s got its gaman to keep it warm… Well, lukewarm.