Earth, water, fire, air. All four elements combined to wreak havoc on Japan. The land rumbled and cracked; then the sea sent up a terrifyingly exaggerated Hokusai wave that crashed down pitilessly on the already devastated coastline; then came voracious fire; then air, the last of the deadly quartet, entered the fray with its lethal cargo of radioactivity. So much has been written on the earthquake-tsunami that ravaged Japan on March 11, synonyms and superlatives related to horror and destruction have been all but exhausted.
There is another set of superlatives that has also been much in evidence: those relating to the qualities that make Japanese people seem custom-designed to cope with disaster: being disciplined, duteous, resilient, stoic, sedulous. The world watched with compassion and admiration as the people of the devastated nation went about the business of putting back to rights their shattered homes and cities in the understated, matter-of-fact manner that has come to be seen as the Japanese way. In the end, the ultimate, the most powerful element is the human spirit. It serves to overcome whatever adversity any or all of the four physical elements might throw at man standing stubbornly, sometimes precariously, upright on two piffling legs.
Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Yet wears a precious jewel in its head.
Surely the jewel in the toad's head is the human spirit, adamantine and brilliant in its innumerable facets cut and polished by the vicissitudes of life.
A subdued echo of the fury of earth and sea unleashed on Japan the fateful day of the tsunami sounded in Burma a week later. An earthquake in the eastern part of the Shan plateau caused over a hundred deaths, brought down buildings and split the Union Highway along the centre with a deep, forked crack. Meanwhile, strong winds lashed the seas south of the Irrawaddy delta and swept away thousands of fragile bamboo rafts bearing men whose job was to tend large fish nets staked offshore. Most of the men were able to get back to land within a few days but as I write, about a thousand are still said to be missing.
Since the encounter with cyclone Nargis in 2008 the people of Burma have developed antennae highly sensitive to the natural disasters that seem to be occurring with greater frequency in all parts of the globe. Impulsive sympathy has matured into empathy born of personal experience. For many of us in Burma the struggle of the Japanese to rebuild their lives after the tsunami is a magnified image of our own efforts to help the people in our eastern hills and our southern delta get back to a state of normalcy after the relatively small, but nevertheless life changing, disasters that had befallen them.
It is the human spirit that moves minds and hearts and bridges geographical and cultural divides. As soon as we heard of the calamity that had struck Japan we wondered what we could do to make her people know how close we felt to them in their suffering, how much we wished to be of some assistance in such a time of trouble. Sadly, we were not in a position to offer material aid of any kind. We then recalled that in addition to the rock-hewn qualities that enable them to face the most harrowing challenges, the Japanese people possess a sensitivity to beauty and poetry that is the tender aspect of their strength. So we decided to put together a small collection of poems that would go some way towards expressing how much at one we feel with the Japanese people in their dark hour.
Among those who contributed to our slip of an anthology are writers and poets who have suffered much in the struggle to assert the primacy of the human spirit. There is Hanthawaddy U Win Tin, member of the Executive Committee of the National League for Democracy, who was a prisoner of conscience for twenty years, released only in 2008 when he was close to his seventy-ninth birthday. While still in jail he had written lines that roared out a challenge to those who had deprived him and others like him of their freedom: "Will the man crumble, or will the prison crumble?" Predictably, his poem for the Japanese people is equally vigorous. He writes of the "dragon tsunami, reincarnation of the Hiroshima bomb" and draws a comparison between the "hell of power" and the "hell of waves."
Three more of our poets have also served prison sentences for their political beliefs and activities. All of them view the challenges of the tsunami in terms of a combat between savagery (of nature as well as of man) and benevolence, a contest between travail and the human spirit. All, despite, or perhaps because of, the hardships they themselves have undergone stand firmly on the side of the triumph of the spirit. Nyein Thit writes:
It is the darker kind of darkness / That heralds the dawn, / Truth pulls itself up on this darkness. / Oh World. . . . / You too, grab this darkness bravely and haul yourself up.
Monywa Aung Shin contrasts the "black" Friday of the tsunami with the "white" of global compassion and lauds the fine sense of duty of the Japanese people. Phyapon Ni Lon U ends his poem on the tsunami with the simple assertion that the evil wrought by the pitiless wave cannot overwhelm the might of man.
We believe that Japan will vindicate our poets.
(By Aung San Suu Kyi)
Note: This letter should have been "Animal Talk (2)" but in the wake of the tsunami I see that ruminations on animals would not be appropriate at this juncture.
(Mainichi Japan) April 23, 2011
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