When the 2011 tsunami killed 15,000 people, damaged almost a million buildings and all but wiped out the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the world saw yet another example of modern Japan's resilience in the face of disaster. David Pilling, the Asia editor for the Financial Times, traces the modern history of Japan's many rebounds in the engaging Bending Adversity. Beginning with the humbling postwar occupation by American forces, his analysis takes us through the Kobe earthquake, the Tokyo subway sarin attack, the bursting of the nation's real estate bubble in 1990 (which left "lost decades" of economic hardship in its wake) and the devastating earthquake that led to 2011's tsunami, where Tokyo skyscrapers "lurched toward each other like bamboo in the wind." Samuel Beckett ("I can't go on, I'll go on") had nothing on Japanese existential perseverance.
Recounting one disaster after another, Pilling demonstrates the incredible endurance of the Japanese--their "gamanzuyoi" (steadfast patience), built on what one playwright described as "an intriguing tradition of forging onward while holding on to a sense of our own impermanence." No fawning Nipponophile, Pilling notes that many of the factors that give Japan its resilience (reverence for the past, a homogenous population, an ingrained respect for courtesy and order) have also mired its people and economy in a sluggish, inward-looking miasma while China, Korea and other Asian countries have bolted full speed into the 21st century.
Bending Adversity is the definitive Western insider's look at Japan as it is today--a country and people that, Pilling concludes, "it would be foolish to count out just yet." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.