Tomodachi

Jack Hardy sent Bill Stewart a link to a YouTube We will remember you video he forwarded to us, which I found (http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=SS-sWdAQsYg&vq=medium) to be so moving and compelling that I sent it many times around the globe ever since. We will skip the weight of our tear basin, but if you want to add some of yours, take a look at the upload. Make sure you have adequate supply of paper towels!

The video begins with a fear-inducing tremor from the 9.0 Richter scale mega-thrust that shook Japan’s northeastern shores 3.11. This was only the beginning as a resulting tsunami as high as 133 ft. roared 6 miles inland.

All told, some 16,000 deaths, 6,000 injuries, and 3,300 people missing were the disaster’s official tally. Some 125,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Damage on public infrastructures was incalculable. Access to electricity and potable water was critical. The death of sakura hope stood at the threshold.

In Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, on March 11, 2010, an Elemental School English teacher and student of Japanese culture since 2008 named Taylor Anderson calmed her class through the tremor until their parents came to pick them up, then pedaled on her bike home to her apartment shortly before the tsunami struck. She never made it home.

Now the children in her class who are about to graduate remember their sensei very well and very dearly. The video proceeds to identify other nations’ response to the disaster from various countries including the United States. Reminiscent of scenes of the cavalry arriving as an impending rout of “innocents by savages” used to be common fare in cowboy-and-native American movies of my youth, a naval carrier group appears on the video shortly after acknowledging Taylor’s assistance, highlighting a response by the US Navy’s Operation Tomodachi (Friend/s).

Cavalry to the rescue in my childhood imagination was artillery coming to wipe out the enemy. In this case, it was the U.S. Armed Forces appropriating a function that does not usually get the budgetary limelight in our armament-focused military-industrial complex guided Pentagon.

The Marianas is familiar with the SeaBees (CB, Construction Battalion) who had done much in the construction of infrastructure during post-WWII occupation in the Pacific and the Trust Territory of Micronesia.

We once considered joining the Philippine Armed Forces with a possible stint at West Point across the Hudson River in NYC, if one did well in copycat PMA, the Philippine Military Academy. That, or join the flyboys to ride ‘em F-4s shortly before Vietnam started heating up.

West Point was established as an engineering school, the ideal pattern for any other engineering school before the American Civil War. Though it included familiarity with artillery and ordnance, its primary thrust was on construction rather than destruction. The tradition of military officers at home with the protractor, the slide rule, and the compass, constructing the nation’s railway lines, bridges, harbors, and roads remained in my military-enamored imagination.

The disciplines of the arts and humanities, and the social sciences found its way into the curriculum, though liberal learning was later pummeled during the Southeast Asian encounters when officers were deemed too elitist and indecisive.

It is this engineering and humanities tradition that came on shore in the Earthquake of Tohuku 2011 for which the video is most grateful. That expression of gratitude in the last half of the video is what got us reaching for the Kleenex.

Off video, we remember Japan’s calmness under pressure, and its gracious acceptance of assistance, but after a while, “‘nuff and thank you, but no more, thank you” echoed back from strongly radiated Fukushima. The self-confidence of a people empowered their own motivity and resolve to rise from the ashes, or in this case, from the sea slime and crust, and the plutonium isotopes. Self-reliance and self-sufficiency prevailed.

It also became too hot a number for the world to appropriate as the nuclear accidents, primarily the level 7 meltdowns at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant complex, hit global anxiety and massive evacuation zones.

We earlier mentioned the discovery of weapons-grade nuclear emissions coming from one of the plants, and though the matter is on U.S. congressional record, the media has kept it out of the public view. We want to think of Japan as a nuclear-weapons free zone; it has forsaken nuclear radiation among its weapons of mass destruction. That’s like saying Israel has no nukes. Right.

Other heady issues as climate warming, the possibility that the additional weight of water might be loosening earth’s tectonics, and the responsible management of nuclear energy in a world of peak oil and continued dependence on coal for increasing power demand, are not in the video.

What it does have is a sample of the soul of a nation who knows how to acknowledge internal indebtedness (utang na loob, in Pilipino), something also was once in the Chamolinian psyche until we made bashing the feds a sport. We commend the video if only to see how our one-sided stereotyped images of Japanese atrocities during WWII have determined how we exploit the half-a-million tourists and tomodachi that Nippon sends annually to our shores.

The video ends with a mother holding a child born on 3.11, saying Arigato. Ditto for the Arigato from Japan.