Over the course of the past week, what have you heard during coffee breaks with your colleagues, over after-work pints or cocktails with your friends, or in the midst of those pleasant but obligatory daily exchanges shared between people who don’t really know one another? Have you listened sympathetically as your acquaintance has reflected on a years-ago business trip to Tokyo, expressed concern for a friend who’s studying abroad in Shanghai, recalled childhood memories of an earthquake, or lamented the damage a tsunami wrought upon his or her yacht as it was docked in Santa Cruz, California’s ill-conceived marina? Have any among the more excitable of your acquaintances gone so far as to buy iodine tablets, and to admit to having done so? If your sympathy has worn thin, and you’ve wearied of this ongoing, unspoken contest to determine whom among the physically unafflicted stands closest the imaginary epicentre of Japan’s crisis, you’re not alone.
This tripartite disaster has been present in our media-guided meditations since last Friday, and unlike the tidal wave of political uprisings that’s still surging over North Africa and the Middle East, Japan’s crises are ones that the average European or North American can relate to. One watches the news or reads the first few headlines, sees one’s compatriots camping out at Narita, pores over a first-hand account of clambering over people in a stairwell as the water swiftly rises, and one thinks “What if that were me?” This is a normal human response, and is perhaps even a fundamental aspect of reading and viewing stories: when working through a novel, doesn’t the very same query run through the reader’s mind? Indeed, what if it were me? Or wait, what if it really had been me? Or, as logically proceeds, what if I’m next? (And so one is moved to visit the pharmacist – or the grocery store baking aisle – for a supply of iodine.)
When identifying with our fellow humans, however, it is important to remember whose story is actually being told – we shouldn’t over-indulge in fantasies of impending personal tragedy. Already, it seems, the media has pulled its gaze away from Japan’s real-time disaster narrative (the plot’s action has ebbed). For those of us who were only relating our own lives to the story being told, the tsunami’s impact is as easy to forget, or to remember from afar, as a moment in a novel. Those who stood near the physical epicentre of the devastation, however, are probably having difficulty so much as identifying with the reworked narratives of their own lives.
