While I was an English major at UC Santa Barbara, I came to believe in the power of words, and hoped I might some day conjure their magic, stringing a few together on a line that would cause readers to open their hearts to a world of strangers. I imagined these magic words might be a passage in a novel, a scene in a screenplay, or maybe a page in a magazine. I didn’t expect them to be a few lines scribbled in a truck stop and faxed to a television station in the middle of the night.
On January 16, I was driving home through the desert listening to the first news reports of the earthquake which had just struck the Hanshin region of Japan. The chaos that had followed the Northridge quake the year before had seemed cataclysmic enough. But as day was breaking in Kobe, it was quickly obvious that the scope and scale of destruction was many times worse.
In 1983, just after graduating from UCSB, I found myself living alone in a Buddhist temple in the old city of Kanazawa. Although my reasons for living in Japan were complicated, I was one of those Americans for whom a first visit to Japan felt like coming home. As a journalist, I later came to specialize in explaining the impact of Japanese culture on modern business. I had even written some fairly impassioned pleas for reason in the fractious political climate that exists between the US and Japan. I had recently joined the staff of the Japan America Society of Southern California, a group with more than 3500 members which has been working for mutual understanding and friendship since 1909
I knew that the Japanese government would be responding to the earthquake, but I felt I should do something. Yet if there was anything I had learned in Japan, it was that respecting someone’s privacy was usually more important than it was to notice their need. To do a kindness for a stranger is only to embarrass them by noticing their distress and to oblige them to repay you for your aid.
But Japanese society has both rules and exceptions. Japan had not hesitated to help Los Angeles after the Northridge quake. They had contributed $3 million for cleanup efforts through the Japan Business Association. Any effort we were able to offer would only be repaying their kindness from the year before.
So I wrote up my argument and by midnight we were faxing the notice to local radio and television stations. The facts needed no manipulation. The eerie synchronicity was unmistakable. Only one year after the Northridge quake the suffering and destruction in Kobe made us realize how lucky we were—and are—in Southern California. The same people who had rushed to our aid now needed our sympathy and support.
By the next morning, the Kobe Relief Fund became an equal partnership of the JAS, the Japan Business Association and the Japanese Chamber of Commerce. Within days, we were receiving a thousand checks per day. Within a month we had received more than $1 million in donations and to date almost $1.8 million. I have recognized the names of classmates, teachers and friends from Santa Barbara. We added the money to an account in Japan which was making direct grants to quake victims.
We originally expected that most of the relief money raised locally would be from American corporations. While we have received many generous corporate donations, more than ninety percent of the donations came in amounts of less than $250.
Many of the approximately 10,000 contributions came with heart-wrenching letters. One woman wrote of tears welling up because the images on television reminded her so much of being a little girl in postwar Japan. Others recalled how their lives had intersected with Japanese travelling through America, or on their own travels to Japan. Many, many of the letters came from residents of the San Fernando Valley, including some whose homes had been damaged or even destroyed. Children all over Southern California told children in Japan to be brave and clean up.
Over and over, these letters used the phrase, “My heart goes out...”
Too often these days, pages in the media are devoted to the fault lines of the US-Japan relationship. These stresses are exploited by merchants and politicians with their own agendas, who profit from discord at the expense of average citizens in both nations. Those people hire English majors, too. However, the outpouring of love from Americans to Japanese sends a very different message from the rhetoric of a trade war—a message that our relationship is built on a deeper foundation than greed and therefore remains unshakable.
I have been writing professionally now for 15 years, but I no longer have any illusions about the power of words. The 10,000 people who opened their hearts to Japan didn’t do so because my words were clever. Only because they were true.
There is magic in that, but it isn’t mine.
Published in Coastlines Magazine
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