One day in September 1923, the great writer and poet of the Tohoku region, Kenji Miyazawa, went into woods not far from his hometown of Hanamaki in Iwate Prefecture to chop down a tree. Suddenly rocks broke away from the cliff, rocks he called "assassins." But he was not surprised or shocked. "After all," he wrote, "I am the one who cut down that tree."
We in this country will be searching for answers and reasons and newly configured goals after the horrific disaster that struck this region in northeast Japan. No doubt Japan will invent new technologies to harness the energy that comes from nature, more benign ones than we have relied upon in the past.
But the ethical dilemma still remains, just as it did after World War II, when Japanese people were compelled to seek new and more democratic forms of social organization. The old ones had led them into a disaster for themselves and for their victims in Asia and the Pacific. The very definition of what it meant to be a Japanese was altered — for the better.