At 2:46 p.m. Sunday, March 11, my family and I joined millions of Japanese standing silently at a Buddhist temple or a Shinto shrine. With heads bowed, we remembered the events of one year earlier, when our house swayed for nearly three minutes and the power died. In the Tohoku region, several hundred kilometers north, waves engulfed entire towns and two nuclear power plants. We relived the sorrow over the 19,000 lives lost in the Great East Japan Earthquake, as the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami are known here.
It was all the more dispiriting, on this somber occasion, to contemplate how little the country's prospects have changed. The disaster should have roused Japan from its lethargy once and for all. Instead, the nation's malaise is back with a vengeance.
The Japanese have survived countless earthquakes and tsunamis, and built a spectacularly advanced economy atop the ashes of military defeat, giving them a reputation for rebounding from catastrophe. "In the past 20 years, never have I been more sanguine about prospects for Japan's rebirth," Yoichi Funabashi, one of the country's leading journalists, wrote in a book of essays published shortly after the quake. But Funabashi also warned that the disaster had exacerbated Japan's vulnerabilities. "Our choice," he wrote, "is rebirth or ruin."