Once, I dated a guy who preferred being in Japan to being abroad, who held that we were citizens of a glorious and beautiful nation and the desire for foreign experiences was one of the deplorable legacies of the Meiji Restoration (1868), which was when Japan officially opened her doors to the rest of the world. The relationship happened back in the 1990s, when Japan was steeped in a new brand of permanent recession, the pop group Dreams Come True was like, sugeekakkoii (すげえかっこいい, incredibly cool) and patriotism was totally weird, weirder even than the green movement that many Japanese metaphorically equated with pre-modern washiki toire (和式トイレ, Japanese crouching style toilets). Everyone I knew wanted to be someplace else where they could escape from the tsurasa (辛さ, hardships), dasasa (だささ, zero chicness) and kurasa (暗さ, gloominess) of all things Nippon. It seemed only my boyfriend professed an undying love for his country of origin, the city of Tokyo that fostered him throughout childhood and adolescence, his little backstreet community, his neighbors and family.
Now, the mere fact of being a Japanese in Japan triggers a surge of aikokushin (愛国心, love for one's country) — up to this point, many of us had liked to pretend we carried a different passport, spoke a different language and only ate sushi because it was the globally hip thing to do. The recent triple-header disaster changed that mental landscape. In every facet of the media, the slogans "Tsunagarō, Nippon!" (「つながろう日本」, "Let's connect, Japan") and "Maeni susumō, Nippon!" (「前にすすもう日本」, "Let's Move Forward, Japan") urge us to stick together and carry on, to value the national identity like a new-found treasure.
The phenomenon has spawned an intriguing new feeling in the air called puchi sakoku (プチ鎖国, a mini-scale closing of the nation). Narita Airport has reported an all-time low in Japanese tourists flying out of the country to enjoy Golden Week overseas, as many people have given up their holidays to work, making up for lost time during the initial first weeks of the disaster. The other popular option is to immerse themselves in volunteer work. So many rushed to the northeast in fact, that volunteer headquarters were forced to turn down newcomers or relocate them to other shelter facilities closer to Tokyo. And those who are taking time off are doing so right here in Japan, to help out a tourism industry that's in dire need of business.