Japanese people who have been hit by the triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident have been — rightly — praised worldwide for their courage and resilience. In many other places, even one such disaster would have triggered widespread looting if not rioting.
But too many sympathizers have made the blithe assumption that all will be well with Japan, that this resilience, sense of togetherness and fighting spirit will pull the country through this disaster, as it has done through so many other crises since World War II. This is dangerous, the language that turkeys gobble before Thanksgiving: We have been OK before, so we will survive again. Before the earthquake, Japan stood perilously close to several economic and political fault lines: failure to respond adequately to the disasters could push it over the edge.
Postwar Japan was aided by the very devastation of defeat plus a helping hand from the American occupiers and from the canny politics of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who let the Americans provide the defense umbrella, so that Japan could concentrate on the economy. To be provocative, a more worrying comparison is the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which killed 120,000 people, and the subsequent political squabbling and uncertain global economic conditions that led to the rise of militarism and war.