Japan and the Reality of Suffering

The scenes around the northern Japanese city of Sendai are still shocking. Clothes set out to dry hang outside two-story houses whose first floors are entirely crushed and hollowed out; the second floors are generally untouched. A solitary chair sits in the smashed wreckage of what must recently have been a living room. Cars can be seen floating on small rivers, and telephone poles teeter at crazy angles. Giant rectangles of scrap metal stand all along what were in January typically spotless and sleek Japanese highways.

In November, I traveled up to the little fishing village of Ishinomaki, an hour from Sendai, with the Dalai Lama. Almost eight months after the earthquake and tsunami of Mar. 11, the sense of devastation was hard to bear. An old wooden temple still stood firm against a hill, but the gravestones in front of it were broken or tilting over. Tidy boxed remains of the recently departed, accompanied by snapshots—here a teenage schoolboy, there a smiling grandmother—sat in rows by the altar, but no survivor had come to claim them, and there were perhaps no homes to take them back to.