Miyazawa’s Message for a World in Sorrow

I think that all of us who live in Japan, whether Japanese or not, have been struck by the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and support coming from all over the world toward the people of this country.

It has taken a horrendous tragedy to show us that Japan’s peaceful and balanced approach to foreign affairs and the generosity that the Japanese people have shown to other nations in the decades since the end of the war have made this country many sincere friends. Even the media in some countries that have not necessarily been well-disposed toward Japan since the end of the war have reacted with empathy and compassion.

What can we all learn from this disaster and its aftermath?

We can learn that we are all connected to each other by the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil that provides our sustenance.

A Message on the Wind

Allow me for a moment to bring up something personal.

On September 21, 2008, at 1:30 pm, I was standing on the bank of the Kitakami River in Hanamaki. Hanamaki is a small town located in Iwate Prefecture in the Tōhoku region of northern Japan. Iwate is one of the prefectures most badly affected by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Iwate was the home of Miyazawa Kenji.

Miyazawa Kenji was a visionary poet, author, scientist, and religious thinker whose works I have been studying for more than 40 years. He passed away on September 21, 1933, at 1:30 pm.

Exactly 75 years later, on the bank of the river that he loved so much, a sharp wind struck me out of the blue. That wind blew right through me.

Now, Kenji believed that we communicate with each other through the elements: the wind, the rain, the snow, the water, the air, the light. And I certainly received a message from him in that instant on the riverbank.

What was that message?

It was his own message that he told to many people during his lifetime: that an individual cannot be happy until all people in the world are happy.

Waves Felt Around the World

That instant on the riverbank came back to me the moment the scale of the earthquake and tsunami dawned on me. As I walked to my home in Tokyo, I felt an immense sense of good fortune and guilt. Why was I so lucky to still have a home and food and light and heat when countless others had lost their lives or their loved ones or their personal possessions?

I thought of Kenji and his message to us. This disaster did not happen to the people of Tōhoku alone. It happened personally to every single person on this Earth.

If we are to be saved from even greater and as yet unimaginable calamities in the future, perhaps it will be thanks to the signals transmitted by Miyazawa Kenji, messages sent to us on the wind and in the light of the air.

(Originally written in English on March 27, 2011.)