Ignorance = Bliss?

Anyone reading this blog is probably a personal friend of mine and will know that I lived in Japan for two years. As they'll also know, I spent my first year in Sendai and that is where I really identify my home-away-from-home as being. The continuing crisis there has been terribly difficult for me to wrap my head around. I see the images, I read the heartbreaking (and too infrequent heartwarming) stories and wait for any word from my friends there.

From what I have gathered a lot of Sendai remains intact. The downtown train station is physically still standing, though I don't think any trains are running there anymore. I watched a brief video that shows young American teachers boarding a bus for Tokyo, abandoning the city after so much devastation. These images should give me some relief but they don't. Instead they serve as a powerful reminder of just how lucky some people are, and how unlucky others were. The tsunami demonstrated nature's ultimate line in the sand: you're either safe and dry or homeless, missing, or dead. Many of my friends lived in those neighborhoods that have vanished. All but one of my friends is still, for me, missing. Perhaps their families knows where they are. Perhaps they are safe in shelter living with other survivors, or perhaps they are part of the some 25,000 people who are gone. Washed to sea. Buried under rubble. Gone.

Part of what I am trying to come to terms with is accepting the not knowing. It may be weeks, months or even years before I am able to determine what happened to them. My Japanese is not what it once was, my contact information on them is sparse, and my fear that if I dig too hard for information it might prove too sad to handle ... these things stall my efforts and force my mind onto other things.

I look through my photo album from those days and see all of us smiling back, totally ignorant of the devastation that would descend on the city a decade later and I realize how lucky I was to be there then, and not now. What a truly magical and trans-formative time it was in my life and what a gift and blessing those friends, my Japan Family as we joked, were. I'm not one for old adages, I think they are too often tossed around at times when maybe it would be better not to say anything at all, but looking at those photos I can't help but murmur to myself, 'ignorance was bliss'. 

I smile at the younger versions of us all smiling back, sigh, close the book and let my mind be distracted by the melodic babbling of my son, Asa, whose names means "born in the early morning" in Japanese. How appropriate that the young light of my life should have a name that beckons the regenerative powers of a new dawn for a country facing a truly dark hour.