Based on Masayuki Takayama’s column published in Weekly Shincho, this essay contrasts the Japanese people who silently rose from the ashes after World War II with contemporary Japan nine years after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Through Nagasaki, the air raids, postwar poverty, reconstruction, and Fukushima nine years after the disaster, it reflects on the Japanese way of life and how the times have changed.

April 9, 2020
Taxpayers throughout Japan have willingly paid the reconstruction tax for twenty-five years, including these past nine years, and have warmly watched over the disaster victims.
In response, not even a single word of “thank you” can be heard.
But Japanese people do not say such petty things.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, published in Weekly Shincho, released today, under the title “Each Nine Years.”
This essay, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Before Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration, the U.S. military, as if rushing at the last moment, dropped a plutonium-type atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
The high-temperature fireball vaporized the city directly beneath it and burned tens of thousands of people to death in an instant.
At Sanno Shrine, some distance away, the left half of the great stone torii gate was torn away by the blast of hot wind.
Behind it, a camphor tree 500 years old lost all its leaves and branches, leaving only a blackened, burned trunk.
On the day the war ended, the only places that still retained waves of tiled roofs were Kyoto and Kokura.
Tokyo, both the old downtown and the Yamanote districts, had turned into burned-out fields.
Ayako Sono, who was thirteen years old at the time, wrote in An Invitation to Thanatology of what she felt then:
“There will be no more air raids.
I can live until tomorrow.”
The writer here is much younger than Sono, but from his evacuation site in Mishima, he saw neighboring Numazu burning in an air raid.
According to historical records, Numazu was attacked by U.S. aircraft one month before the end of the war.
Nine thousand incendiary bombs were dropped on it.
Eighty-nine percent of the urban area was burned down, and 322 people died.
In memory, the entire western sky was dyed bright red.
Even after the frightening air raids ended, Sono wrote that, after the war, dark and painful days continued, and “perhaps because of vitamin deficiency, even the heart felt weary.”
For those who had been burned out, “there were no evacuation shelters, no temporary housing, no volunteers to help, and no public assistance.”
“The victims gathered burned remnants of tin and lumber by themselves and built shacks to live in.”
The writer also returned to Tokyo after the war.
But he remembers losing his house and everything else, laying boards in a garage that had escaped the fire, and living there temporarily for a while.
Soichiro Tahara, two years younger than Sono, speaks with an air of knowing sophistication, saying, “Defeat changed all values” and “I came to distrust adults.”
In contrast, Sono says, “I have no memory of ever hearing, at that time, either the phrase or the concept that Japan’s future could not be seen.”
I apologize for interrupting repeatedly, but for this writer, who was ten years younger, values meant only things like “if it was sweet, it was good,” and “if it was soft, it was delicious.”
There was a soft kind of dried bonito called “namari.”
It was soft, but it tasted bad.
Even so, after some time had passed since the end of the war, changes appeared even in the atomic-bombed land, which had been said to be incapable of producing grass or trees for seventy years.
Dr. Takashi Nagai wrote, “Buds appeared on the camphor tree at Sanno Shrine.”
Before long, war broke out in Korea, a place with which Japan had been involved to no good end.
Thanks to that, vitality returned to Japan.
In elementary school lunches, sugar-coated fried bread began to appear.
It was sweet and soft, and truly delicious.
But sometimes there were rat droppings in it.
By that time, vigorous Japanese people had also begun to appear.
Sazo Idemitsu sent the Nissho Maru to Iran, then under British sanctions, and purchased cheap crude oil.
Angered, Britain sent warships to pursue the Nissho Maru in order to sink it, but the ship brilliantly escaped.
In Ginza, Hide Ueba, a former Gion geisha, advanced into the district and opened “Osome,” setting herself against Rumiko Kawabe’s “Espoir.”
In the film world, Hiroshi Okawa of Toei made it standard practice to show two new films every week.
The fried-bread generation filled the movie theaters.
The Japanese film industry released 500 films a year, surpassing Hollywood.
Nine years after the war, Japan had clearly regained its vitality.
This year marks nine years since Fukushima was struck by the great tsunami and the nuclear accident that followed.
Unlike that earlier time, there were temporary housing units.
There were volunteers.
There was public assistance.
Taxpayers throughout Japan have willingly paid the reconstruction tax for twenty-five years, including these past nine years, and have warmly watched over the disaster victims.
In response, not even a single word of “thank you” can be heard.
But Japanese people do not say such petty things.
Then, in a recent letter to the Asahi Shimbun, a young man who had moved to another prefecture at the age of five before the earthquake disaster described himself as “an intermediate disaster victim who came from the disaster area but was not disaster-stricken,” and spoke of the pain of having lost his hometown.
He demands sympathy for everyone connected with it.
On another page, there was an article saying that disaster victims who had lost their hometown demanded increased compensation from TEPCO and won a total of 700 million yen.
Sono says that those who were victims of the previous war “lived in silence.”
And they built a vigorous Japan.
But it seems that, these days, such a way of living is not favored.