[We are posting below a piece by Japanese philosopher and literary critic Prof Kojin Karatani, sent to us by a friend. Karatani has authored a number of works, including a very important recent book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (MIT Press 2003). In this brief but thoughtful piece, Karatani talks about the ways in which the experience of the earthquake is forcing many Japanese people to rethink the whole idea of becoming a world economic power and its concomitant idea of development. AN]

I was on the streets of Tokyo when the earthquake struck. The ground shook violently, while buildings swayed around me for a long time. It was beyond anything I had experienced before, and I sensed that something terrible had happened.  My first thought was of the Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people in 1995.  Although I did not experience the Kobe earthquake first hand, it hit the region of my hometown where many close relatives lived, and so I headed immediately to the scene of the disaster. I walked the streets where building after building had collapsed into rubble.

Clearly, the scale of the current disaster far surpasses that of the Kobe earthquake. For it also includes the damage caused by the tsunami to coastal regions across hundreds of kilometers as well as the danger of nuclear catastrophe. Yet these are not the only differences. The Kobe earthquake was completely unexpected. Aside from a small number of experts, no one had imagined the possibility of an earthquake there. The recent earthquake, on the other hand, had been anticipated. Earthquakes and tsunamis have struck the Northeastern region of Japan throughout its history, and frequent warnings had been sounded in recent years. Meanwhile, nuclear power had always given rise to strong opposition, criticism, and warnings.  Yet the scale of the earthquake went far beyond any prior anticipation.  It was not that anticipating the scale of such a disaster was impossible, just that people had purposely avoided doing so.

The full article can be read in Counterpunch.