Mrs Tsk *

It’s the day after Japan’s most disastrous earthquake and tsunami, and I’m heading down Osaka’s Animal Park arcade — a seedy, Showa-style passage with whores on one side, flophouses on the other — to neon-garish supermarket Tamade, where I’m planning to stock up on rice and other basics. With such chaos to the north and east of us, with the yen in freefall and nuclear power stations on the brink of meltdown, Japan’s food supplies may soon get scarce or dear. But on the streets of Osaka people are cheerful, smiling and laughing and chatting. It reminds me of the day after 9/11, when I went up to Central Park and found children happily sailing yachts on the pond, oblivious to the plume of smoke rising from Ground Zero. Life goes on. Life revives. Life survives, in part because it has an in-built adaptive obliviousness. Or is it just that we’re so entirely aware, all the time, that “in the midst of life we are in death, et cetera”?

Halfway to the supermarket I stop, pulled up by the sound of frenzied bongos, screeching violin and honking avant-garde saxophone. A street performer is using the pavement in front of the oden restaurant as his stage. He’s a middle-aged man wearing stockings and suspenders, his face and legs daubed in the distinctive white make-up which inscribes him in the tradition of Butoh. Draped in a banner I can’t read, he’s emerging from a gigantic vulva constructed of cans and wire. For me it’s a metaphor for Japan’s rebirth after yesterday’s disaster. Life goes on. New life emerges. A bird, a woman, a foetus, it flaps grotesquely around, here beneath the freeway flyover. The bongos beat, the violins stagger and slide, the sax quacks. People shoot photos, or simply squeeze past on bikes. After videoing for a few minutes, I continue to the lurid neon lights of the Tamade supermarket, strangely reassured. Whatever happens to it, this country — precarious yet resilient — is extraordinary. Will and brilliance can overcome, time after time, whatever risks and spills come Japan’s way. The sun also rises.