Stiff upper lip

Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good.
When the levee breaks, mama you got to move.
– When the Levee Breaks, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy

THE BRITISH are known for having a stiff upper lip, an expression used to describe the capacity to face serious adversity with resolution and restraint. As I watch the Japanese deal with the largest officially recorded earthquake in their history—from a position of safety in Kyushu, where nothing bad happened—I’m impressed once again by their sang-froid when dealing with trying circumstances. If anything, their upper lips are even stiffer than those of the Brits.

As of now, several hundred people are confirmed to have died, most of them by drowning in tsunami, some of which reached 10 meters high. The images of houses, cars, and medium-sized ships being washed away, and of debris and the smoking remains of houses being swept ashore on farmland, are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Large fires are still burning in Sendai and at an oil storage depot in Chiba. It’s not possible to imagine the damage a tsunami can cause passing through city streets until you’ve seen the film of what happened in Iwate.

Had this happened in the United States, where I’m from, half the television airtime would be occupied by images of people weeping and wailing and clinging to each other in hysterical desperation. Most of the news readers on television would be so maudlin and bathetic an involuntary urge would arise to grab them by the collar and slap some sense into them.

That’s not happening here. I’ve just seen some interviews of survivors in Sendai, all women and children, and every one of them retained their self-possession. I’ve been watching the quasi-public station NHK rather than the commercial networks, and all the announcers are calm, crisp, and businesslike. They are not injecting any sham dramatics. That is not to say they are emotionally detached, but it is apparent they understand they are fulfilling a public service. I’ve seen no video of people shrieking in the streets. I’ve seen exactly two hugs on film from on-site, and in one of those the person being hugged, an older woman, ignored it and kept talking to the person sitting next to her.

I visited a particular office late this afternoon, as I do two or three times every week. Ten or 15 people work there, all with computers, and there is a television on the premises. Everyone knew what had happened, but no one was talking about it, no one had turned on a radio, and they weren’t huddled around the television set. It’s not the sort of place where the people in charge would get angry if anyone working there had done that. It’s just that doing any of those things didn’t occur to anyone.

Yes, there are people sick with worry that they are unable to get in contact with their family members. There will be people tonight unable to sleep because of concerns about the future. There will be crying at the funerals. What there will not be much of, however—unlike elsewhere—are displays of people indulging their emotions.

The folks on my father’s side of the family were Russian peasants, and those on my mother’s side of the family were peasants from the other Slavic areas in Eastern Europe. During the course of their lives, they were just as likely as anyone else to laugh or cry, or to shout from anger or from joy, but when they hit a difficult patch all of them did what they had to do and got down to the business at hand. They had little sympathy and no time for any of the other malarkey. Perhaps as a result of this upbringing, I find the Japanese attitude at times such as these to be admirable and worthy of emulation. My impressions were the same during the Kobe earthquake some years ago.

Looking around on the web, I came across this usage example for the phrase stiff upper lip: “Men are brought up with this awful burden of having to have a stiff upper lip and not crying at all.”

There’s a lot of hard and unpleasant work to be done, and it’s already started. It seems to me that the awful burden is to have to perform that work while carrying around extraneous emotional baggage and wearing it on the sleeve.

Update: A friend e-mails from England to say that a television announcer there breathlessly announced that the car park at Tokyo Disneyland has been completely destroyed. Needless to say no one on NHK reported that information. I’m still watching NHK, and they are showing film of water rushing down the streets of a town, halfway up the sides of buildings. The water is filled with debris and a few automobiles. Fires are still burning in Sendai. There are live feeds of helicopters rescuing people. Not once–not once!–have I heard a TV announcer inject a personal observation, such as, “Oh, that’s horrible!”, or “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

Of course they think it’s horrible, and they can’t believe what they’re seeing, but that’s all beside the point at the moment.

What I’m seeing is a display of the character that enabled them to rebuild and recover so quickly after the war.

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