The Planet of Japan and Our Prayer Mat

[This piece was originally posted in Arabic here]

Is Japan a super planet or it is us, the captives of a narrow and suffocating sphere, seeing the perfect as exceptional and the whole as a giant!

The paradox emerged from the comparison between us following a quick visit to Hiroshima to familiarize us with the afflicted city’s resilience and reconstruction.

The city was, literally, leveled to the ground. The bodies of 140 000 people carbonized in a second. Those at distance had a more terrible death, seeing their own blood fall from their bodies from scorching heat. The other victims were counted in the hundreds of thousands, generation after generation, because of the black rain which infused poison into the land and air.

The city rose from under the debris, but most importantly, its people were liberated from malignity and were preoccupied with building their own future.

I met with survivors who rose above their pains despite the fact that they survived the disaster to lose everything (their homes, families, food, money, and health). To be honest, I was not only surprised, but I can almost say that I denounced how an eyewitness can close his eyes to a crime that has terrified humanity.

The answer was that those people’s resilience was not achieved with the press of a button, but the current of tolerance was stronger and people were faced with two options: either swim with this current or be pulled down to the very bottom and drowned.

The current started to flow in the schools, publications, and media. The government had a clear goal and studied plan that reaped fruit after two generations, turning those who called for revenge or the old samurai into a rejected minority that was sometimes even condemned.

Let us look towards our future two generations from now. What are we planting…What are we going to reap?

Supposedly, the Syrian curricula avoid dictation and adopt interactivity, introducing the students to creative and free speech—an approach killed in the crib by conservative teaching staff. For instance, a teacher imposes a single answer to two contradicting questions, about what they have to do when happy or angry. Should they perform ablution and lay out their prayer mat to thank God or to ask for his revenge?

An example we can rely on to predict our future two decades from now.

Japan is not a distant planet, but we continue to reinvent the wheel.

*The design/image is by Lemon Loco Designs.