This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 17, 2011 - About this time of year 16 years ago, I went to Japan to cover a tour of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Our first stop was Osaka, which is, if you look at the map, just around the coast of Osaka Bay from Kobe. Kobe was the focus of the last great earthquake to bring destruction to the Japanese, and it occurred shortly before we arrived.
Before we really settled in at Osaka, the musicians gathered up their instruments and all together in the early morning we set out for Kobe. The orchestra members decided to take the day usually reserved for resting after traveling to give a benefit concert to raise money for relief efforts.
What would be under normal circumstances a brief journey around Osaka Bay took several hours and involved buses, trains, a subway and taxis because of damage to roadways and railways. The closer we got to Kobe, the more the damage was pronounced. If anyone was under the illusion this was to be a sightseeing trip, it was dispelled as we moved from conveyance to conveyance, closer and closer to Kobe.
Emotion was palpable in the little music hall where the concert was performed. When the orchestra played Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," conducted by then-music director Leonard Slatkin, everyone was weeping. This experience became one of the defining moments of my life, a mystical marriage of generosity and emotion and art.
After the concert, a group of us went to see just how bad things were, and what we saw was staggering. The floors of high-rise buildings collapsed in upon each other like pancakes. A residential neighborhood was burned to the ground by fires that erupted after the earthquake struck. Heartbreaking hand-lettered signs were placed around in the hope of making connections with family members and friends. This residential quarter was not only destroyed, but also was veiled in sorrow.
I have thought so much of Kobe in the last few days, realizing that more than likely its citizens have built new houses and repaired tattered lives, and before last Friday they logically may have assumed such multiple and complex horrors surely would not be visited upon their land again, a horror in no wise a marriage of generosity, emotion and art but a Mephistophelian marriage of nature and technology gone berserk.
This new horror is one not to be assuaged by Samuel Barber or any music nor by expressions of generosity or emotion. Both by nature's hand and human invention, it provides new and staggering meaning to cataclysm, at least it does for me.
This morning, I stood in line at the coffee shop in the idyllic town where my younger son lives today, a town rich in history, blessed by climate and endowed both with a land and seascape and an architectural heritage of astonishing richness.
Outside the coffee shop, nature fondled land and sea and the citizenry and its industry. Inside, those of us in the queue were fixated on the television hanging over the counter. It showed fresh footage of incomprehensible destruction. A woman standing in the queue began to cry. She and I are of the same generation, one affected unconsciously and consciously from our very earliest days by misfortunes inflicted by technology and by nature upon the people of Japan.
"We are lucky," she said, "lucky to be as old as we are..." and then she could say no more.
She needn't. I knew exactly what she meant.