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Thunder From the East

Ruthlessness has an impeccable pedigree in Asia. In the Warring states Period of China, 2,400 years ago, there lived a famous soldier-statesman names Wu Qi, who is still read today for his insights into military strategy. Although Wu Qi wanted to be the commander of his country's troops, he knew that the government did not want to put him in charge because his wife was raised in an enemy state. Any normal person would have realized that the situation was impossible and given up. But Wu Qi was as ambitious as he was disciplined, and he pondered the problem over and over: How could he show his absolute devotion to the state? How could he show his hostility to the enemy?

The answer came to him. He murdered his wife. The rules, impressed by Wu Qi's hatred of the enemy, made him commander. His in-laws may have been displeased, but Wu Qi, got what he wanted. His action spawned an expression in Chinese: sha qi qiu jiang (kill the wife to get a prize).

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Just days after we moved to Tokyo in 1995, our son Geoffrey, then a baby, roused Sheryl for a 5:30 a.m. feeding. A few minutes later our bed began to shake. "Wake up, Nick!" Sheryl urged me with a poke. "It's an earthquake!" I grunted and, in an effort to reassure the household, kept sleeping. But it turned out to be the great earthquake that devastated the port city of Kobe and killed 5,200 people. A modern city as reduce to rubble, and for the next few days ordinary middle-class families were thrown back virtually to the stone age, struggling to find water, food, toilets, and shelter. Homes and shops were abandoned, of course, and in America or Europe the result would have been widespread looting, as well as desperate fighting for water, food, and blankets.

Instead, the people of Kobe were majestic in their suffering. They lined up for water and other supplies, never jostling, and nobody climbed through the shattered store windows to help themselves. Even the yakuza, the Japanese gangsters, suspended their criminal behavior and tried to improve their image by trucking food to the hardest-hit areas to give it away to the newly homeless.

I was fascinated by these displayed of public honesty, and so I kept searching for a case of theft or looting. Finally, I was thrilled to find one. Two young men had entered a shattered convenience store, picked up some food from the floor, and run out. Rumors of this crime spread around town, and finally I was able to find the store and its owner. "Of course, we expect this kind of looting if there is an earthquake in Los Angeles," I noted triumphantly, fishing for a good quote, "but were you shocked that your fellow Japanese would take advantage of the chaos and do such a thing?"

The shop owner looked puzzled. "Who said anything about Japanese?" he asked me politely. "The thieves weren't Japanese. They were foreigners. Iranians, it looked like."

He was right, it turned out. And I always think of that scene when I hear people talk of instability in Asia, because to me it speaks to something very different and something I saw much more often: a more cohesion and a sense pf shared values that together create a considerable degree of social stability in Asia. The social fabric f the East is rent or threadbare in places, but on the whole it seems to me stronger and more resilient than that of the West. And in assessing Asia's prospects in the coming decades, one of the important assets that it has working for it is this social fabric - by which I mean strong families, low crime rates, considerable civility, and a broad sense of shared values and destiny. If I had to offer a shorthand for Asia's path to growth, it would be economic flexibility, brutal drive, and social stability.

Thunder From the East was recommended to me by my close friend Mike. Even though I hate history and pretty much always have, I loved this book. It was well-written, interesting, educational, and thought-provoking.