When I produced this event video for the Portland Japanese Garden at the World Forestry Center on the west end of town, Los Angeles was still on fire.
You could feel the impact on the audience -- everyone's hearts were wondering where we could draw resilience from, in the face of both rising fascism and the angry retribution of a neglected mother earth.
It was so valuable, in this atmosphere, to hear from Hitoshi Abe, Director of the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, about Japan's long history of responding to natural disasters with solidarity and ingenuity.
I wish I could encapsulate the whole of Professor Abe's fascinating lecture, but I've clipped it down to just a few choice segments that highlight how much Japanese culture and history has been shaped by the repeated, relentless destruction brought by natural disasters.
His complete lecture delved into the remarkable solutions Japanese communities have developed -- from innovative building materials that flex with earthquakes to levee systems that work with rather than against natural water flows. These aren't just engineering marvels; they're examples of how human ingenuity and community cooperation can create resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
In our current moment, when we're confronting both environmental crisis and social division, these stories of adaptive solidarity offer a roadmap for building the kind of future we want to inhabit.
