Dalai Lama Weeps for Japan’s Quake Victims as Golfers Play On: Pico Iyer

The scenes around the northern Japanese city of Sendai are still shocking. Clothes set out to dry hang outside two-story houses whose first floors are entirely crushed and hollowed out; the second floors are generally untouched.
A solitary chair sits in the smashed wreckage of what must recently have been a living room. Cars can be seen floating on small rivers, and telephone poles teeter at crazy angles. Giant rectangles of scrap metal stand all along what were in January typically spotless and sleek Japanese highways, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Dec. 26 issue.
In November, I traveled up to the little fishing village of Ishinomaki, an hour from Sendai, with the Dalai Lama. Almost eight months after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, the sense of devastation was hard to bear.
An old wooden temple still stood firm against a hill, but the gravestones in front of it were broken or tilting over. Tidy boxed remains of the recently departed, accompanied by snapshots -- here a teenage schoolboy, there a smiling grandmother -- sat in rows by the altar, but no survivor had come to claim them, and there were perhaps no homes to take them back to.
When the Dalai Lama stepped out of his car to greet and console the hundreds who had gathered in the street to see him, women began wailing and sobbing, “Thank you, thank you.”
He told them to look forward, not back; to honor the dead with something more concrete than tears; to rebuild their community as their nation had so stirringly rebuilt itself in the wake of World War II. As he turned round, however, I noticed that the usually unshakable Tibetan was wiping a tear from his eye.

Source credit: bloomberg