Go along. The great 17th century japanese poet said the person in mourning is a slave to sorrow. Nobody i saw in japan was a slave to sorrow. The pain was real and extremely deep, as you can imagine. The pain of losing people, not necessarily the pain of losing houses and cars and computers and bicycles, because this is a country so seismically dynamic that people all the rural people i talked to said, oh, this has talked to our family many times over the last 500 years. My great grandmother swam back to safety during the last tsunami and survived. So it wasnt an unexpected misfortune. There was an earthquake every day that i was there in all three months, at least one. So you were constantly reminded of impermanence, that you felt as if you were in a place where landscape shaped consciousness, shaped the mind, shaped how you saw the world every day. And you see this, you know, i felt it all these years. Ive been going to japan since my first visit in 1968, and its a sense that the bea