Living in Hope

PER ARDUA AD ASTRA (Through Hardship to the Stars) It is not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty which makes a man what he is. A ccording to an English scholar, Ian Nash, who spent eleven years in Japan making a detailed study of the language and the nation, what shook the Japanese most profoundly was not upheavals in politics, but the great Kanto earthquake, which devastated the whole of the most populated eastern part of Japan on the first of September 1923. In his book, The Story of Japan, he explains that another terrible blow was the reduction of two of the great cities of Japan to smouldering mounds of waste by the dropping of atomic bombs. This led to the ultimate defeat of Japan in the Second World War in 1945. One might imagine that any country which has been dealt with such shattering blows would never be able to rise again from its ashes. But this is far from being true, for Japan has not only rehabilitated itself, but