Technology is a forward-looking engine of change that pays scant attention to the past. It defines progress. American culture, which has scant interest in history, has embraced technology like no other. Japanese culture, which pays enormous attention to the past through Buddhist traditions, has also been a progenitor of high technology, but straddles an uneasy fault line between respect for ancestors in the broadest sense and obsession with material progress. There may be no more poignant image of how the Fukushima disaster has ripped apart the fabric of Japanese society than the sight of displaced families visiting their ancestors’ graves in evacuated regions during this month’s Bon festival.
