Does America Need More Wa?

The 2011 Tōhoku, Japan, earthquake and tsunami killed thousands of people and damaged more than one million buildings, including the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant. The initial crisis of rebuilding that region quickly became a question of how to rebuild, including how to rebuild the fractured spirit of the place. “This spirit and awareness of the importance of collective memory and the risk of losing that ‘capacity for making,’ which is an expression of social cohesion,” Rossella Menegazzo writes in the introduction to Wa: The Essence of Japanese Design turned Tōhoku into a center of design as “social interaction.” The fallout of that terrible crisis was a purposeful turning back to the idea of Wa, the Japanese cultural idea usually translated as “harmony” in English, and away from the more rational, individualist ideas of the West. Wa takes form in everything from a building to a chair to a kitchen knife. As American society faces its own ideological upheavals and tidal waves of unrest as political races begin to go nuclear, it’s worth asking: Does America need more Wa? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Does America Need More Wa?"