Xie Suhang “In Preparation for Prolonged War against Corona”

 

April 4 is a Qingming Festival in China. At 10 o’clock, this day, the government prayed, for three minutes, for doctors and other medical workers and the dead by the new coronavirus in China which occurred on January 23 in Wuhan. They fought for about two months.  The prayers by the government were the symbol of elementary victory against COVID-19.

 

 

In China, COVID-19 converged temporarily. But it spread all over the world in April and Japan was no exception. The number of infected persons in Japan is not so big compared to Europe and America. The Japanese government declared a state of emergency in April and May and could put COVID-19 under their control. But, when the Japanese government released such declarations at the end of May, infection clusters out broke. In Tokyo, the number of infections increased day by day. It was the second wave of coronavirus.

 

 

The second wave of coronavirus in Japan brought us brutal facts as follows: At least, in a predictable future, we must live together with corona which would leave influential traces in our daily lives.  We dreamed optimistically that we would be able to get back to normal lives after standing suffering in a short period. But this dream was broken. We must rebuild our new attitude in COVID-19. We have to have strong and tenacious guts of prolonged war against coronavirus and, at the same time, we have to do our best in our defensive measures against COVID-19 paying attention in all our movement of our actual daily lives. I think it corrects attitude to survive in the “WITH-CORONA” societies.

 

 

There is one story which I have read before. This story explains how an individual or one organization succeeded in coping with and overcame over prolonging difficulties. The answer, which the writer gave us, is “recuperative power”. Then how is “recuperative power” composed?

 

 

The writer of this article has interviewed a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp. According to a survivor, he had never had an illusion that he would be rescued soon. It differed from other inmates.

On the contrary, he was prepared seriously to predict that he might not get out of the camp forever.  The only thing he has been thinking in the camp, in which people would reach the limit of life or death, is that he had to expose everything which he had experienced there in the world if he would be able to get out of the camp alive.  He was strongly saying in his heart that he would inform the world about the tragedies in the camp and such tragedies should not be repeated.  Based on such belief, he has collected every material for the winter in the camp and could get over finally such difficult situation which is far beyond our imagination.  

 

 

Such experience by this survivor shows us clearly that there are three factors that consist of “recuperative power”. Namely, courage which faces actuality, a pursuit for meaning of being alive and flexible correspondence to the situation. I think those three factors are the “theses” which can maximize our real worth in the circumstance that we would confront COVID-19 on a long-term basis.

 

 

The COVID-19 pandemics on a global scale brought the people all over the world not only serious disasters but various difficulties like the menace of latent virus, inconvenient and restricted livings, stagnant of consumer lives and losing sense of accomplishment by unemployment etc.

I think, however, those difficulties gave us again good chances to reconsider and determine the purpose of lives and positive attitude to our lives.

 

 

There will be a big possibility which influence of COVID-19 become a trigger to the sudden change in global situations. But I think we should consider COVID-19, which we encountered unfortunately in the year 2020, as good news, not as bad news. Let’s create infinite possibilities by ourselves in our limited livings which may continue a long period.

 

 

SGRA Kawaraban 644 in Japanese (Original)

 

 

Xie_Suhang / 2019 Raccoon,

 

Translated by Kazuo Kawamura

English checked by Sabina Koirala