Bōsai. Keep calm, help your neighbours, rebuild the city. How Japan raises children for the event of disaster.

Bōsai is Japan’s culture of preparedness: school drills, the ‘first response,’ self-help, and neighbourly cooperation. An essay on how Japan raises children for calm, responsibility, and rebuilding after disaster.

Living under constant threat

The earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku in March 2011… The world remembered that image for a long time: not the wave itself, not the black water carrying houses like matchboxes, but the people afterward. Queues formed without shouting, without pushing, with that unfathomable, almost bashful attentiveness to another person; the silence in shelters where someone apologized for moving a blanket so as not to jostle a neighbour; the simple gestures of organising life—as if someone, in the middle of the ruins, decided to recreate the order of the world on a micro scale: to distribute water, count the children, find batteries for the radio, write down names. In the Western imagination it immediately entered the catalogue of “Japanese miracles”: a nation of discipline, a nation of calm. And there is a grain of truth in that—but only a grain. The rest is far more human. Because nothing comes just like that. Everything has to be worked for, trained—through discipline and determination.

Rebuilding begins much earlier than disaster—in people’s minds. It begins at school, in the upbringing of children, in something that at first glance looks like a boring routine, but in reality is a psychological art of living in a world of risk. In Japan, bōsai (the philosophy of being ready for disasters) is not meant to sound lofty—it is meant to work on a Monday at 10:17, when the signal goes off and a person has one second to begin acting rather than freeze. That is why children learn the “first response” the way they learn the alphabet: in those first moments they do not wait for wisdom from outside, but look for a place where “nothing will fall, nothing will topple, and nothing will move into you”—and the simple triad “落ちてこない・倒れてこない・移動してこない” has saved the lives of thousands of children and returns like a mantra, because it works even when the brain is already in survival mode or panic.

One of the lessons for Japanese sixth-graders is titled “わたしにできること” — “What can I do?” — and that question is, in fact, the core of the entire philosophy of bōsai: to raise a child not only for escape, but for the role of someone who supports; for rebuilding, before rebuilding is needed. In today’s text we will try to see how Japan tames disaster without hysteria—and why what the Western world admired as “Japanese resilience to pain and loss” (gaman) is, in reality, something that can be trained—discipline—like a strike in karate.

Disaster is not the exception

That “serenity of spirit” we so readily attribute from the outside is often not serenity at all, but dignity; not the absence of despair, but its containment, so as not to poison others with it. It is a difference that is easy to miss if one looks at disaster as a spectacle rather than as a psychological experience: a person can be broken and still function; can be crying inside and at the same time neatly line up shoes at the entrance to a shelter. In such a moment, culture is not an ornament—it is a tool of survival. It gives form to what, without form, tears a human being to shreds.

That is precisely why it is worth beginning the story of bōsai with this global fascination—and then gently disarming it. Disaster in Japan is not an “event” that happens; it is a category of the world. In Japan one lives on an archipelago where the earth can take away possessions and loved ones without warning, where typhoons return like the seasons, where the mountains are beautiful but young and unstable, and where the sea is gentle only until it is not. This does not create a nation made of stone. It creates a society that, at some point, had to psychologically abandon the fantasy of full control. Not in the sense of fatalism, but in the sense of sobriety: “this can come, so let’s not build our lives on pretending it won’t.”

That sobriety is something different from heroism. Heroism is short, intense, alluring. Bōsai is long, boring, repetitive. It is like everyday psychological and social hygiene: drills, maps, arrangements, routines, shared gathering points, conversations about who will pick up the child if the parent is stuck on the other side of the river. From the outside, it looks like meticulousness. From the inside, it is work on fear—work you do not see, because its very aim is not to scream when it is already too late to scream. One could say: Japan tames disaster not by taming the element itself, but by taming its own reaction.

And here the philosophical weight of this culture begins. Europe—I say this cautiously, because generalisations are always brutal—has a strong tendency toward “let it not.” That sentence is tempting, because it allows one to keep comfort. “Let it not” is a form of spell that calms for a moment, because it pushes the problem into the fog of an undefined future. Japan more often chooses a different kind of calm: calm built on acknowledging uncertainty. Not “it will be fine,” but “let’s establish what needs to be done when it comes.” This is not romantic. This is adult. And in that adulthood there is also room for sadness, rage, mourning, a sense of injustice, and even for fatigue from constant preparedness—because no one is made of stone. The difference is that these emotions do not invalidate practice. Practice continues despite them.

We also need to say it plainly: the image of “perfectly organised Japanese” is often a media filter. Disaster always exposes cracks. There are excluded people, lonely people, the elderly who have neither family nor neighbours who will knock on their door. There are tensions in shelters, conflicts, shame, silent humiliations, a sense of being a burden. There is trauma that cannot be “gaman-ed” indefinitely. There are institutional mistakes and communication chaos, because the scale of events overwhelms the best systems. Japanese bōsai culture is not about eliminating suffering. It is about trying to limit the second wave of disaster: the psychological and social one, in which people would fall apart not from water or shock, but from loneliness, panic, and helplessness.

That is why “disaster as an element of the world” is not a geological slogan, but a sentence about the human being. If something is inevitable on a long horizon, maturity consists in not living in permanent alarm, but also not living in denial. Bōsai is precisely that thin, difficult line between the two: not hysteria, not repression. It is a culture that tells a child—and an adult—that fear is natural, but it does not have to rule; that one can be terrified and still act; that one can lose everything and yet know how to begin from zero, because rebuilding does not start with concrete, but with the capacity for cooperation and with trust that the person next to you will also try.

And when you look at it this way, those scenes after the tsunami stop being “Japanese exoticism.” They become evidence of something more universal: that calm is not always a character trait. Sometimes it is the result of upbringing, training, and repeatable practices that shift a person from the question “why me?” to the question “what now?” And it is precisely from that “what now?” that true bōsai begins—not as a warning system, but as a culture of living in a world that does not promise stability.

What is the philosophy of bōsai?

The word bōsai is most often written as 防災—literally: “protect” (防) “from disaster” (災). In the signs themselves there is an important intuition: this is not the language of “heroic victory” over the elements, but the language of shielding and prevention, the way one shields a flame with a hand against the wind. In everyday use, bōsai includes everything that is meant to ensure that when the world trembles or cracks, the person and the community do not crack along with it: from education in schools, through evacuation practice, to equipment, supplies, neighbourhood communication, hazard maps, rules of action—and, perhaps most importantly, a habit of thinking in which “this can happen” is not a gloomy obsession, but a calm recognition of fact.

But bōsai is not only a set of actions. In the Japanese context, it is very easy to see that it is also an attitude, and even a certain form of ethics: the way a society tames uncertainty. That is why in Japan, alongside hard infrastructure and procedures, there is such a strong emphasis on something soft, harder to measure: shaping “life strength” (生きる力), that is, the ability to think accurately, decide, and act in a threatening situation—not on paper, but in the body and in character. After the Tōhoku disaster in 2011, ministerial materials for schools do not merely say “practice evacuation,” but go deeper: they speak of the need to develop in children an attitude of independent, situational judgement, the ability to anticipate risk, everyday preparation, and also—something that sounds almost like civic philosophy—education toward being someone who, after a disaster, can become support for others and for rebuilding, even through volunteering and cooperation.

And here we come to what in bōsai is “Japanese” not in an exotic sense, but in a culturally fundamental one: the thought that preparation does not have to be drama. It can be custom.

In Japan, many bōsai practices resemble the rhythm of daily life more than the rhythm of an alarm. Not because the threat is downplayed, but because, on a long time horizon, it is the only way not to go mad. If disasters are something that “will surely come someday” (in some form), then living in constant tension would become a second element—just as destructive as an earthquake. Bōsai resolves this paradox through a banal wisdom: to tame does not mean to stop being afraid; to tame means to be able to act despite fear—and ideally in such a way that, in the decisive moment, one does not have to reach for heroism, because the body and the community already have a well-trodden path.

That is why people sometimes speak of bōsai as they speak of manners. Not salon manners, but the kind that keep life in order: putting things back in their place, checking whether the door is locked, remembering someone weaker. In this sense, bōsai in Japan can be something obvious, almost “imprinted”—not as coercion, but as a form of care. Care here is practical. It does not consist in intense emotions, but in consistency. It is like a daily meal: repetitive, unshowy, necessary. And it is precisely this unshowiness that distinguishes a culture of preparedness from a culture of sensation.

Here it is worth taking a step toward psychology, because without it bōsai becomes incomprehensible to a European: it then looks like cold discipline. Meanwhile bōsai is, to a large extent, a response to mechanisms that are universally human. One of them is what researchers call “normalcy bias”—the tendency to deny or downplay risk, especially when the information is unpleasant. The mind prefers to conclude: “it won’t happen,” “not here,” “it’s exaggerated,” because that narrative is psychologically cheaper than acknowledging that the world can collapse in a few minutes. What’s more, normalcy bias is not “stupidity,” but defence—primitive, but understandable. In uncertainty, the brain tries to keep reality coherent; if it cannot, a person can “freeze” in their own fear.

The Japanese approach to bōsai is mature precisely because it does not pretend that this tendency can be uprooted by a moral sermon. Instead of saying “you must not ignore risk,” bōsai does something more effective: it translates risk into practice. Instead of fighting denial at the level of declarations, it teaches action at the level of habit.

Evacuation drills, then, are not a “simulation of disaster” in a theatrical sense; they are a training of decisions, a micro-reflex: what do I do when I hear the signal, where is the route, whom do I help, how do I keep attention. When practice becomes normal, normalcy bias loses some of its power—not because it disappears, but because in the decisive moment a person already has something inside that can lead them.

At this point a concept fits very well—one that appears increasingly clearly in Japanese discussions of risk reduction: “everyday-life preparedness” (生活防災, seikatsu bōsai)—readiness built into ordinary life. This idea is philosophically extremely important, because it shifts the accent from thinking “in case of disaster” (which easily triggers repression) to thinking “for quality of life in the world as it is.” Preparation ceases to be a separate, heavy project to tick off. It begins to be something one does “along the way,” but wisely: one builds neighbourly ties not only so that it is pleasant, but also so that in crisis there is a real network of support; one plans community meetings not only as a formality, but as a space where a sense of agency is born; one creates hazard maps not as an imposed document, but as something “ours,” thanks to which people begin to take it seriously.

Here we touch the essence: bōsai is not exclusively about threat, but about agency. In disaster psychology, this is one of the most brutal truths: what destroys a person is not only the loss itself, but also the feeling of being a “pawn,” a victim. That is why so much depends on whether bōsai activities are experienced as shared practice, or as instructions “from above” handed down by experts. When people feel they are only recipients of orders, resistance, indifference, or passive “participation without heart” easily arises. When they feel they have a share in planning and decisions, something emerges that researchers describe as collective efficacy—the conviction that “we, as a community, can do something.” That conviction is a quiet but powerful vaccine against panic.

In Japan, the philosophy of bōsai thus grows out of a paradox: the more you accept that full control does not exist, the more sensibly you invest in what can be controlled. You cannot control an earthquake. But you can control whether a child at school has a protective reflex, whether they know the route, whether they can listen and respond; whether neighbourhood communication works; whether people know who is alone; whether hazard maps exist not as a file, but as the memory of a place. In this sense, bōsai is a philosophy of “small decisions”—one that does not promise immortality, but reduces the size of tragedy and shortens the road back to life.

And when you look at it from the perspective of upbringing, you see that the stake is something more than safety. The stake is the shape of a human being. Bōsai teaches a child: “the world can be dangerous, but you are not helpless.” It also teaches something even harder: “you are not alone, so you must not think only of yourself.” It sounds simple, but it is the most mature foundation of rebuilding. Because rebuilding begins earlier than disaster—it begins in the way a society teaches its youngest to respond to reality without fleeing into the spell “let it not.”

Raising children in the thought of bōsai — school

The Japanese school very rarely treats bōsai as a “topic” to be covered. It is rather the shaping of a person who, in the real world, can keep their head, life, and health—while also helping a neighbour along the way. In ministerial school materials, this goal is linked directly with the concept of “生きる力” (ikiru chikara)—“life strength”: not as romantic bravery, but as a combination of sober thinking, the ability to make quick decisions, cooperation with others, care for the weaker, and ordinary psychological endurance. This is not meant to sound lofty—it is meant to work on a Monday at 10:17, when the signal goes off and a person has one second to begin acting rather than freeze.

What matters is that this “life strength” in Japan is not left to teachers’ intuition or “good intentions.” MEXT materials break bōsai down into developmental stages, as if it were language learning: one can demand one thing from a preschooler, another from a fourth-grader, and yet another from a high-schooler. In preschool, the goal is a simple competence: to recognise dangerous places and, in a crisis situation, calmly and quickly follow an adult’s instruction. In the younger years of primary school, following instruction is still key, but in the middle grades an element of independence is added: the child is to understand what hazards may appear and begin to act without panic. In the older grades, a phrase appears that, in the Polish context, already sounds “adult” for a child: the student is to care not only for themselves, but also be attentive to the safety of others. In middle-school and high-school age, another layer is added: awareness of one’s role in the community, understanding the value of volunteering, and readiness to participate in community actions. This is education for rebuilding—before rebuilding is needed.

At the very heart of this pedagogy are evacuation drills—but not as a “theatre of fear,” and certainly not as a reason for school foolery. Their true function is more psychological than organisational: to move a child from paralysis (when a real disaster comes) to action. Under stress, a person does not become wiser—they become more automatic. If they have not trained the automatism, in a moment of threat the simplest one will switch on: “I stand and don’t know what to do,” or “I run blindly.” This is the same mechanism described in disaster literature as a tendency to “normalise” the threat. Bōsai does not try to eradicate it with moralising—it tries to cover it with habit. And that is why school drills are repetitive, sometimes even boring. Boredom is an advantage here: it is a sign that the procedure is becoming “ordinary,” which means ready to “ignite” in a crisis.

A good example of this “psychology of habit” are exercises based on 緊急地震速報 (kinkyū jishin sokuhō)—the early warning system for strong earthquakes. School materials assume scenarios in which, from the signal to the shaking, there are only a few to a dozen seconds; in one of the models for primary school, it is stated outright that “10 seconds after the alarm, strong shaking begins.” In those seconds, the child is not to wait for wisdom from outside, but to perform the “first response”: find a place where “nothing will fall, nothing will topple, and nothing will move into you”—this triad (“落ちてこない・倒れてこない・移動してこない”) returns like a mantra, because it is simple and works even when the brain is already under stress. What’s more: the assumption is explicitly stated that the student is to be able to act even without the teacher’s command. This is a subtle but great thing—education toward agency, not toward passive obedience.

Then the second layer begins—the more “visible” one: children put on bōsai zukin (防災ずきん, hoods/protective caps), sometimes cover their mouth and nose with a cloth, line up in the corridor, listen to announcements from the school PA system, go out to the schoolyard, quickly get organised, and attendance is taken. To a passer-by it looks like discipline. To a psychologist it is building a map of the world: “in chaos there is a sequence,” “my role contains both ‘listen’ and ‘act’,” “there is someone who will count me—and I will count others.” The materials even include a practical detail: after leaving, the class must be gathered quickly and efficiently lined up, and then the headcount reported (e.g., to the principal). These are details that, in a crisis, make the difference between panic and smooth movement.

The older the children, the more the drills stop being only evacuation. In scenarios for older grades and secondary schools, elements appear that are already explicitly “about rebuilding”: first aid, carrying the injured, acting under conditions of limited resources. One model assumes: alarm, then strong shaking, injuries appear and aid must be given, and then evacuation must take place while ensuring safety. Between each stage there is to be an updated assessment of the threat. A methodological comment also stands out: this is to be training, but the student is to treat it as real; they are also to understand that, as a teenager in a disaster, they will have responsibility also at home and in the community. This is bōsai in the most mature sense: not only “I got out,” but “I can be useful.”

And here we arrive at the fragment that may seem, in the West, the most “Japanese”: the child is educated not only to save themselves, but to the role of someone who, in a crisis, protects others. In school materials this is not a slogan. There is an entire current of educational work (e.g., within ethics/moral education classes) where students talk about what life in evacuation looks like, what attentiveness to another person is, what tensions arise in crowding and discomfort, and why, in such conditions, a “role”—mine, yours, our class’s—is something that sustains the community.

One example lesson for the 6th grade even has the title “わたしにできること” — “What can I do?” — and builds moral imagination around the fact that after a disaster, in a shelter, empathy and cooperation are needed more than ever.

This “protecting others” takes various forms in practice. The simplest is very everyday: older students help younger ones line up, move, calm down, remember the rules. A more mature form appears in complex drills—especially those that connect the school with the local community: then young people learn that disaster does not end at the schoolyard. The school can be a shelter, and teenagers can become real support: in logistics, care, communication. In one high-school scenario of an “integrated, complex evacuation training”* the goal is not only a response to the alarm and a safe escape, but also explicitly: confirmation of jijo / kyojo behaviours (self-help / mutual help), reflection on what young people can do as support, and building an attitude of leadership and helping actions.

*MEXT, “高等学校展開例７：地域と連携した複合的避難訓練” (“Implementation example for high schools – integrated training with the participation of local institutions and residents”)

What binds all of this into a whole is a very Japanese intuition that readiness must become “someone’s,” otherwise it dies. The concept of “embedded preparedness”—seikatsu bōsai—fits perfectly here, saying: a culture of resilience will not endure if it is only a top-down lecture by experts; it must give people agency and a sense of ownership, it must link “school” with “community life,” and sometimes even rely on what people do willingly, because then practice stops being an obligation and becomes part of normality. In one analysis there is a telling anecdote: hazard maps handed out to residents can end up forgotten in drawers if people did not participate in creating them—because no interest or sense of “this is ours” was produced*. Bōsai upbringing tries to avoid this from the beginning: not “I will teach you because I have to,” but “I will involve you because it concerns your world.”

* K. Kitagawa (2019), “Exploring ‘everyday-life preparedness’ [seikatsu bosai]: Three case studies from Japan”

As a result, school in Japan is more than a place where knowledge about hazards is passed on. It is training in a very concrete maturity: one in which a child learns that fear is natural, but can be translated into action; that uncertainty is a constant element of the world, but does not have to mean helplessness; and that in disaster, the most important thing is not spectacular courage, but the calm, everyday ability to cooperate. This is precisely a “laboratory of resilience”—not theatrical, but the kind that, on the worst day, turns out to be simply… practical.

Kōjo – jijo – kyōjo: the triangle of help

In Japanese thinking about bōsai a simple triangle returns very often: 公助 (kōjo), 自助 (jijo), and 共助 (kyōjo). Three words that sound technical, but in practice describe something deeply human: who helps whom when the world is collapsing—and why none of these pillars can be treated as a “substitute” for the others.

Kōjo (公助) is “public help”: the state, local government, rescue services, fire brigade, police, warning systems, shelter management, logistics, spatial planning, building regulations. Without this, all of bōsai would be only a private hobby of people with first-aid kits. But Japanese maturity lies in the fact that kōjo is not a myth of omnipotence. In educational materials and practical discourse it is said outright: in the first hours and days after a major event, the state can be late—not because of ill will, but because of scale, destroyed roads, lack of communication, chaos. This is not an accusation—it is realism.

Hence the second pillar: jijo (自助), that is, “self-help.” And here misunderstanding is easy. In Europe, “self-help” sometimes sounds like the ideology of “deal with it yourself.” In Japan, jijo is rather an ethic of responsibility: since I know I live in a world of risk, it is my duty toward others not to become a burden immediately. This is soft in content, though hard in consequence. “I have water and a flashlight because I don’t want to take them from someone else.” “I know the evacuation route because in panic I might lead my child the wrong way.” “I have a plan for picking up my child from school so that the school can take care of others.”

And then we come to the third pillar, which is the true soul of bōsai: kyōjo (共助)—“co-help,” mutual help. This is the layer that cannot be bought or legislated. It either exists as a bond and habit, or it does not. Kyōjo includes everything that happens in between: neighbours, the residents’ council, local associations, parent communities, volunteers, and even simple knowledge of who is alone, who has mobility problems, where an elderly lady lives whom no one visits. In practice, kyōjo decides whether the first days after a disaster will be “survival” or “collapse.” Kyōjo can also be a psychological remedy: a person panics less when they know they are not alone and that someone knows them by name.

Notice that there is no heroism in this triangle. There is something else: a mature ethics of interdependence. Bōsai does not say: “be tough.” It says: “be prepared so you can take care of yourself, and then be for others.” This subtle shift makes an enormous difference.

Seikatsu bōsai: preparation “built into” life

Here we enter one of the most interesting threads of contemporary thinking about Japanese bōsai: 生活防災 (seikatsu bōsai)—“readiness in everyday life.” In K. Kitagawa’s research a simple intuition appears: preparation is durable not when it is impressive, but when it is woven into ordinary practices. Because what requires special mobilisation dies quickly: people forget, put it off “for later,” feel saturation, and eventually forget the topic.

Seikatsu bōsai tries to circumvent human nature instead of fighting it. How? Through the principle of “two goals at once,” and by transforming preparation into something that also makes sense without disaster.

The examples are very concrete (there are far more of them than I provide here):

- Rolling stock supplies: not “buy once and forget,” but keep at home products you use anyway (water, rice, canned food, flashlights, batteries), but in an amount that allows you to survive a few days. You use the oldest, add new ones (here proper habits are needed). Zero heroism, maximum durability.

- Family contact rules: simple arrangements—“where do we meet,” “who picks up whom,” “who has a list of numbers on paper”—because after a disaster the phone may not work, and stress “wipes” memory.

- Hazard maps as part of conversation, not a leaflet: Katsuya Yamorim (a professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI), Kyoto University) teaches that hazard maps should be co-created by residents. Already at the school level, instead of giving ready-made maps to children, classes should be conducted in such a way that these maps are created during them, with students’ participation.

Seikatsu bōsai is thus, in a sense, a philosophy: the best preparation does not look like preparation. It looks like normal life—just organised a little more cleverly. And because it is not a burden, people have a greater chance of maintaining it for years.

The psychology of rebuilding

Let us now enter the psychology of rebuilding. After a disaster, “equipment” is not enough. Equipment gives survival. Rebuilding is given only by something harder: the ability to act together. Most often in times of painful losses, resignation, and desperation.

In social literature it is sometimes called social capital, and in social psychology the concept of “collective efficacy” appears: the conviction that “we, as a community, can act together.” This is not a slogan. It is a real resource that reduces panic and increases the ability to organise.

How is it built in Japanese bōsai? Again: through practices, not through grand declarations.

- Meetings and conversations about risk: not only an “instruction,” but joint arrangements: who has what resources, where people requiring support are, what evacuation routes exist, who knows the terrain.

- Neighbourhood and school–neighbourhood drills: because children and youth are part of the community, and the school can be a real shelter and logistical hub. What is practiced together works more smoothly in a crisis.

- Local initiatives that make sense also without disaster: here lies the entire genius of seikatsu bōsai—when a neighbourhood meeting is also integration, and not only a “safety briefing,” people come more willingly. And the social bond becomes fuel for readiness.

The psychological effect of this culture is quiet, but powerful: fear is “dispersed” into a network of relationships. When the threat is only in your head, it grows to the size of a monster. When it is a topic you talk about together, plan, and practice, it stops being a mystery. It does not disappear—but its quality changes. It becomes something one can carry.

And here we return again to the maturity of bōsai: this is not a culture “without fear.” This is a culture that teaches how to live with fear so that it does not become a tyrant—and how to transform it into agency, responsibility, and care that is practical. That is why Japanese bōsai is less about disaster, and more about the human being.

Dignity after disaster — education for the role of support and rebuilding

After the shock, after the tsunami wave, after the typhoon—there comes a second stage, less cinematic and more real: life has to be put back together. And it is precisely for this stage that Japanese education tries to raise children and youth: not only to save themselves, but to be able to co-create a return to normality.

In MEXT materials (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), they speak directly about shaping an attitude of participation and responsibility, about understanding the role of volunteering after disaster, about the fact that supporting others is a real competence that can be practiced—just like evacuation.

This shift of perspective also makes deep “psychological” sense. Trauma feeds on helplessness. A person who, in a crisis, has even a minimal role—even a small one, even a symbolic one—regains a fragment of agency. That is why it is so important that the young are not raised solely for “obedience to procedures,” but to understand that after disaster there is work that does not require physical strength or specialist qualifications: to calm younger children, help organise space, hand out water, carry information, support a senior, take on a piece of chaos so that others can breathe. Bōsai in its mature form is not a cult of toughness (gaman)—it is a culture of what could be called compassionate, practical usefulness.

And then comes an even harder topic: dignity. Disaster is humiliating. In one moment a person loses privacy, control, the rhythm of the day, the sense that their life has shape and meaning, direction. Bōsai culture tries to leave, in all of this, at least a little form—because form protects a human being. In a shelter, in a queue for food, in a crowd on a schoolyard—those small rules of coexistence are not “Japanese politeness.” They are a way to still exist as a person in a world without walls and doors.

If we stopped here, it would be easy to fall into naïveté. Because bōsai—even in Japan—is not a magic spell that works always and everywhere.

There are people who do not participate. Sometimes because they are young and feel no bond with the place; sometimes because they are exhausted by work and have no energy resources left for “another duty”; sometimes because they are lonely and have no social network that naturally draws them into such practices; sometimes because they are ashamed of their situation or do not trust institutions. Sometimes it is simpler: some people have resistance to thinking about disaster, because that thinking triggers fear—and fear, as we know, likes to be repressed. Seikatsu bōsai arose precisely so as not to fight human nature with a fist, but with cleverness: to build preparation into life, so that it does not require extraordinary mobilisation.

There is tension between the top-down and bottom-up model. The state and the school can create excellent frameworks (and in Japan they often do), but if on the ground there is no bond, trust, conversation, local agency—bōsai becomes an instruction that works only when everything goes according to plan. And a disaster is not about everything going according to plan, right?

In the end, I would like to leave only one question—without the illusion that “Poland should become Japan.” We do not have to copy another world in order to learn maturity from it.

In Poland, fortunately, we live less often under the pressure of great elements, but we are not free of risk. And even if we were free of natural disasters—private disasters still meet us: illness, an accident, a sudden crack in life, a loss that is hard to accept.

Are we ready for that? Can we—despite pain—pass through suffering without inner decomposition, and then proceed to rebuilding, sometimes also to helping another person? If not, it does not matter. This is not a fixed character trait, an inborn toughness, a Japanese gaman that some have and others do not. This can be trained.

So the real question is not: what are we like. It is: what do we want to train?

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