Image in the original: Attack on Pearl Harbor – Pictures from History / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
There are jokes you should never laugh off.
When I was in senior school (high school) at the British School in Paris, an American classmate once joked that he would “drop an atomic bomb on us.”
I told him, “That’s not funny,” and the room went cold.
We had been doing what teenage boys do best: talking too loudly, saying too little, wasting time as if it were infinite. His remark came out with that familiar mixture of ignorance and swagger that adolescence so often mistakes for wit.
I could have let it pass. I could have protected the mood, preserved the social rhythm, and moved on. A small laugh. A thin smile maybe. The usual diplomacy of youth.
Instead, I said, “Hey man, that’s not funny.”
It made things awkward. He apologised later, and in the ordinary sense the incident ended there. But it stayed with me — not because it was dramatic, but because it revealed something I have never really forgotten: some jokes are not jokes at all.
They are tests.
Tests of who gets to invoke history lightly, and who is expected to absorb it in silence.
That memory came back to me when I read about President Trump invoking Pearl Harbor in his meeting with Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.
According to reports, Trump was defending his decision not to notify allies in advance about military action against Iran when he reached for Pearl Harbor as an example of why surprise matters.
But what struck me more than the remark itself was what came before and after it.
Takaichi had opened the meeting by telling Trump that she firmly believed he was the only person who could bring peace to the world. The Pearl Harbor remark came later, during questions. There was no sharp reply. There was no going cold.
From a human point of view, it was hard to watch.
From a diplomatic point of view, it was perfectly intelligible.
And yet the gap between those two readings is where something important lives.
Image in the original: Donald Trump and Prime Minister of Japan Sanae TakaichiAlex Wong / Getty Images
Video: Trump compares Iran strikes to Pearl Harbor in front of Japan’s PM
(https://jp.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW568919032026RP1/)
The easy interpretation is weakness.
Japan, constitutionally constrained, militarily dependent, strategically deferential — what else could she do? That reading is not wrong. But I no longer think it is complete.
Consider what the Dutch did in the seventeenth century. At a time when every other Western power was excluded from Japan’s closed borders, the Dutch were granted a small trading post in Nagasaki harbour — the only opening in a sealed country.
Their representatives were instructed from home with unusual precision: do not preach. Do not proselytise. Do not mistake the short-term satisfaction of spreading your faith for the long-term value of sustained commerce. Keep your eyes on the ultimate objective and do not confuse it with anything else.
They held that discipline for two hundred years.
That is not weakness. It is a particular kind of strength — one that requires knowing exactly what you are after, and being willing to look undignified in the pursuit of it.
I am not suggesting that Takaichi’s praise of Trump was a masterwork of strategic patience. I genuinely do not know. But I think the flattery-as-weakness reading assumes that dignity and strategy always point in the same direction.
History suggests they often do not. Israel offers a different model: a country that absorbs international condemnation, ignores reputational cost, and prioritises survival above all else.
Japan is not Israel. But both, in their different ways, have decided that the world’s opinion of their methods matters less than the outcome they are reaching for. The battlefield is simply different.
Japan chose — or was guided into choosing — a different field entirely.
Not military dominance, but economic presence. Not the kind of power that commands, but the kind that connects. Somewhere in that shift is a genuine achievement: a country once known for imperial aggression rebuilt itself into a nation whose passport is among the most welcomed in the world. Doors open. Customs officers nod. Almost nowhere on earth does a Japanese traveller face hostility.
That is not nothing.
Laugh if you want. But they got the prosperity.
Still, there is an honest reckoning to be made.
Japan’s postwar path was not entirely chosen.
A constitution written under occupation constrained the options from the start. The military route was not so much abandoned as foreclosed. The economic emphasis was not purely visionary; it was, in part, what remained after the other avenues were closed. There is a difference between an actor who chooses his stage and one who performs brilliantly on the only stage he was permitted to enter. The performance may look the same from the outside. It does not feel the same from within.
This is why I find myself drawn to a Japanese word that translates poorly but captures something true: 善処 (zensho).
It is the kind of phrase a politician uses when he means to sound responsible without committing to anything. It means, roughly, to handle things appropriately — to do what can be done, carefully, within the room one has been given. It is not a heroic word. It does not inspire. It is a word for managing constraints with competence and without spectacle.
Postwar Japan, I think, has been a nation of 善処 (zensho). Not grand transformation. Not a chosen destiny. But a sustained, undramatic effort to tend carefully to what was within reach. That is less than a vision. It is also, perhaps, more than it sounds.
An individual can sometimes say what a nation cannot.
At seventeen in Paris, I had almost no power. But I had enough to say: that is out of bounds. The cost was limited — embarrassment, discomfort, a strained friendship that soon repaired itself. A state operates under a different arithmetic. When the other party is the president of the United States, and the surrounding facts include alliance obligations, military asymmetry, energy dependence, and a live crisis in the Gulf, the satisfying response is rarely the prudent one.
But here is what I have been turning over since.
The individual and the nation face the same essential constraint: a finite span of time in which to act. I will not live to see whether Japan’s long wager pays off. Neither will Takaichi. Neither will most of the people who are, right now, forming opinions about what she should have said in that room.
The honest question is not whether the strategy will ultimately vindicate itself — history’s verdict on that will arrive long after we are gone — but whether, in the years we are given, we tend well to what is within reach.
Nations do this under the pressure of geopolitics and constitutional limits and the accumulated weight of their own histories. Individuals do it under the pressure of time, circumstance, and the things they cannot bring themselves to say out loud. The scale is different. The problem is the same.
I still think about the boy in Paris and what it cost him nothing to say. And I still think about what it would have cost Takaichi to say even a fraction of it.
The swallowed words do not disappear. They remain somewhere — in private discomfort, in historical memory, in the inward life of citizens who understand perfectly well what was meant and why it could not be answered. That is not a small thing. But it may be the price of keeping the room intact — the alliances, the stability, the long arrangement that has held for eighty years.
善処 (zensho). Do what can be done. Carefully. Within the room you have been given.
Whether it deserves admiration or contempt is a question for those watching from the outside. Takaichi will do what she can. I will do what I can. Perhaps that is the only honest answer any of us has — not a verdict on history, but a commitment to the room we are standing in. ■
First published on Substack on Mar 23, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/zensho-do-what-can-be-done
カバー画像：The rock garden at Ryōan-ji, Kyoto（CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons／出典）
