Gaman: Endurance, Dignity, and the Limits of Both

In the days after the tsunami of March 2011, foreign journalists in northeastern Japan kept reporting the same thing with a kind of astonishment: the queues. People who had lost their houses stood in orderly lines for water and rice. Nobody pushed. Shops that still had stock did not raise prices. In evacuation shelters, families laid out their blankets in neat rectangles and swept the floor around them. The word the reporters reached for, once someone told them it, was gaman (我慢).

It is usually translated as endurance, or perseverance, or "bearing the unbearable with patience and dignity" — that last phrase is the one that went around the world. All are right. None of them explain why gaman is also, inside Japan, one of the most argued-about words in the language.

A Buddhist word turned inside out

The characters mean, roughly, "self" (我) and "pride" or "arrogance" (慢), and in the Buddhist texts the word came from, gaman was a fault — one of the seven kinds of conceit, the clinging to the self that causes suffering. Over centuries the meaning inverted. To gaman came to mean holding the self in check: not asserting it, not indulging it, keeping it quiet under pressure. The arrogance became the discipline of refusing to be arrogant.

It is a word children hear constantly. Gaman shinasai — endure it, hold on, don't complain — when the injection hurts, when the walk is long, when the meal is not what they wanted. It is a word adults use of themselves with a kind of grim pride, and of others with respect. To be gaman-zuyoi, strong in gaman, is a compliment. To lack it is to be wagamama — selfish, childish, the opposite of an adult.

What it built

There is no honest account of modern Japan that leaves gaman out.

It is in the reconstruction after 1945, when a starving, bombed country rebuilt its cities and its industry through two decades of overwork, low wages, and deferred everything. It is in the lifetime employment system, in which a worker gamaned through bad postings, long hours, and transfers away from family in exchange for security. It is in the trains that run on time because ten thousand people are quietly enduring a commute that would provoke riots elsewhere.

It is in the disaster response, which is the face of gaman the world admires. Japan sits on four tectonic plates and has always known that the ground can move. A culture that expects catastrophe develops, over centuries, a way of meeting it — and the way is gaman: hold, endure, do not add to the disorder, rebuild.

And it is in the everyday courtesies that visitors find so restful: the silence on trains, the patience in queues, the absence of public complaint. Much of what feels like politeness in Japan is people gamaning on your behalf.

What it costs

The word has a shadow, and Japanese people are far more willing to discuss it than the admiring foreign coverage suggests.

Gaman silences. A culture that praises endurance produces people who endure things they should not: abusive bosses, impossible hours, illness that goes untreated, grief that goes unspoken. The word karōshi, death from overwork, exists because gaman has an outer limit and the body reaches it before the person admits to it.

Gaman protects the wrong people. In institutions, the person who endures quietly is more convenient than the person who objects, and so gaman becomes something demanded rather than chosen — by employers of workers, by families of daughters-in-law, by the system of everyone in it. The queues after the tsunami were dignified. So was the silence, for years afterward, of people who had been told to gaman their doubts about the nuclear plant.

And gaman can look, from outside, like consent. The foreigner who admires the patient queue may not see the person in it who has not eaten since yesterday and will not say so.

The feminist critique, the labour critique, and the mental-health critique of gaman all say roughly the same thing: that a virtue which asks people to be quiet about suffering is a virtue that is very useful to whoever is causing it.

Gaman and its cousins

It helps to distinguish gaman from the words it is often confused with.

Ganbaru is effort — to try hard, to give it your all. Ganbatte! is what you shout at a runner. Gaman is not effort; it is holding. You ganbaru toward something. You gaman through something.

Shōganai — "it can't be helped" — is acceptance of what cannot be changed. Gaman is the discipline of living with it afterward. Shōganai is the thought; gaman is the posture.

And nintai, which also means patience, is calmer and more Buddhist — forbearance, waiting out a storm. Gaman has teeth. There is a clenched jaw in it.

A visitor's view

For someone from a culture that treats complaint as healthy and endurance as slightly suspect, gaman is instructive in both directions.

There are things worth learning. The Japanese capacity to be uncomfortable without making it everyone else's problem is a real social good; it is why public space in Japan is so livable. The cold, the wait, the crowded train, the bad meal — most of these are not injustices, and a person who can gaman them is easier to be around and probably happier. Not every discomfort deserves a voice.

And there is the warning. Gaman is for weather, not for wounds. It is the right response to an earthquake and the wrong one to an abuser, and the skill is in telling the two apart — which Japanese culture, for all its strength in the first, has often been poor at. A person who can endure anything will, sooner or later, endure something they should have refused.

The queue

I think about a woman I saw in a photograph from 2011, standing in a line for water in a coastal town that no longer existed, holding a child's hand. She was not crying. She was waiting her turn.

That is gaman, and it is beautiful, and it should be honoured. And somewhere behind it is the question the word never asks on its own: how long, and for whom, and who decided. Japan has spent the years since asking that question of itself, out loud, more than it used to. That, too, is a kind of strength.