Japan-Lebanon: Between the Paradox of Rising From the Ruins of Defeat and the Trap of Perpetual Collapse

I was deeply moved while watching the Netflix series Antarctica, and I found myself wondering whether we in Lebanon could achieve something similar to what happened in Japan in 1950, or whether our situation is simply hopeless.

The series revolves around the model embodied by the Japanese expedition to Antarctica in the 1950s, illustrating how a scientific and technical project can become a vehicle for rebuilding national sentiment in the aftermath of occupation and defeat.

Emerging from the Second World War, Japan did not confine itself to rebuilding its physical infrastructure. It also sought to reconstruct its collective narrative and its image in the world by shifting the basis of legitimacy from the military sphere to the scientific and civil sphere. The expedition played a symbolic role in this transformation, as it was presented as evidence of the Japanese nation’s ability to rise again and reintegrate into the international community through peaceful means.

What is striking about this experience is that launching the expedition was not merely an administrative or scientific decision. It was, above all, a profoundly political and symbolic act, framed by a public discourse that linked scientific progress to the restoration of national dignity. Educational institutions and the media played a central role in this process through campaigns of emotional and educational mobilization that simplified the project and presented it as a collective human adventure capable of engaging different segments of society and raising the funding required for the expedition at a time when the state’s resources were limited.

This is precisely where the remarkable role played by the mobilization of children becomes apparent. Elements of the polar environment, such as penguins and sled dogs, the huskies, were turned into emotional and educational vehicles that made the project accessible to the public imagination and created an emotional bond between individuals and the expedition. This symbolic use of animals was far from incidental. It was an effective way of turning a complex project into a story that people could understand and identify with, particularly younger generations.

In this sense, popular donations were not merely a source of funding. They also became a means of fostering a sense of belonging, as the very act of donating helped reinforce the feeling of participating in a shared national achievement.

This brings us to what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities,” in which the nation takes shape through shared narratives that give individuals the sense that they belong to an entity larger than their own personal experiences. It also falls within what Eric Hobsbawm described as “the invention of tradition,” whereby rituals and practices are constructed in ways that lend legitimacy to a new form of patriotism.

According to Axel Honneth, the nation-state is not built through laws and constitutions alone, which in Lebanon lose their function and effectiveness because of corruption. It is also built through what he calls a “shared ethical life.” Such a life can only take shape when citizens share “practices, living traditions and common projects” that foster solidarity and mutual recognition, making them feel that their individual freedom is connected to the freedom of others and to the success of the community as a whole. This is precisely what Lebanon lacks today, in the absence of any common project capable of redefining national identity beyond the confines of sectarianism and corruption.

Yet the success of the Japanese experience was not the result of discourse alone. It rested on specific structural conditions.

The first was the existence of a cohesive state capable, despite defeat, of planning, executing its policies and managing its resources. The second was the presence of political and administrative elites that understood the need to move from a militarized nationalism toward a form of civil and scientific legitimacy, and sought to entrench this transformation through concrete projects. The third condition, and perhaps the most important, was the level of public trust in institutions, which enabled citizens to believe that their material or symbolic contributions would genuinely be used in the service of the common good.

Without this trust, any attempt at popular mobilization loses its meaning and is reduced to little more than a formal exercise.

When I considered launching a similar fundraising campaign in Lebanon to help the people of the South, contribute to reconstruction and prevent the Shiite tandem from exploiting the occasion, a reality radically different from Japan’s became apparent.

Lebanon’s current reality stands as the structural opposite of the Japanese experience. Rather than serving as a unifying framework, the state has become an arena of competition between sectarian forces and patronage networks, undermining its ability to launch any common national project. The collapse of trust between citizens and institutions also preempts any possibility of broad-based public fundraising, since public resources are widely perceived as vulnerable to plunder or to being diverted toward factional interests.

Added to this is the coexistence of competing narratives about the very meaning of Lebanon as a political entity, between the logic of “resistance” and that of “sovereignty,” as well as conflicting regional and international allegiances. This prevents the emergence of a “shared narrative” on which collective mobilization could be built.

In this context, reconstruction and aid mechanisms become instruments for reproducing political allegiances. This is evident in the dominance of clientelist institutions over the distribution of resources, reinforcing dependency rather than building a system of equal citizenship.

The purpose of this comparison, therefore, is not to replicate the Japanese model. Rather, it is to expose what is missing in the Lebanese case: a symbolic and institutional framework capable of transforming an economic act into an act of belonging.

The problem lies not only in the scarcity of resources, but also in the inability to create a shared sense of purpose strong enough to make individuals willing to contribute voluntarily to a project that transcends their divisions.

Accordingly, any initiative aimed at financing reconstruction in Lebanon will remain limited in its impact unless it is accompanied by the rebuilding of trust, the formulation of a shared national narrative, and the establishment of transparent mechanisms that sever the link between resource allocation and clientelist practices.

In short: freeing the state from its occupiers.

Without that, the contrast between the two experiences will remain the expression of profound differences in the structure of the state, the nature of its elites, and the conditions under which a shared national sense of purpose can emerge.