Min Jin Lee, reporting nearly a year after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami:

There are two sayings in Japan for when bad things happen: shikata ga nai, an idiom that means “it can’t be helped”; and gambaru, a verb translated as “to persevere against adversity.” When life doesn’t go your way — a job loss, illness or a romantic failure — your friend is likely to say, “Sho ga nai” (a variation of shikata ga nai), it’s out of your control. If you need a boost before an exam or when your favorite team is losing, you hear “gambatte,” you can do it.
Several survivors shown here, their faces carved deeply like woodblocks, withstood wars, rationing, atomic bombs, postwar reconstructions, economic booms and busts and now an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. From the outside, it looks as if the Japanese accept all things with equanimity. But we cannot know if inside, the survivors want to spit at another well-intended sho ga nai.

See the associated slideshow, Faces of the Tsunami.