Japanese masochism is rooted in this tendency to give oneself up to one's perceived fate or destiny. It has nothing to do with belief in a particular religious deity but springs, rather, from a vague sense of letting oneself go with the inexorable flow of events because that is one's fate. The Chinese believe that one must do all that one can as a human being and then await the mandate of heaven, but not the Japanese. This mind-set has not changed. In other words, instead of doing something themselves, they wait for someone to do it for them.
Japan is prone to unpredictable natural disasters.
If people had regarded the earthquake not as the hand of fate but as something that might well befall them too, I suspect that relief efforts would have been much more energetic. I do not say that there has been absolutely no change in this Japanese psychology. People have been expressing anxiety about the state of Japanese education for quite some time. Most worries used to be framed in terms of what would become of Japanese education. This is hardly a dramatic change, though.