On March 13, 2011, Haruhiko Kuroda stared out the window as our Boeing 777 descended toward a Tokyo in chaos, visibly anxious about what we might encounter. It was two days after the near-cataclysmic earthquake struck northeastern Japan and precipitated a nuclear meltdown. I was in the Philippines when as many as 20,000 died, and grabbed the first Tokyo-bound flight that was allowed to land. Kuroda, then president of the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, sat across from me on the near-empty flight. We remarked on the obvious irony of us rushing to a city hundreds of thousands were fleeing. "I'm returning to do what I can to help," he said.

Two years later, Kuroda returned again to helm the Bank of Japan. But my four-hour flight with him was stuck in my mind as Japan commemorated the fifth anniversary of that record trembler. As Kuroda and I chatted about the devastation in Tohoku and the unfolding Fukushima crisis, my fingers were clicking away on what days later would be Bloomberg BusinessWeek's cover story, "Crisis in Japan."

In it, I tried to accentuate the positive, exploring how March 11, 2011, could have been a turning point for Tokyo's sclerotic political system (a possibility Kuroda also raised). Giant Japanese quakes tended to catalyze major change: in 1855, 1923 and 1995. The idea 3/11, which triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, might be transformative filled Malcolm Gladwell's head, too. "The only time you can get things done is in moments of genuine crisis and catastrophes — there's a small opportunity to do an extraordinary amount," the author of "The Tipping Point" observed. "Japan, a country whose politics were in deadlock and sluggish for many, many years, I hope they can seize this moment and accomplish a lot."