I lived in Japan for two years, and studied the language, and it was amazing how that sentence always brought any discussion to a conclusion.

Grammatically, its negation would be "Shikata ga aru", but I never heard this said once.

Maybe that negation would be too obviously related to the idiom. There are other ways to say there is a way; e.g. instead of shikata, there is houhou： 方法　（方法がある）.

The counter-idiom, if you will, to "nothing can be done" might be "where there is a will, there is a way":

意志のあるところには方法がある。

If someone says しょうがない　or しかたがない, and you don't agree, that might be the thing.

> The counter-idiom, if you will, to "nothing can be done" might be "where there is a will, there is a way":

I've always thought of the counter-idiom as being やればできる (yareba dekiru) -- "you can do it if you try."

Sounds like it's a thought-terminating cliche- of which we have many in English.

well, that's just the way it goes.

"It's God's will."

English has an equivalent: "it is what it is". It also stops solution-seeking dead in its tracks. A hateful little phrase.

That's educational. Had a boss who normally on an even keel then someone said "it is what it is" to him and he got very, very angry. It was like someone kicked him. He said that was just unacceptable and we would find a solution / work around. I guess I now know the other half of the story.

Ah, this must be the Japanese equivalent of the Chinese "mei banfa" (没办法), probably the national slogan. Oh, they are building a dam and you need to move your house twenty metres up the hill? "Mei banfa".

Wow, I knew this phrase from the Metasploit encoder, but never knew that it had such deep cultural meaning!