Safes In Japan
The recent Japanese disaster has shone a spotlight on the country’s relatively unique social structure.
Unlike many other situations of natural disaster elsewhere, no looting or rioting has followed to compound the misfortune — and this has significantly impressed many a non-Japanese observer.
From the patient orderly lines to the return of valuables, “yamoto-damashii,” or the Japanese spirit, has elicited admiration and further sympathy from the world.
As can be imagined, articles have appeared attempting to reveal the phenomenon of people who continue being law-abiding citizens even with being deprived of not just creature comforts but everything they own and even of loved ones.
Police stations all along the coast are loaded to capacity with all the personal household safes of persons which have washed back to ground or been recovered from the rubble by rescue workers.
Then there is the seemingly suicidal heroism and self-sacrifice of many nuclear power plant employees.
Even animals have displayed yamoto-damashii: a dog made worldwide headlines for standing by another dog caught under rubble, declining to leave!
Much has been written both for and against the “Japanese-spirit interpretation” of events.
On one side, people remember that the country is a wealthy one, a computer advanced one, and one that is perhaps uniquely homogenous among the leading industrialized societies of which it is a member.
Of course household safes and other belongings have been returned or at least remaining unmolested!
It figures, argue such people, because there is no motivation to loot and riot when the country as one offers so many resources to provide succor.
Others note that the spirit of Japan is such that rules are noticed simply because they are rules – Japanese rules – and one is Japanese.
Safes are not broken into because that is not what a Japanese person does, plain and simple.
This side of the argument notes that no matter how rich the society, individual victims still suffer – yet they are doing so patiently, in a manner uniquely Japanese.