The recent Japanese catastrophe has shone a spotlight on the country’s apparently unique social structure.
Unlike many other situations of natural disaster elsewhere, no looting or rioting has followed to compound the catastrophe — and this has tremendously 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 additional sympathy from the world.
As can be imagined, articles have shown up attempting to describe the phenomenon of people who continue being law-abiding citizens regardless of being deprived of not simply creature comforts but everything they own and even of loved ones.
Police stations all along the coast are stuffed to capacity with all the personal household safes of sufferers which have washed back to terrain 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 technologically advanced one, and one that is arguably uniquely homogenous one of many leading industrialized societies of which it is a member.
Obviously household safes and other belongings have been returned or at least remaining unmolested!
It figures, argue such people, because there is no inducement to loot and riot when the country as one offers so many resources to provide succor.
Others remember 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 isn’t what a Japanese person does, plain and simple.
This side of the discussion notes that no matter how rich the society, individual victims continue to suffer – yet they are doing so patiently, in a manner uniquely Japanese.
