How The Disaster In Japan Affected Safes
The recent Japanese disaster has shone a spotlight on the country’s seemingly unique social structure.
Unlike many other situations of natural disaster elsewhere, no looting or rioting has followed to compound the tragedy — 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 trying to reveal the phenomenon of people who continue to be 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 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 stuck under rubble, refusing to leave!
Much has been written both for and against the “Japanese-spirit interpretation” of events.
On one side, people observe that the country is a wealthy one, a computer advanced one, and one that is arguably uniquely homogenous among the leading industrialized societies of which it is a member.
Certainly household safes and other belongings have been returned or at least left unmolested!
It figures, argue such people, because there is no motivation to loot and riot when the country all together offers so many resources to provide succor.
Others observe 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’s not what a Japanese person does, plain and simple.
This side of the argument notes that no matter how rich the society, individual victims continue to suffer – yet they generally do so patiently, in a manner uniquely Japanese.