Culture keeps Japanese from looting
Posted Mar 16, 2011 05:25:39 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The resilience of the Japanese people is fast becoming part of the story in the wake of last week’s earthquake and tsunami.
Unlike what we have become accustomed to following similar natural disasters in Haiti and, before that, New Orleans, there is no civil unrest in Japan, no anger, no looting.
“They don’t do looting,” David Welch, Chair of Global Security at Waterloo’s Centre for International Governance Innovation, says plainly.
The Japanese are an incredibly civic-minded, orderly, and rule-following people, according to Welch.
“If you lose your wallet on the subway in Tokyo, the odds are that somebody will turn it in to the lost and found with all of the money inside of it,” Welch offers.
Indeed, as stores run low on food and gas stations short on fuel, orderly line-ups have formed daily in the hours before their opening.
But to what do we owe this sense of order, this adherence to rules and disciplined behaviour?
Welch suggests some of the roots can be traced to religion, though he’s reluctant to assign that as the sole source of the behaviour.
“It’s a country with a variety of religious and philosophical traditions, from Buddhist to Shinto, Confuscian and a certain amount of Christian influence,” Welch notes. “But a lot of these older Asian traditions do stress things such as respect for the elderly, respect for ancestors, respect for rules and authority figures. So it’s got that element to it.”
Still, the actual practice of religion is not what it once was in Japan. Welch points out that visits to the temple or shrine are now generally reserved for holiday occasions. He equates Japanese religious observances to those of evangelical Christians in the United States and some parts of Canada.
Instead, Welch attributes the relative calm in Japan with a basic, unconscious level of self–understanding.
“If you’re a Japanese person, you just wouldn’t be able to respect yourself as a person if you went and looted a shop in the middle of a natural disaster,” Welch says.
He believes this orderly and disciplined behaviour also makes the Japanese unique not only in their ability to cope with such adversity but also to rebound from it. Welch cites the second world war as an example, pointing to Japan’s ability to essentially rebuild its major cities within 15 years of a massive aerial bombardment during the war.
That’s not to say, however, that the Japanese way is perfect.
“There are ethnic Japanese who go back to Japan and settle (after growing up elsewhere) and they suffer enormously because everybody expects them to know all of the rules and will be on their case 10, 20, 30, 40 times a day for not conforming to expectation,” Welch explains. It’s incredibly difficult to adjust to that kind of pressure.”
Under current circumstances, though, it seems that ability to conform and that penchant for order and rule-following are the perfect ingredients for coping with incredible tragedy.
