gofer articles

The recent Japanese devastation has shone a spotlight on the country’s seemingly unique social structure.
Unlike many other circumstances of natural disaster elsewhere, no looting or rioting has followed to compound the misfortune — and this has greatly 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 seeking to explain the phenomenon of people who remain 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 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 trapped under rubble, refusing 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 probably 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 still 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 note that the spirit of Japan is such that rules are noticed given that they are rules – Japanese rules – and one is Japanese.
Safes are not broken into because that’s not what a Japanese person does, in basic terms.
This side of the debate notes that no matter how rich the society, individual victims still suffer – yet they generally do so patiently, in a manner uniquely Japanese.