Why aren't they looting in Japan?

[Gryffindorian]

There's always something to steal.

But the Japanese have more class & civility than the rest of the planet combined.

Amen.

Posted by blobvandam:

Isn't it a sad reflection on our society that anyone has to question why they AREN'T looting? And yet over here there was plenty of looting after the floods, and it doesn't at all surprise me.

And this.

 

[The Inquisitor]

Apparently families who are starting the clearup operation are actually recycling. If that doesn't reinforce your faith in humanity nothing will. Incredible mentality.

 

[Kirby]

But the Japanese have more class & civility than the rest of the planet combined.

This. I have known several 1st and 2nd generation Japanese people and they are the most honorable and civil people I have ever met.

If there is any looting going on in Japan, it's being done by non-Japanese people.

 

[Danoz]

We're talking about a nation where people at Starbucks leave their laptops on the table when they go to the bathroom. Stealing isn't unheard of here, but it's exceptionally rare-- and organized crime is known to be a force against it (particularly the kind of looting during a national crisis-- which is selfishly helping yourself at the cost of the community and nation).

 

[scotpens]

There's always something to steal.

But the Japanese have more class & civility than the rest of the planet combined.

True, and yet they produce some of the world’s most violent and downright gross pornography. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure. Just haven’t quite figured out what it is.

 

[C.E. Evans]

^^^
The more polite a society is, the more hardcore their private fantasies are?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

It's a country where even the organised crime syndicates, commonly referred to as the Yakuza, have been reputed to provide disaster relief, for example, after the Kobe earthquake.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

There's always something to steal.

But the Japanese have more class & civility than the rest of the planet combined.

True, and yet they produce some of the world’s most violent and downright gross pornography. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure. Just haven’t quite figured out what it is.

Since they aren't repressed and closed minded about the porn, maybe that frees their minds to be better people.

It's a country where even the organised crime syndicates, commonly referred to as the Yakuza, have been reputed to provide disaster relief, for example, after the Kobe earthquake.

It should embarrass the rest of the world that Japan's mafia are more considerate than most other countries' general populace.

 

[Witterquick]

Somehow we have more guilt and shame over sexuality than the Japanese, while they have more of that over honor and civility.

Sense of entitlement is also overwhelming here. Seems like everyone owes you something because you pay your taxes. Whatever happened to «Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country.»

 

[Count Zero]

I think many of you have a rather dim view of your fellow humans. I certainly wouldn't expect looting here after disasters have struck. Thankfully, we haven't had anything of the magnitude of the Japanese tsunami or even Katrina here but there wasn't any looting after the floods we had here (at least not to a noticeable degree, I can't rule out that some people might have stolen something). And the Elbe/Labe flood also took place in countries where you shouldn't leave anything valuable in your car. Usually, people tend to stick together when faced with disasters.
I also think looting is usually motivated by a stark divide between the rich and the poor. I certainly wouldn't expect it in any country/society where that divide isn't big.

 

[clint g]

For what its worth in the 2003 Blackout and after 9/11 people in NYC behaved themselves very well...which surprised me. I guess we are able to act decently when need be. Stupid shit does seem to happen though from time to time.

 

[Sky]

I left a backpack with my laptop, plane ticket, passport and wallet on a Japanese train once by mistake. I was worried that I'd end up losing at least the laptop and the wallet. The next day, everything was returned to me (after the JR officials had phoned around for a volunteer interpreter and sorted out all kinds of complicated things for me).

 

[Too Much Fun]

I can share a story like that too. I left my gloves (and/or umbrella) on a Japanese train once and was able to get it delivered to the train station closest to my home within a few days. Only in Japan.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

Having spent a fair amount of time there, I can say that Japan is one of the most honest countries on earth. As another poster upthread stated, if there is any looting going on it Japan, it is not being done by the Japanese, that's for sure!

3 years ago while on business in Tokyo (I used to work about 5-6 weeks a year there), I took a long weekend trip to Kyoto by train. Whenever I get off a train in Japan, I always look at my watch, because I am continuously amazed at the fact that trains are ALWAYS on time there - to the minute. So I know that I looked at my watch right before I got off the train in the very large Kyoto train station.

By the time I got to the taxi, my watch was gone - nowhere to be found. So I knew that I'd lost the watch in the train station. Of course, being an American, I immediately despaired of ever seeing that watch again - I didn't even bother reporting it, since here, it's pretty much 'finders keepers' - especially with nice jewelry (and this was a nice watch).

5 days later, back at work in Tokyo, my Japanese co-worker noticed me looking at his computer screen for the time, and commented about my missing watch. I told Goto-san what had happened, and he told me he was certain I would be able to get my watch back. Right then and there, he called the Kyoto train station...and 3-4 min later was told that not only did they have my watch, but they would be happy to Fedex it to me free of charge.

THAT is the kind of culture you are dealing with there, folks. And there was never a single doubt in Goto-san's mind that we would easily find my watch, either. I don't think it ever occurred to him that we wouldn't, because when I told him that in the US, the watch would almost certainly be gone forever, he was really surprised.

What a country!

 

[Witterquick]

Be positive though, guys. We're not that bad. At least it's common around here to leave Fedex/UPS etc packages at doorsteps. I know some countries where people would never do that because they would be gone for sure.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

^ FedEx once left a package in the foyer of my old apartment building, without ringing my doorbell. The same day, a different FedEx driver left a different package outside my door, again without ringing the doorbell or knocking on the door.

The first one vanished without a trace & FedEx reimbursed the seller and I at least got the second one.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

It's a shame to see that the myth of the people of New Orleans and other hard hit areas behaving like murderers and thieves en masse after Katrina persists despite the numerous investigations and reports to the contrary in the years since. It's not as if they didn't suffer enough without also being falsely painted as violent thugs who constantly looted for the hell of it (instead of primarily taking water, food, and other basic needs to survive) and shot at National Guardsmen.

Not only are these myths offensive, they're dangerous, in that the fear of nonexistent chaos and hugely exaggerated criminality often led to a slower response by first responders and the National Guard who sometimes waited until they had overwhelming force before entering an area where people were in desperate need of help.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=eb8_1283271830

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/natural-disasters/2315076

http://www.snopes.com/katrina/personal/utah.asp

http://www.snopes.com/katrina/crime/carjack.asp

http://www.snopes.com/katrina/personal/reststop.asp

Contrary to popular opinion, people are far more likely to exhibit the best qualities of humanity during a disaster rather than the worst; and no, that's not limited to Japan. For every instance of criminal behavior you can find many more where people got together to help others. Have a little faith in people.

Jenji posted this article in TNZ that sums up typical human behavior in the aftermath of tragedy nicely:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-myth-of-the-panicking_b_837440.html

Before the Second World War, the Ministry of War confidently predicted what would happen when London was bombed from the air by Nazi planes. There would be, they warned, "a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population." For every one person injured, there would be dozens who lose their morals or lose the plot. They would howl and they would loot and they would rape. Humans couldn't take it. They would break. They would turn on each other.

The same predictions are made about every disaster -- that once the lid of a tightly policed civilization is knocked off for a second, humans will become beasts. But the opposite is the case.

...

The evidence gathered over centuries of disasters, natural and man-made, is overwhelming. The vast majority of people, when a disaster hits, behave in the aftermath as altruists. They organize spontaneously to save their fellow human beings, to share what they have, and to show kindness. They reveal themselves to be better people than they ever expected. When the social scientist Enrico Quarantelli tried to write a thesis how people descend into chaos and panic after disasters, he concluded: "My God! I can't find any instances of it." On the contrary, he wrote, in disasters "the social order does not break down... Co-operative rather than selfish behavior predominates." The Blitz Spirit wasn't unique to London: it is universal.

On April 18th 1906, San Francisco was leveled by an earthquake. Much of the city collapsed, and the rest began to burn. Anna Amelia Holshouser -- a middle-aged journalist -- was thrown out of bed, and then felt her house collapse all around her. She wandered the streets, and found herself sleeping that night in the park. But then the daze wore off, and she did what almost everybody else did: she began to look after the people around her. She knitted tents out of old clothes to house all the children who had lost their parents. She set up a soup kitchen, and the local shop-keepers handed over the goods for free. Hundreds of people gathered there, as they were gathering around similar people across the city. Anna put up a sign that said: "One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin."

In San Francisco that week, all the city's plumbers began -- unpaid -- to fix the broken pipes, one by one. People organized into committees to put out the fires with buckets and anything they could find. The philosopher William James, who watched, wrote: "Everybody was at work... and the discipline and order were practically perfect." It had been an incredibly divided city, prone to race riots against Chinese immigrants. But not after the disaster struck. San Fransicans handed out food and clothes to astonished Chinese people. A young girl called Dorothy Day watched her mother give away all her clothes to survivors, and wrote: "While the crisis lasted, people loved each other."

...

This is so cross-cultural -- from Haiti to New Zealand -- that it is probably part of an evolved instinct inherent to our species, and it's not hard to see why. We now know that 60,000 years ago, the entire human race was reduced to a single tribe of 2000 human beings wandering the savannahs of Africa. That was it. That was us. If they -- our ancestors -- didn't have a strong impulse to look out for each other in a crisis, you wouldn't be reading this now.

Yet there are a few examples stubbornly fixed in the popular imagination of people reacting to a natural disaster by becoming primal and vicious. Remember the gangs "marauding" through New Orleans, raping and even cannibalizing people in the Super-Dome after Hurricane Katrina? It turns out they didn't exist. Years of journalistic investigations showed them to be racist fantasies. They didn't happen. Yes, there was some "looting" -- which consisted of starving people breaking into closed and abandoned shops for food. Of course human beings can behave atrociously - but the aftermath of a disaster seems to be the time when it is least likely.

...

As Solnit puts it: "If you imagine that the public is a danger, you endanger the public." They are the allies of public safety, not its enemy. After the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979, nearly 150,000 people were evacuated. The government was not in charge. Ordinary people spontaneously coordinated it themselves, without panic.

Even inside the World Trade Center on 9/11, people were remarkably orderly and altruistic. The disabled people who worked in the Towers were not abandoned by panicking colleagues. They were all carried out by their workmates -- including people from floors above where the planes hit.

...

Alongside this impulse to denial and self-destruction, there is something fundamentally good in us. We are humans. We care about each other. We will -- at the most crucial and final moment -- sacrifice for each other, like the technicians who are trying to prevent the nuclear plant melting down, knowing this is probably personal suicide. That's something to hold onto.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Contrary to popular opinion, people are far more likely to exhibit the best qualities of humanity during a disaster rather than the worst; and no, that's not limited to Japan. For every instance of criminal behavior you can find many more where people got together to help others. Have a little faith in people.

 

[RoJoHen]

^ FedEx once left a package in the foyer of my old apartment building, without ringing my doorbell. The same day, a different FedEx driver left a different package outside my door, again without ringing the doorbell or knocking on the door.

The first one vanished without a trace & FedEx reimbursed the seller and I at least got the second one.

I've grown to really hate FedEx, actually. Their service is atrocious compared to UPS.

 

[trampledamage]

Jenji posted this article in TNZ that sums up typical human behavior in the aftermath of tragedy nicely:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-myth-of-the-panicking_b_837440.html

I was reading Johann Hari's article yesterday and I was going to quote it here too. Thanks to you and Jenji for saving me the effort of finding the link


Shocking news, it's human nature in extreme situations to be kind to other people.