The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means, "Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu ," and puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!"
We realized that in America if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we were.
This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.
It seems to me that they asked a bunch of people in the US why they think there is no looting in Japan...
Modern democracy, anyone?
No, they're just different. Better in some ways, worse in others.
If I had to summarize Japan in one word, it would be 'harmony', or 'Wa' (和). People here don't rock the boat, and don't want to upset the status quo. The few that do find themselves more often than not pushed to the bottom of society.
Because of this, kids go through twelve years of indoctrination, where they learn to think, speak, and act like a unit. They emerge from this into a four-year vacation (university) where very little is asked of them, after which it's expected that you will either become a researcher, or put on a suit and become a salaryman.
The Japanese system is great in times of crisis.
It sucks if you want to start a company, or if you've got a startup and want to hire employees.
White friends of mine recall looking for a flat in Japan and being constantly rejected with "you're white, we don't lease to whites", which is not a problem there. There are second-generation Koreans living in Japan who can't get citizenship or the vote.
Japan is an awesome place and the people are very different to a great many other places, but can we keep the cultural cringe to a minimum?
I also find it interesting in the story that there is no mention of Feynman making a fuss about a colleague being stark naked in the same room. Does this mean he's also much more advanced and civilised? Why doesn't Fernman mention this; why is it beyond notice? Why is the maid's lack of reaction that much more noteworthy than his own lack of reaction?
It's interesting that sexual violence strikes such a chord with us westerners, but we think nothing of glamorizing gratuitous, sadistic physical violence. We have a popular television series where the hero is a psychopath serial killer with a heart of gold. In some of the Hannibal Lecter movies, Hannibal was arguably portrayed as a hero and he cannibalized people!
>>There are second-generation Koreans living in Japan who can't get citizenship or the vote.
It's not about discrimination why Koreans are not becoming Japanese citizen, but it is their choices. Because Koreans in Japan have privileges and immunities which people with Japanese citizenship or other nationalities don't have.
I don't think your story represents Japanese people's personality regarding not looting. Read <The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture>.
What do you mean "allow"? Where I live (Europe) there are no restrictions in spas, and people can sit in tubs in any combinations they want...
Politely disregarding an unintentional exposure is rather different from being perved at repeatedly by a sexual predator.
When I came to Tokyo, a lot of foreigners I met who had been living here complained about the uptight nature of Japan. Too rigid, too exclusive, too slow to change.
Before Tokyo, I lived in a very nice part of Brooklyn. I remember I was walking down the street and I saw a man with his child come out of a store. The kid unwrapped his new toy and promptly threw the package onto the curb. I had a flash of anger and was thinking "what's wrong with that guy not correcting his kid?" As I was thinking this, the guy threw his cigarette pack cellophane on the sidewalk. He had different values than me, and I had a dirty street because of it.
In a place like Brooklyn you learn tolerance and how to live with other people's values on a day to day basis. In a place like Tokyo, the system shuns you until you adopt their values. I don't think either is necessarily better but you should be aware of it when you live in Japan and feel left out.
Bangladesh is 98% ethnic Bengali; you can read about their crime here http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1011.html#c... ("U.S. citizens should avoid walking alone after dark, carrying large sums of money, or wearing expensive jewelry").
Lesotho is 99.7 percent Basotho, with an intentional homicide rate seven times higher than the U.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Meanwhile, Singapore, split between large numbers of Chinese, Malays and Indians is one of the safest places in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Singapore). Also safe is Switzerland, which is so ethnically diverse there are three official languages, each widely spoken within the country. (http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1034.html#c...) .
I think the efficiency gained depends on the culture gaining it. Japan has decided that they value safety. In Bangladesh there are probably different assumptions you can make. I don't know what they are and I don't want to speculate because I don't have any experience living there.
edit: also wanted to add... even though Switzerland is ethnically diverse and speaks many different languages, I would still call it a mono-culture. The swiss are also sometimes criticized for being unique in their ways and resistant to change. Culture is not the same as race or language.
When I visited Zurich a couple of years ago I saw things unimaginable for my city, like people leaving their unchained bikes outside their apartment buildings.
Your examples look a lot like shooting a straw man... if he had said monocultures always imply civilization, his argument would be dead right now.
Wait, you live in Tokyo, don't you? (I think we met at one of the meetups)
Everybody locks their bikes here, and even so bycicle theft is common (well, at least compared to the other types of crime). My own bycicle was stolen while I was out of the country for a couple of weeks...
That said, I understand that's not the main point of your comment.
Also, the biggest bike thief is probably the city. ;-)
I've had three bikes stolen since I first came here in 1998---one of them twice! The cops found one of my bikes a year and a half after it was stolen. Within six months it was stolen again!
edit: Just thought of another little anecdote: I was sitting outside roppongi hills eating a bento on a bench when a woman with a kid and a little dog walked by. The dog stopped to poop and when he was finished she quickly scurried away into her high-rise.
My wife and I were flabbergasted. An old woman and her husband walking by gave her the glare and you could see everyone nearby was shocked. About 5 minutes later she came out without the dog but with the kid and a woman from the front desk of her building. They cleaned it up. I guess she didn't have a bag with her and she wanted to drop the dog off and then grab a bag from her house. During the five minutes that it was there, I was thinking how I should have said something.
On numerous occasions I saw things where I thought: wow, in my country (The Netherlands) this would totally get abused, vandalized or stolen. Not that my country is not safe or dirty, just that it is individualized to the extent that people place more value on the well-being of themselves and their stuff than that which they share with others or the public space.
Some examples:
Vending machines are so ubiquitous in Japan that they are an icon in itself. Trash cans, on the other hand, are not. However, you rarely see trash on the streets. Not because there are exorbitant penalties for this, people simply don't do it. People simply drag their trash along until they get to a place with a trash can (maybe their home or office) and dispose of it there.
In crowded areas, there are always plenty of public toilets and they are generally free to use. Not once have I seen one that was dirty or vandalized.
At one point, I found myself in a packed bus that had one of those old-fashioned destination "tickers" made out of a roll of paper with the names of all destinations printed on it. When we still had those buses in my country, they were encased in industry-grade steel enclosures, lest people break the thing or change the destination. In Japan, one could just reach out and do just that, yet nobody did.
In six week of traveling through Japan, visiting dozens of places and most major cities, I saw one wall that had graffiti on it. This was so special that I took a picture of it.
I think it is too easy to "blame" this cultural difference on a "shame" effect, as is often done. I spoke to a lot of Japanese people and my impression is quite different. I would say the major reason why there is so little looting in Japan, is that rather than thinking about their own petty interests first, Japanese consider the quality of the public or shared space to be just as important to their personal well-being. In other words: when western people throw their trash on the floor, they think "Good, I got rid of my trash"; for Japanese people nothing changed, since it is still in "their" space, so they better dispose of it properly.
Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on all things Japanese. I was just there for six weeks and this is my impression, I might very well be totally wrong :)
Regarding the trash, there's two forces at work. One is that there's a rich naturalist tradition here. Japanese love nature, which is why you see so many people enjoying the parks here. Littering goes against that tradition, and the second force at work is that Japanese people really don't buck tradition.
Agree with the rest though.
(edit: "plenty" is relative, in this case of course)
More pertinent example: Several Japanese vending machine companies build into their machines backdoors to dispence products for free in the case of an emergency http://inventorspot.com/articles/vending_machines_japan_offe...
Compare this to the vending machine in the Computer Science department that is always being probed for new attack vectors to allow free products. On the bright side, we do get the latest machines first ;)
In the US, I imagine folks would just reuse the axe provided with the fire extinguisher, and not hassle over a key in a time of emergency.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEED71131F...
I've found wallets and cell phones, and tracked down the owners, too.
The US isn't the den of iniquity breathless journos like to pretend it is.
I attribute it to a sense of basic human decency that nearly everyone manages to maintain if one isn't suffering from crushing poverty.
There's certainly pros and cons to the Japanese culture, as with any culture I suppose. The attitude that displays its self in the preservation of the the vending machine is one of the pros. But along with it seems to comes an immensely strong pressure to conform and sacrifice. This is the country that produced the Kamikaze[1] and took ritual suicide almost to the level of an art form.
1. I visited the Chiran Peace Museum (http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/museums/chiran/inde...) while I was in Japan, I found it fascinating to learn of the history of the Kamikaze and see all the paraphernalia on show. I had only ever seen the classic footage of the Kamikaze flying into US ships. I did not know that they also had defensive Kamikaze who would protect Japanese cities by flying into enemy bombers and also small Kamikaze speed boats.
What would be the challenge or rule-breaking here? If you can just do it, there's no accomplishment. The more you guard something the more valuable breaking it becomes. Reminds me of the old story of a mainframe operator who, having grown a frustration against users hacking the system to have it shutdown, simply added a suid script accessible to everyone that shut down the machine. The machine stayed online from that point on.
Same reason it's unthinkable for a Japanese to take fruit or berries hanging outside of someone's yard, even when it's falling off the branch and rotting on the ground, and yet they'd hardly think twice in their downtown drunken stupor to steal a bicycle to get them home after the trains had shut down for the night.
They have different social norms there.
Just the fruit on that branch, though.
I don't know how it works specifically, but I'm sure there would be better ways than to vandalize the machines in order to obtain the contents.
If you need water, Suntory vending machines have emergency
levers beneath a sticker on the upper-right corners. Pull
the sticker off, pull the lever firmly and you’ll get free
drinks.Not that someone wouldn't have eventually stolen it though.
Let's be careful with the orientalism. The suicide rate[1][2] is one thing that personally bothers me.
Japan is fundamentally different from the West, and this has its advantages and disadvantages.
[1]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_count...
[2]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_OECD_...
OTOH, every school girl gets felt up on the train.
As a slightly amusing story, a very Japanese-looking American ladyfriend of mine used to live here. She's ex-military, and more than a bit of a redneck, but you couldn't tell by just looking at her.
So, one day she's on the train, and some guy cops a feel. Women here more often than not don't react to it, but ex-Navy chicks are a different story.
Mr. Pervert got decked, cursed out in English, and arrested at the next station.
That said, the most likely and annoying thing to happen to your bicycle in Japan is that the parking police will steal it if you park near a crowded place (eg. any train station) and place it in some storage facility far away from where you live, where you then have to go by bus to pick up your bicycle and cycle home. This happened to me at least 3 times..
By contrast, the Japanese are perhaps 3,000 years old as a distinct ethnic group on the island.
There are just a lot fewer poor people in Japan. So if your house got leveled by the tsunami, you can go to your friends, relatives, family, etc for a little help because they aren't half impoverished already.
I don't mean to demean the theory regarding social differences. I'm sure it's very true that society's standards and everyone's individual respect for shared property play crucial roles in the lack of looting. But I'm willing to bet that economic factors made a difference too.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Japan: .249
US: .408
Haiti: .592
Aside from media exaggeration of looting, which is almost instant after a disaster where there are significant numbers of black people. Pretty much, the mirror image of this post. Google "looting in Japan" if you want to take a sample of the most racist invective on the internet. I mean, if the Japanese have honor in their blood...
when you feel like you’re on your own, when you feel abandoned and the only one who you can depend on is you, then yes, you’re going to do what you have to do to survive. This has been seen around the world in many countries and cultures. The big difference in postwar modern Japan is that people are confident that help is on the way.
...
Here’s where you see a glaring cultural difference: virtually nobody in contemporary Japan has this kind of contempt for their fellow countrymen. Yet prewar Japan was deeply divided along class lines, and when disaster happened and the poor starved and burned, neither the government nor the upper classes could be bothered to give a shit. Currently in Japan there are calls for the government to scrap proposed tax cuts and use the money for relief efforts. Can you imagine the same happening in the US?
No, we would have both tax cuts and relief efforts funded by deficit spending. That's something you can do when your debt to GDP ratio is 60% and when the world considers your bonds to be risk free.
It's trickier for Japan to do that - their debt to GDP ratio is 200% already (second only to Zimbabwe).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_pub...
Still, why has no one mentioned the fact that there is nothing left to loot in the areas most effected?
> Honor is something we can't describe but japanese people carry it in their blood.
I remember a news program I was watching in our Japanese class in, uh, probably 1992. A couple of policemen were interviewing a distraught convenience-store clerk who had just been robbed.
"Did he look blue-collar, or white-collar, or what?"
"He just looked like a normal person! But obviously he wasn't, because he robbed the store!"
Our whole class (this was in the US) burst out laughing. The idea that, in order to commit armed robbery, a person would have to have some kind of mental abnormality — it was so alien to us as to be comical. That idea used to exist in US culture; Lombroso's theories used to be popular, eugenic policies were often justified on the basis that "morons" were likely to be criminals, and the word "crook" was a neat little package wrapping up the idea of mental abnormality causing lawbreaking. Much of Clarence Darrow's career was spent defending the most abhorrent criminals on the basis that their criminality was beyond their control, although not merely because of mental defects.
But, at least since the 1970s, an alternative conception of law and lawbreaking has been popular in the US — perhaps due to the absurd drug war, perhaps due to the discovery of abuses like the Tuskegee experiment, J. Edgar Hoover's campaigns of persecution against national heroes like MLK, and government deceptions about Vietnam and the dangers of fallout from open-air nuclear testing, perhaps due to the increasing cultural influence of Hollywood, or perhaps simply due to the failure of prosperity to be widely shared.
Whatever the cause, though, people from the US almost universally think of lawbreaking as a common and often harmless activity, not something limited to the mentally handicapped or partially insane — something that many people would do if the law weren't restraining them.
Also, in Japan, if you deviate from social norms, everyone will pressure you to conform. In the US, it's usually just the police.
Therefore the difference in looting behavior is unsurprising. I hypothesize that if you look back to 1955, you'll find natural disasters in the US with almost no looting, too.
Here in Argentina, things are even more American than in the US.
That wasn't particularly the case during the great Hanshin EQ of 1995. I think they did try to improve gov't response to disasters since then. So, yes, I believe they have faith in the gov't, but it's not because of a stellar record.
As for 'steering wheel'... a bike that unusual is asking to be stolen by a curious enthusiast :)
Here is why there is no looting in Japan. Across the world -- in the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, South Africa and any country where they live side by side -- people of primarily Northeast Asian descent tend to commit crime at lower rates than people of primarily European descent, who in turn tend to commit crime at lower rates than people of primarily sub-Saharan African descent.
You can google the various crime stats if you aren't aware of this. Here are the California state statistics:
http://stats.doj.ca.gov/cjsc_stats/prof09/00/22.htm
Divide that by California population totals to get the rank ordering of violent crime rates by population.
You can also look at table 43 of the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, which is fine for establishing the black/Asian violent crime ratio, but which lumps Hispanics in with whites, inflating the apparent white violent crime rate.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_43.html
Similar stats can be obtained for other countries with a bit of googling. Now, the absolute magnitudes do change (1), which one could legitimately ascribe to the local culture. But the trend is very consistent.
There isn't a country across the world that I'm aware of in which people of primarily sub-Saharan African descent commit crime at a lower rate (or have higher educational levels, incomes, and so on) than people of Northeast Asian descent. Interested in counterexamples, but this appears to be a very consistent pattern.
Obviously there are other factors as well. But the probability of looting seems to be proportional to a group's propensity to disorganized violence (e.g. murder, rape, robbery) and inversely proportional to their ability to commit organized violence (e.g. military actions).
No doubt this post is extraordinarily blasphemous. But someone had to say what a good fraction of the rest of the world is thinking.
(1) Cultural variation seems to shift magnitudes but not rank ordering. That is, it does not appear to be a large enough factor to make Northeast Asian descent individuals in country X commit more crime than sub-Saharan African descent individuals in country Y. At least, I couldn't find any examples of this for any (X, Y) pair in the world, but perhaps you can.
Their primary interest lies in the financial side of mizu-shobai type establishments, gambling, and money laundering.
They also offer thug-work-for-hire, which is helpful when the police aren't, but you've got to be careful dealing with them because there tend to be hidden costs to their "help".
* whoops. replied at the wrong level :P
'Professor Pflugfelder evidently needs to study Japanese history a little better because after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 there was widespread looting and rioting, and during the firebombings of WWII looting was a common practice. If these are deep cultural roots, they only go back about two generations'
http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-rea...
Comparing the situation to here in Australia where we had floods and hurricanes, it's the same: we know that the government will look after us.
So I agree with him/her. It's got nothing to do with culture/etc. Because if you take away all the efforts the government and international community are making, then I bet the situation in Japan would be totally different.
Yeah, one of those things is not like the others sigh.
where did you get the idea that no one in Iowa got robbed during the floods?
As a matter of full disclosure, I think I should tell you that I lived there at the time of the flood and had to listen to my neighbor go on and on about what he was dealing with. Neighbor was a cop.
If you don't consider Japan part of the "civilized world" you have probably not updated your social mores since WW2 and should reconsider that before commenting further.
There are also practical considerations at play. The damage is so severe that there's not much left to loot, and there's and nowhere for looters to keep what they steal.
The article makes comparisons with Haiti and Katrina, but the damage in Japan is more total than either of these. In many towns there is literally nothing left.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366395/Japan-tsunam...
It's very, very hard to form a new group of friends, if you have no existing connections to leverage.
And we did, they guy thanked us like a million times. We felt the most honorable people on earth. Honor is something we can't describe but japanese people carry it in their blood.
Same thing happened to us in a Spanish clothing shop. Wife went out with some blouse she tried and somehow this didn't trip that alarm at the door. While groceries shopping nearby we notice the blouse.
>And we did, they guy thanked us like a million times. We felt the most honorable people on earth.
We go return the blouse, the alarm starts while we enter then we have to fiddle explaining in half-Spanish what we meant to do.
We end up paying for the damn blouse, with the guard next to us but we don't get a receipt because that's company policy (I'd guess a form of punishment so you couldn't return the item).
In the end we both regretted returning it and kinda ruined the whole evening.
Not sure if this is a valid Spanish/European-Japanese comparison but it certainly is a corporate versus humane shop comparison.
We honestly have a long way to go.
The article mentions UK floods, Chile and Haiti earthquakes, and Katrina. The UK, Chile, Haiti and US are all 'Individual at the Center' societies. By contrast, Japan is not so 'Individualist' a society.
You may have less looting in a place like Japan after a natural disaster of this scale. However, if there is ever say ... oh ... a recession, you will have 100,000,000 people standing around waiting for the authorities to 'fix it'. You will observe far fewer people launching startups for instance, than you would in similar recessionary environment in say ... Chile.
Just wanted to make sure everyone realized that 'it cuts both ways' as it were. All societies have strengths and weaknesses. In fact, as in this case, the strength of any society usually is its weakness.
Photos of empty store shelves are from areas outside the disaster zone where people are preparing for a possible radiation disaster where they would be unable to go out of their homes for days. That's not a situation that is conductive to looting.
"We have friends over there and what info we are getting is that they are having to deal with heartache and problems of Biblical proportions. If it weren't for those citizens who are in the older age group who know what to do in desperate times there would be more problems. The older people are self reliant and remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki...they know how to share with each other and help each other in the worst of times. Panic has not gripped them as it would a lot of other countries...look at Haiti..look at other regions where something less than this has taken hold and how they react."
I think the difference is that when people believe the world is watching and that help is coming (ie September 11th, this earthquake) they maintain their composure. People destroy and loot when they feel that the world has forgotten them and that help is not coming. During Hurricane Katrina the government was quite slow to respond. In Haiti it took nearly two days to reach twitter/the public and trigger international relief. Almost nobody was there to hold them over until then, and chaos happened. I think this is quite rational: if you felt the world had ended and that it was not going to be made better, you'd probably act like an animal and only think of yourself too.
Both of these disasterous events had extremely little looting. Both of these events saw strong outpourings of community spirit and solidarity, with lots of volunteering and food drops. It's not something that's mysteriously Japanese.
This is important because the article paints this as a Japan vs the World thing by roping in the UK, Chile and Haiti.
The article lists the following as reasons why there is little looting in Japan: - buddhism and shinto - honour and dignity - conformity and consensus - national pride - high discipline - they return your lost wallet - more highly evolved race (!) Few of these are attributes that random interviewees would say are characteristics of Australians or New Zealanders
The Japanese are a unique culture and credit needs be given where due, but we need to stop talking about them as if they're magical and mysterious, beyond mortal ken just like Tolkein's elves.
In any instance, it takes a few disgruntled, enterprising people to start a riot or mass vandalism. Particularly the disaffected.
Racial homogeneity can only go so far to explain things, but Japan is a country where people generally look out for one another. When I was there, people were so polite that I thought these people were feigning politeness. I remembered walking out of a food stall when the head waiter would call out that a customer is leaving, and all the wait staff would turn around and bow and ask us to come again. It was simply amazing. I guess by learning to be polite even when you are tired, stressed, you become very good at being outwardly calm and it helps to maintain social order.
Incidentally, I remembered the caning incident where a young expat in Singapore spray painted cars and got several strokes of cane as a punishment. Wanton destruction is an alien concept to me when I grew up in Asia. A lot of vandalism with spray painting were simply copy cats importing an unwanted culture.
And, interestingly, everyone would expect the students at a state college or better to behave just like the Japanese.
Really, the fact that there is such widespread poverty, thuggery, and low educational levels in the US is just plain embarrassing. That you can't trust the people you live around is the weird thing, not that you can.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262162/people-want-know...
I'm pretty sure it's not honor. Middle Eastern cultures also put plenty of emphasis on honor and dignity, but there are many poor pockets of society that simply ignore these values during times of crises.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330680
They tell their experiences following the earthquake. These snippets of what moved them and touched them during these very trying times are heart-warming.
From the tweets you can see the spirit of "in it together".
There are notable exceptions, of course, but for the most part people can do a pretty good job of policing themselves.
I'd expect the same from anywhere.
1) I left a noodle restaurant and left a little too much for the bill. The owner ran me down on the street and handed me the change. She would not accept it as a tip even after I begged her to keep it for her honesty.
2) A policeman on foot simply has to waive an orange baton at you if you were speeding. Offenders just pulled over.
There is much to admire about Japanese culture. Really what it comes down to is, the USA is a ME-first culture. Japan is an US-first culture. I always say the way to get back at Japan and most of Asia is to westernize them.
"Criminals tend to be young males who are muscular rather than thin, and who have lower-than-average IQs and impulsive, "now"-oriented personalities, which make planning or even thinking about the future difficult."
If you already have about the same amount of stuff as everyone else, stealing seems silly.
Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic has articles linking to cases of looting, fraud, child molestation and hoarding.
The Japanese government itself just isn't very forthright with regards to collecting and releasing information about victims and events.
There is no theft, and litigation is infrequent. In case of violations of the law, the light offender loses his wife and children by confiscation; as for the grave offender, the members of his household and also his kinsmen are exterminated.
