Why no looting in Japan?

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.

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/...

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.

'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...

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 :)

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.

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?

Yeah, one of those things is not like the others sigh.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

We honestly have a long way to go.

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.

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.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262162/people-want-know...

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.

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.