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Why no looting in Japan?

• jules 16y ago
  A guy in my class parked a shiny bike not locked for a month. After a month when he came back it was still there. The chances of this happening in Amsterdam are very slim. Even if you only lock your bike to something with a big chain somebody with a metal cutter will come and get it if the bike is shiny. And better lock both of your wheels and the frame through the chain or else you end up with a bike without wheels. Unfortunately the steering wheel and saddle are not so easily locked.
  • vacri 16y ago
    The saddle is just as easily locked - get a light chain and a padlock, wrap it around one of the underwires of your saddle. As for 'steering wheel'... a bike that unusual is asking to be stolen by a curious enthusiast :)
    • jules 16y ago
      My bike doesn't have this, although my racing bike does. Unfortunately racing bikes as made in such a way that you can detach parts easily in a couple of seconds...so it's really necessary to bring two locks or one very long one to lock everything.
• kstenerud 16y ago
  Same reason nobody vandalizes vending machines, even when they're quite literally in the middle of nowhere along the side of an unfrequented road in the countryside. 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.
  • StavrosK 16y ago
    I don't know about other countries, but in Greece the fruit that's in your garden (when a branch of the neighbour's tree extends there) belongs to you, and fruit on the branch in the street is public property. Just the fruit on that branch, though.
    • eru 16y ago
      Should be similar in Germany.
  • kmfrk 16y ago
    Japanese vending machines also have a safety lever (of sorts) that makes all the beverages free, in the event of a catastrophe. 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.
    • donw 16y ago
      The thought process is probably more like: Why would you vandalize the machine? All of the people that use this machine would be upset. I don't want to upset all those people.
    • huhtenberg 16y ago
      I don't know if this is true, but this was making rounds today: 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.
    • stevenveltema 16y ago
      don't know about a lever, but practically all vending machines have a phone it them that can call home about being short on drinks etc. There are also specific machines that have water, speakers, and a screen in addition to the usual fizzy drinks that the local municipality can use in an emergency to give out drinks free, display messages, and sound warnings. These machines are rather few and far between at schools or near city offices, but I have seen them here and there.
• dfischer 16y ago
  The Japanese have a lot of respect. When I visited a common thing said was "If you leave your wallet on the street and come back a day later, it's likely it will still be there or in the closest shop."
  • staunch 16y ago
    This actually happened. When we were living in Tokyo my wife lost her wallet. A day later she found that it was sitting in the basket of her bicycle outside our building. This was a busy street in a business district (Nihonbashi) with hundreds of people going past it and it was a large new coach wallet with at least a few hundred in cash. Not that someone wouldn't have eventually stolen it though.
    • kmfrk 16y ago
      >Not that someone wouldn't have eventually stolen it though. Japan is only nearly Utopian. 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_countries_by_suicide_rate https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_count... [2]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suicide_rate https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_OECD_...
      • nivertech 16y ago
        Clear trends: * Southern Europe/Mediterranean/Levantine countries - low suicide rates. * English-speaking/Northern countries/former Communist block in Eastern Europe/Developed Asian countries - high suicide rates. Seems to be related to amount of daylight, climate, stress and competition.
        • jules 16y ago
          Has anybody else noticed the magical effect of sunlight? A few days ago was the first sunny day of the year. Everyone was very happy.
• panarky 16y ago
  Japan certainly has social mores that discourage petty crime. 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-tsunami-earthquake-Haunting-images-450-Britons-feared-missing.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366395/Japan-tsunam...
  • donw 16y ago
    Also, if you loot, you're ostracized. You will forever be remembered by your community and friends as a thief. It's very, very hard to form a new group of friends, if you have no existing connections to leverage.
• geoffw8 16y ago
  This was the first thing I thought about when it all kicked off. I watched a video on one of the news reports and when the earthquake hit, staff in the stores instead of hiding tried steadying shelves to stop things falling off. We honestly have a long way to go.
  • pyre 16y ago
    Japan also gets more earthquakes than most places that you're probably used to. Even though this one was larger, it seems that to the Japanese, dealing with earthquakes is rote.
• funthree 16y ago
  How about because the Japanese have been living on that island for what, 30,000 years? I think they have a sense of longevity in their culture that we could all really learn from.
  • olivercameron 16y ago
    So have the people of England, what's your point?
    • michaeldhopkins 16y ago
      No, they have not. Roman Briton was a different society than pre-Roman Briton. The Anglo-Saxons came about 1500 years ago and nearly completely replaced the Britons, genetically and culturally. The Norman invasion was about 950 years ago and greatly changed Anglo-Saxon culture, although not as much as the AS changed post-Roman Briton. There were several other invaders (Danes, etc.) as well. By contrast, the Japanese are perhaps 3,000 years old as a distinct ethnic group on the island.
      • kstenerud 16y ago
        3000 years of writing bad Chinese poetry. edit: It's a JOKE, people.
        • michaeldhopkins 16y ago
          No, about 1,500 years of influence by Chinese poetry, and assimilation took a long time. I don't know enough about it to say if it really is bad, but I do know that Norman England produced some excellent poetry -- chiefly Chaucer, and that was only 300 years after William.
          • kstenerud 16y ago
            While it was in vogue, the nobles would all try their hand, no matter how bad they were at it, and no matter how little they actually knew of the language. Think Janglish, but the Chinese version of it :P
• jjordan 16y ago
  People respecting people, even in great tragedy and chaos. Refreshing.
  • jf271 16y ago
    From another board: "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."
• tc 16y ago
  From Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!; Feynman and a colleague are staying at a traditional Japanese hotel in Kyoto: 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.
  • StavrosK 16y ago
    I came here to quote Feynman too, but a different part: 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...
    • jerf 16y ago
      It strikes me as a theory with very poor explanatory power. We've seen many crises in the US as well, and Katrina was an exception. There have been a couple of others within my lifetime, but it's not politically correct to point out what similarities they may have. (I suppose I should point out this isn't a veiled reference to race, it's actually 100% cultural, but it's still not politically correct to discuss.) It is true in the US we always have to be at least a bit worried about looting, we can't quite completely write it off, but in general it doesn't happen, and we do have a very loose society by comparison to Japan's. Whatever the determining factor is, that is not it, at least not directly.
• zspade 16y ago
  NPR had a good piece about how the Chinese looked at the Japanese and wondered the same thing when hey had so much price gouging and looting themselves during their last major earthquake.
  • est 16y ago
    Ok, just to be clear, since when did Chinese start looting in earthquakes? I admit there are prices gouging in the 2008 earthquake, but looting?
    • zspade 16y ago
      There was some looting during the 2008 earthquake, but not really that much upon doing more research. They did have significant issues with price gouging on essential goods like food/water/blanknets etc. The way the NPR worded it, and the chinese nationals they got sounds bites from made it easy to jump to the wrong conclusions...
• stcredzero 16y ago
  In part, it's the Yakuza. In the neighborhoods they control, no one commits crimes they disapprove of. It's much better for it to be peaceful for the gambling and other revenues.
  • splat 16y ago
    That would be really interesting if true. Do you have any sources to back that up?
    • kstenerud 16y ago
      No. The Yakuza generally do not participate in civilian affairs, nor are they interested in "policing", except where someone becomes a personal nuisance to a higher-up or someone disrupts their business. 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
      • stcredzero 16y ago
        nor are they interested in "policing", except where someone becomes a personal nuisance to a higher-up or someone disrupts their business. You are "disagreeing" with me by saying exactly what I am.
      • kstenerud 16y ago
        What I am saying is that the lack of looting has nothing to do with the Yakuza.
• tastybites 16y ago
  Japan, like Germany, is a society that has been bombed into submission. They went straight from feudal society into Empire mode. There's nothing particularly peaceful about their history. 60 years ago they sure didn't see any problem with looting the entirety of Asia and were about to continue into the Hawaii and the West until that pesky little thing called World War 2 got in the way.
• tsuyoshi 16y ago
  There was a major power outage in much of the northeastern North America, affecting tens of millions of people, and almost no looting (aside from isolated incidents in Ottawa and Brooklyn) there either. There was a major terrorist attack in New York in 2001 and no looting. There was a major earthquake in San Francisco in 1989 and no looting. This statement that "looting is something we see after almost every tragedy" is simply not true.
  • asdkl234890 16y ago
    Exactly! This Why are the Japanese so different! is just romanticising them for not being us. It may not quite rise to racism, but it certainly is silly.
• mistermann 16y ago
  This is probably a presumptuous or naive statement, but the very first thing that came to my mind was: if you have ever been to Japan, you wouldn't even think of asking this question.
  • Florin_Andrei 16y ago
    By all means, please do elaborate.
    • kragen 16y ago
      I was thinking the same thing. Modern Japanese culture looks very negatively at people who put their own interests ahead of everybody else's, to an extent that you probably can't imagine if you haven't been there, and this is backed up by very low levels of inequality. 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.
• danenania 16y ago
  Aside from the strong cultural values and homogeneity of that culture, I would think socioeconomic factors must have a major impact. I don't know how the statistics stack up in Japan, but looting is generally an activity of the poor and disenfranchised. Anyone have data pertinent to this?
  • kentbuckle 16y ago
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/asia/22poverty.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/asia/22poverty.html The poverty rate in Japan isn't that much lower than the US (15.7% vs. 17.1% according to the article). However, people below that line in Japan are somewhat unwilling to admit being in poverty.
    • rick888 16y ago
      It's not only people that are poor, but people that have a poor culture that loot. I can bet there were lots of poor people in Japan that didn't loot or steal from their neighbors.
• maxklein 16y ago
  I'd personally think that it's because the japanese have a greater sense of 'us' than in countries where looting occurs. Nobody thinks to loot from their family, only from other people.
• micheljansen 16y ago
  This is something that really surprised me about Japanese culture. I went there in 2008 for a study tour and one of the things that really impressed me is how different their attitude towards shared property and public space is. 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 :)
  • fanboy123 16y ago
    Was surprised at same types of thing the first time I visited. I believe this question is answered by this new york times article below about Japanese lost and founds. I've asked my friends about the phenomena and they attribute it to a sense of duty/routine - normally nobody even thinks twice about turning in a lost item. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEED71131F93BA35752C0A9629C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEED71131F...
• Kilimanjaro 16y ago
  I went there in the 90s and remember leaving my wallet in a store, then walking down the street a man tapped my shoulder from the back and when I turned I saw the store owner giving it back to me. Man I was touched by that gesture. A couple of stores down the road we entered a jewelry and my gf tried some expensive pearl necklaces just for the fun of it (like Y3M a pop ($30k back then)) and she forgot to return the last one she tried. A couple of blocks down we noticed and looked at each other with that weird sensation and the urge to return it, like if we were guilty of something we really didn't do. 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.
  • fierarul 16y ago
    >that weird sensation and the urge to return it, like if we were guilty of something we really didn't do. 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.
• joebananas 16y ago
  Man, you guys are just busting out with the exotism in this here thread. "People there carry honor in their blood"...
  • 9999 16y ago
    The original article is definitely full of that sentiment, although the responses here are more measured. Still, why has no one mentioned the fact that there is nothing left to loot in the areas most effected?
    • w1ntermute 16y ago
      I do believe joebananas is referring to this[0] comment, which is indeed on HN: > Honor is something we can't describe but japanese people carry it in their blood. 0: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2330020 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2330020
• Pahalial 16y ago
  So I read that, and the first thing that jumped out to me from the quotes: "The so-called civilized world can learn much from the stoic Japanese." 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.
  • biot 16y ago
    Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you read that the wrong way around. The point is that those who do consider themselves civilized are, in reality, not civilized when compared to the Japanese.
• winestock 16y ago
  At the same time, we must ask: Why so much looting in Haiti and New Orleans?
• Emore 16y ago
  This is not a perfect truth. Friend reports that her family have seen (directly or indirectly, I don't know) both theft and rape. Nonetheless, the extent is probably much less than any other place of crisis.
• guelo 16y ago
  I can't find the link right now but I'm prety sure I saw a news report yesterday about some looting happening. In any case, I see absolutely nothing wrong with looting in an emergency situation where there is no access to food and water.
  • Florin_Andrei 16y ago
    Well, that's surviving, not looting.
• naner 16y ago
  http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-reaction-to-trouble/ http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-rea... 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?
  • yummyfajitas 16y ago
    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_public_debt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_pub...
    • bcaulf 16y ago
      Wow, I did not know that. Worse than Greece at 144%!
• bluehat 16y ago
  Many other people on this thread have compiled lists of "western" tragedies that did not come to looting, so I think calling it a cultural thing is out. 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.
• orijing 16y ago
  I am surprised nobody mentioned this yet: Japan has a much MUCH lower level of income (and wealth) inequality than the US, Haiti, etc. [1] 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/rankorder/2172rank.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
  • pessimizer 16y ago
    The UN Gini numbers: Japan: .249 US: .408 Haiti: .592 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ... 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...
  • forkandwait 16y ago
    Also, because there are fewer poor people, there are fewer people growing up without access to decent family and educational training and enculturation.
  • michaelchisari 16y ago
    Not to mention a very well executed disaster plan, both before and after the earthquake.
• po 16y ago
  Japan takes a lot of criticism for being a closed off culture. After living here for a while I have started to believe that it is necessary to support these values. Multiculturalism means lowest common denominator. There are efficiencies you can gain by having a monoculture. Nobody has to lock their bikes, subways can have nice cloth seats and you can walk around in any neighborhood and be safe. 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.
  • angus77 16y ago
    Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody has to lock their bikes? 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!
    • po 16y ago
      OK, I shouldn't have said that because it is an overgeneralization and is overshadowing the point I was trying to make. Coming from New York, I still think people generally don't lock their bikes. They certainly don't chain them to posts with 1/2" steel chains. There is definitely still theft and crime though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Japan
      • angus77 16y ago
        The point that crime like theft is lower in Japan is totally valid, but I can promise you people do lock their bikes---bike theft is very common. You might not have noticed it because most bike locks come built into the bikes themselves. I don't think I've ever seen those kinds of locks in North America. Furthermore, anyone who has a mountain bike or crossbike does chain them to posts with 1/2" steel chains. The far more common "mama-chari" type bikes are the ones with the built-in locks.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• patio11 16y ago
  Looting is the exception in most Western nations, not the rule. I love crime here, don't get me wrong, but how many reports of widespread looting have we ever heard in the US? Rodney King riots, Katrina (and that was exaggerated)... that's about it, right? Massive floods strike Iowa, war breaks out, terrorist attacks, lethal heat waves, Bulls win trophy, none of these calamities cause looting. Yeah, one of those things is not like the others sigh.
  • bilbo0s 16y ago
    Wow, 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.
• chrismealy 16y ago
  This was already debunked: '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-reaction-to-trouble/ http://partialobjects.com/2011/03/is-looting-our-default-rea...
  • kentosi 16y ago
    I just read the article, and the one main point s/he makes that struck me is that in Japan, as opposed to Katrina, the citizens KNOW that they'll be looked after. 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.
• kierank 16y ago
  I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the explanation that there's no looting because the Government's emergency response is very good and people are getting what they need at the shelters.
  • lurker14 16y ago
    Expanding on this, I suspect that people have confidence that the situation is being well handled, and there are enough supplies to go around, so people don't tend feels a need to loot or hoard. The preparation and the perception are equally important. (Preparation without perception leads to pointless wasteful crime. Perception without the preparation leads to piles of abandoned bodies.)
  • mc32 16y ago
    >there's no looting because the Government's emergency response is very good... 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.
• kingkawn 16y ago
  From what I've heard many vendors are also giving away their goods, especially food, during the crisis, so it sorta precludes looting doesn't it?
• michaelty 16y ago
  I'm guessing they haven't run out of food yet. Then there's the "no guns" thing.
• bilbo0s 16y ago
  One word : 'Individualism' 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.
  • InclinedPlane 16y ago
    More so, modern Japan is not a pure entity, it is the product of Japan's prior history, the events of WWII, the American occupation, the reconstruction, and the close ties with America since. Without all of the latter Japan as a nation would be quite different today.
• forkandwait 16y ago
  I think it is high level of "human capital" plus an understanding that your society is a cooperative venture. I am not sure, but I would hazard that most Japanese are highly literate, brought up to behave well, and that there is actually a social contract in force. I am willing to bet just a little bit of money that your average high school grad (i.e. "working class") Japanese person would rival our state college educated class for both high levels of good behavior and knowledge. I bet there would be similar behavior in the Scandinavian countries. 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.
• davidasikin 16y ago
  I've collected heartwarming tweets from the eye-witnesses of 2011 Sendai earthquake as seen on Twitter timeline. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330680 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".
• starpilot 16y ago
  I've heard anecdotally that the Japanese are horribly repressed. They also have the second-highest suicide rate among industrialized nations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suicide_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suici... (South Korea is #1, USA is #20). They may be composed, but their culture is far from an ideal.
• georgieporgie 16y ago
  Japan seems to have very little crime, or at least, very little obvious crime. This may be rooted in their distant past. Here is a quote from "Sources of Japanese Tradition - From Earliest Times to 1600" which contains description of Japan by Chinese from around 297 CE: 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.
• hasenj 16y ago
  I think it's really just because there aren't many poor people (socialism is good :D) 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.
• ChRoss 16y ago
  I'm not a Japanese, but I will say it's because of their Bushido spirit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido
• vacri 16y ago
  This is an outrageously biased article. The previous two globally-advertised large-scale disasters happened in western anglo countries and had minimal, if any, looting. I'm talking about the floods that devastated Brisbane and the Queensland coast, quickly followed by a category 5 cyclone smashing into Townsville (Australia) and the Christchurch earthquake where the centre of the city was levelled (New Zealand). 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.
• temphn 16y ago
  The answer to this question is completely obvious to people who spent formative years in Asia and are free of American/Western taboos (we have other taboos no doubt but not these). 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 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 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.
  • ovi256 16y ago
    That's a very interesting, non-PC, and yes, blasphemous hypothesis. The data certainly seems to support it. I hope it begets a good discussion.
• krig 16y ago
  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because there are no news reports about looting doesn't mean it's not going on. The social difference may be in how news are reported, not in how people cope with disaster. I'm not saying that's what is going on, just saying that the statement "there is no looting in Japan" is taken as fact without any closer examination, which is a very unscientific approach.
  • krig 16y ago
    Also, from the photos of the stricken areas that I've seen; what are you going to loot? Everything is destroyed, there is no way to get around, there are rescue teams working around the clock. It's not a situation where houses were flooded but remain mostly intact. There are no houses anymore. 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.
• furyg3 16y ago
  Income equality? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA... If you already have about the same amount of stuff as everyone else, stealing seems silly.
• teyc 16y ago
  Broken windows at work here. Nobody loots because nobody else loots. 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.
• yannickmahe 16y ago
  There wasn't any looting also in the 2008 Chinese Wenchuan earthquake, where people are much poorer. I don't think the absence of looting has anything to do with the Japanese spirit, and is more about the human spirit. I'd expect the same from anywhere.
• grammaton 16y ago
  By and large people don't go crazy looting during disasters. The idea that the moment authority disappears, we instantly devolve in to dog-eat-dog anarchy is a myth - mostly promulgated by those who feel it's their job to be the one in charge. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for the most part people can do a pretty good job of policing themselves.
• rajpaul 16y ago
  Does looting commonly follow earth quakes in a large percentage of other countries?
• mgutz 16y ago
  Does not surprise me at all. I remember being in Japan in the service for only two weeks. Two things I remember: 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.
• Chi019 16y ago
  Population genetics, as it affects those parts of the nervous system involved in social behavior, together with geography and a long common history, predisposed the Japanese to strong ethnonationalism and social stability in a well-organized and well-supervised hierarchical order. Under premodern conditions this did not preclude intracommunal violence under codes widely understood and enforced; but in the affluent post-WW2 world, with good standards of health and education, and under imposed consensual government following certain highly salutary experiences, these old factors directed the Japanese to an exceptionally high level of nonviolent social cohesion and intense but benign racial-national consciousness. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262162/people-want-know-contd-john-derbyshire http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/262162/people-want-know...
• Chi019 16y ago
  From a review of Wilson and Herrnstein's Crime and Human Nature: "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." Is there any group other than the Japanese for whom that description would be less fitting?
• Keile 16y ago
  But there is looting in Japan. 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.