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Japanese residents return over $78 million from earthquake wreckage
By James Brady RyanAugust 19th, 2011, 8:19 amComments (4)
How about something heartwarming and life affirming to kick off your Friday? Japan is still working to rebuild after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck in March, and while many stories about the recovery effort are less than promising — like, say, radioactive beef found in Tokyo food markets — this one could restore a bit of your faith in humanity. In the five months since the quake, officials say that over $78 million, mostly contained in wallets or safes, has been turned in by those looking through the debris. The next step, obviously, was returning it:
Determining who the safes belonged to, proved to be the easy part. Saiki says most kept bankbooks or land rights documents inside the boxes, containing their names and address. Tracking the owners down, was much more challenging.
"The fact that these safes were washed away, meant the homes were washed away too," he said. "We had to first determine if the owners were alive, then find where they had evacuated to."
Saiki says Miyagi police fanned out across the region, searching for names of residents posted at evacuation centers, digging through missing person reports at town halls, sorting through change of address forms at the post office, to see if the owner had moved away. When they couldn't find the documents, police called listed cell phone numbers, met with mayors or village leaders to see if they recognized the names.
It may be only a small comfort for those who lost their entire houses — not to mention potentially friends and family members — to receive money recovered from a safe or wallet. I couldn't pretend to know what these people are going through, but hopefully even that little bit can give them some tiny bit of solace after losing so much. Either way: stand-up job, people of Japan.
Commentarium (4 Comments)
amazing culture, so much more evolved than ours...not that we aren't on our way, just saying.
The ignorance of your comment would seem to lie in the fact that either you are unaware of the strong Asian trait of 'fearing losing face', or you are aware of it but don't realise what it means as related to the behaviour this article covers. Meaning, you have no idea (same as I, or anyone else) if any particular Japanese individual didn't steal, or didn't loot, because of real inner goodness (selflessness: your 'so much more evolved') or whether it was because they feared being shunned and isolated socially in consequence of potentially getting caught as a result of indulging in said behaviour (selfishness: hardly indicative of 'so much more evolved'). As this applies to people returning money no-one knows they'd found (thereby being a potentially 'foolproof way to steal without getting caught' scenario), when you've been brainwashed into the 'losing-face game' from birth, it's always there, no matter what. The price paid for this seemingly socially cohesive tool is, as I see another poster has already pointed out, a heightened xenophobia - Foreigners who don't play the losing-face-game automatically portend a great threat to undermining it's usefulness as a method of social control (in which it finds its true genesis), because through their own behaviour they demonstrate that one can still avoid being/becoming a social pariah even when such a mindset isn't (so, if at all) predominant.
I'd use the phrase 'so much more ordered than [y]ours...', with that order being present in no small way due to the brainwashing that is called the 'losing-face game'.
Oh and for a final note, if you think the innumerous mutilation of innocents during WW2 carried out by Japanese soldiers was always due to their inherent sadism, and was never because certain individual soldiers did such acts not because of inherent sadism but because they feared losing face in front of their soldier comrades (and so values that fear over the pain they'd have to inflict on the innocent/s opposite them), then I'd think again if I were you. Brainwashing is never a good thing, even if it sometimes/oftentimes results in 'so much more evolved' behaviour.
Soon after the earthquake, there was an on-the-scene report on NPR essentially asking the question, "Why no looting?" It wasn't an analysis, just a shocked question.
An extremely homogenous population minimizes the risk of civil strife and maximizes itnerpersonal empathy. It also promotes extreme racism against anyone who's different. You pays your money; you takes your chances.
Now you say something