Over the last several days, I’ve heard the question, “Why aren’t folks in Japan looting?” I dismissed the question without realizing that’s what I was doing: Because it’s Japan, duh.
What, that answer’s not illuminating?
The comments on this blog got me wondering, why is that my answer? What is it about Japan that makes it so unsurprising to me there’s no crime spree o’ opportunism? If you’d like the short form of my novella below, look for Maje’s answer among the comments.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, the answer came to me in the form of a picture. I searched and searched but couldn’t find that picture, which showed progressively smaller rings of Japanese students standing on each others’ shoulders to form a tower of kids several adults high. The first time I saw a group of kids doing this on Sports Day, I shook my head in amazement and told the teacher next to me, “This wouldn’t happen in America. I see this, and all I see is potential lawsuits!”
After time, things like this came to seem ordinary to me. My students’ parents not only didn’t object to the sometimes dangerous team efforts of Sports Day, they encouraged them. How, after all, are kids supposed to learn the importance of teamwork and togetherness if their efforts are short-lived or superficial?
To me, the answer to the looting question isn’t: “Because they’re good patriots and they love their country!” The answer is simpler than that. They don’t loot or harm each other opportunistically for this straightforward reason:
They cultivate togetherness.
Cultivating togetherness
Togetherness isn’t something that just happens magically because you put classmates together once for a project. It’s the product of active, concerted effort to teach children–and the adults they become–to pull others into the fold and to see the welfare of each individual as intrinsic to the welfare of the whole. That’s not to say everything is kindness and smiles. One disconcerting aspect of this facilitated cohesiveness is that errant behavior is singled out and amplified. One of my coworkers was routinely called things like “pig-face” and “fatty.” These words, for the most part, weren’t spoken with hostility. They were just reminders that she deviated from the norm, and that such deviation made it hard to promote an image of “rightness” in young students’ minds, for there is, after all, a right and a wrong of things. How else was she to know, if folks didn’t remind her?
From the time Japanese individuals are very young, they walk together in pre-organized groups to school. They go to school together, eat together, play together, and learn about the world together. They gather frequently in and out of schools and feel the goodness of being bound together.
“Together.” This is the operative word. The Japanese cultivate this togetherness so that, in prosperous times and hard ones, it is an intrinsic part of how they relate to the world.
If you’re like me, you were often forced into a team for “group work” at school. The group work ended up, more often than not, being one overachieving student telling everything else what to do. As little time as possible was spent actually working on things together before the group concluded its project and–in most cases–never worked together in that particular formation of kids again. The next time, there’d be a different group of students for a different project in a different class. “Accountability” in this kind of teamwork setting means something very different than the kind of accountability you are held to–personally and by others–when you work with the same people over and over again, from a very young age, and learn to see their needs as interwoven with your own.
I love my country. I am proud to be an American. As I read news about how women are treated in other countries, I think, I’m pretty damn blessed to live in a country where I can openly criticize my government without fear of retribution. I am afforded so many freedoms simply for having been born in the United States of America! One of those freedoms is, of course, the freedom to single-mindedly pursue my own liberty and happiness, which I do with great fervor. By and large, the folks around me also pursue these things enthusiastically. Each of us knows that if something bad befalls us because of another person’s slip-up, we’ve got access to a thousand lawyers happy to represent us for a cut of any settlement or judgment. This knowledge is born of and contributes to the individualism that made me look on Sports Day activities that first day and go, “Lawsuit. Other lawsuit. Other lawsuit. OMG, they’re letting that happen?! That’s the biggest lawsuit of all!”
Folks in Japan aren’t avoiding looting and crime in the wake of last week’s disaster because they’re patriots, or because they have different–or better–hearts than Americans do. They’re not doing those things because to do them would be inconceivably inconsistent with the principle of togetherness they are taught and teach each other to strive toward from almost the moment they can walk. That principle isn’t always perfectly realized, but it’s the driving force in almost every decision, every day.
How will what I’m doing impact the people around me? How will they look on me at the end of the day if I do this horrible thing?
In the United States, the land of the free to do whatever the hell we want–beautiful or conniving–as long as no one’s looking, it’s hard to imagine these questions being determinative in virtually our every single decision, in an ordinary day or a day of catastrophe. Here, I feel like we’re more inclined to ask the question, If making decisions that improve Harry and Lou’s well being means I’m out a million bucks, do I really favor their well being more than I care about my million Washingtons?
In Japan, by contrast, the question would more likely look like this: Do I want to spend a lifetime knowing Harry and Lou, and their kids, and their grandchildren, lost out because I wanted a little more money, or screen time, or booty?
When we’re asking such different questions–when, indeed, we’re trained to ask such different questions based on our assessments of the import of self versus others–can it be any wonder we come up with such different answers, and such different end results in practice?
Again, I love my country. I love that I’ve been encouraged to do and be whatever I dreamed, and that I have so many tools to help get me there. But I love, too, the land of Japan, and its peoples’ attentiveness to the needs of other people. I cherish each memory–and there are so many!–of strangers offering me rides, umbrellas, or money for the train when I found I didn’t have enough; of strangers walking me a half-hour to where I needed to go because I couldn’t understand their directions; of people around me seeing me in times of distress and ushering me through them. I was blessed countless times that each of these beautiful strangers and friends felt it more important to see me to where I needed to be than to catch their own train on time, or meet their friends, or . . . there are dozens of “ors” here, one for each individual who took the time out to help me.
It was jarring to come back to the states and see the way people thoughtlessly disregarded others: not paying attention in a parking lot because they expect others to stop for them, not bothering with an “excuse me” after bumping into someone else (shouldn’t they be watching where they’re going?), not stopping their kid from kicking someone else’s airplane seat because it was their kid’s God-given right to do whatever he wanted as long as it didn’t involve cutting off someone’s arm. This thoughtlessness, I saw, was seldom born of malevolence, but rather of a distinct, cultivated weighing of someone else’s needs as less important than one’s own.
Now, if I can take a step out of the way to avoid someone else having to go eighteen steps out of the way, I try to take that step. I don’t always get it right, but thanks to what I saw in Japan, I at least try to be mindful of others. Small demonstrations of care are often greeted with large amounts of gratitude, after all, and that’s something I see more often thanks to my time in Japan. We’re all interconnected, after all, whether or not we can see it at the moment.
The Japanese people struck by disaster aren’t looting and/or beating each other up because they know–more intrinsically than do we in the United Sates, with our very different history and set of values–that the health and safety of each individual is necessary to the health and safety of the whole. That whole, in the end, is comprised of all the individuals who will raise their arms to shield you from the rain as you walk through trials that might very well overwhelm you . . . if you were forced to walk them alone.
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