7:10 AM
Trung
There is stoicism. There is dignity. There is even an unthinkable resilience in the face of major disaster.
This battered nation has acquitted itself admirably.
Faced with the worst disaster to hit their densely populated island since World War II, the Japanese have shown an admirable stoicism and dignity that has had the world agape with admiration.
After Friday's 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami, four nuclear reactors are in crisis and the Nikkei in freefall. The economy is teetering, thousands are dead, many more are missing, presumed dead, and millions are homeless, without water or electricity.
Yet vignettes from around the country show only co-operation between people, generosity, order, industriousness and civilised behaviour.
No looting, no whining, very little panic, if any, and no demands for some mythical "them" to fix it.
The stories are heartbreaking and at the same time uplifting, as the best of humanity comes to the fore.
Mothers calmly line up, holding babies to be checked for radiation exposure.
Survivors queue for eight or more hours for food and water.
The rest of Japan voluntarily reduces non-essential power use, reducing the need for official blackouts.
Shops in Tokyo tell customers: "Only one bottle of water per person. People are thirsty."
Workers go back to their desks on Monday morning, despite blackouts and slow trains.
Motorists wait patiently in orderly lines for fuel, with no honking or pushing in.
In Koriyama, near the Fukushima nuclear plant, residents queuing for drinking water uncomplainingly go home when told the water has run out.
Shoppers in a mall when the earthquake hits run outside with merchandise, and when the tremors subside, they go back inside to pay for the items.
At the height of the tsunami there are no cries of panic, no swearing or exclamations to be heard on YouTube videos, just sounds of dismay as houses and cars glide away under the force of the deceptively slow-moving wave.
Then there is the respectful way rescue workers go about retrieving the dead, with a blessing for each of the bodies removed.
The owner of a sake factory roaming the streets trying to account for all 50 of his employees, and quietly overcome when he finds one.
The doctor at Senen General Hospital in Tagajo whose staff call him a "samurai" because he is managing 113 patients with no water or electricity and little food or drugs.
"Shikata ga nai," (it can't be helped) he tells a reporter. It is a common saying in a country whose fatalistic people are used to misfortune.
There are the people in shelters sharing their food with strangers.
A solitary man, full of dogged hope, riding silently around the wreckage on a bike with a handwritten sign which asks politely if anyone has seen his wife.
The exhausted old lady piggybacked out of the rubble, bowing to her rescuer.
The people looking for relatives emerging from a makeshift morgue in Sensai, legs buckling with grief, hands over their mouths as they quietly weep.
Even the Japanese media, as seen on NHK television, remain calm and level-headed as they explain the nuclear situation.
There are the nuclear plant bosses who respectfully apologise on TV for the "inconvenience".
The calm and careful Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who travels immediately to the fragile nuclear zone to talk to plant operators.
And of course there are the brave workers who volunteered to stay on at the Fukushima nuclear plant battling to bring the blazing and exploding reactors under control, risking their lives to pump seawater onto melting radioactive fuel. You cannot imagine more selflessness. (Sketchy reports yesterday afternoon suggested that rising radiation levels had led them to "suspend" their operations.)
Some surmise it is their mixture of Shinto Buddhism and Confucianism which has given the Japanese such presence of mind in the face of disaster. Or perhaps it is the necessity for strong social order that comes from having 127 million people crammed into a small island with few natural resources, on a fault line, and only their bare hands to create the wealth that once made it the second richest nation on the planet.
In Tokyo, there is virtually no crime in a city of 13 million. You could leave a bag of lovely shopping, as I did once, in McDonald's and come back an hour later to find it untouched.
In some neighbourhoods you might see an eye painted on a wall, a subtle message that locals are watching out for signs of disorder. Rather than offload all responsibility for order to authorities, the Japanese assume the duty.
As a child in Tokyo, I grew up understanding that the Japanese culture requires its people to be self-contained, and persevere through hard times without complaint. Not for them such spectacles as the outpouring of public grief from strangers after the death of Princess Diana. Such emotional flatulence would be unthinkable.
Cultural grit is embedded in the Japanese language with words such as "Ganbatte", newly popularised on Twitter and the internet as "Ganbatte Nihon", which means, roughly: "Do your best, Japan. Never give up."
The veteran Australian ambassador Murray McLean this week described the Japanese people as "long-suffering in many ways".
"They are able to, however, be very resilient," he told the ABC. "They have a wonderful spirit. They're very quiet people, calm people, dignified people ... but also highly industrious."
It would be unfair to compare the quiet stoicism and order in Japan to the chaos, looting, crime and panic of Hurricane Katrina or the whining and demands for handouts after Queensland's Cyclone Larry in 2005. It may be unfair to conclude that self-indulgent, pampered Westerners have forgotten the Japanese virtues of sacrifice, and selflessness, as some have suggested.
After all, we saw resilience and generosity closer to home recently on a smaller scale: in Christchurch after the earthquake where New Zealanders' can-do attitude and lack of whingeing endeared them to the world. And similarly, after the floods and Cyclone Yasi in Queensland and Victoria we saw admirable courage and a calm stoicism from victim and rescuer alike, as well as an outpouring of concern and charity from the rest of Australia.
In testing times, we are learning what it really means to be human.
This battered nation has acquitted itself admirably.Faced with the worst disaster to hit their densely populated island since World War II, the Japanese have shown an admirable stoicism and dignity that has had the world agape with admiration.
After Friday's 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami, four nuclear reactors are in crisis and the Nikkei in freefall. The economy is teetering, thousands are dead, many more are missing, presumed dead, and millions are homeless, without water or electricity.
Yet vignettes from around the country show only co-operation between people, generosity, order, industriousness and civilised behaviour.
No looting, no whining, very little panic, if any, and no demands for some mythical "them" to fix it.
The stories are heartbreaking and at the same time uplifting, as the best of humanity comes to the fore.
Mothers calmly line up, holding babies to be checked for radiation exposure.
Survivors queue for eight or more hours for food and water.
The rest of Japan voluntarily reduces non-essential power use, reducing the need for official blackouts.
Shops in Tokyo tell customers: "Only one bottle of water per person. People are thirsty."
Workers go back to their desks on Monday morning, despite blackouts and slow trains.
Motorists wait patiently in orderly lines for fuel, with no honking or pushing in.
In Koriyama, near the Fukushima nuclear plant, residents queuing for drinking water uncomplainingly go home when told the water has run out.
Shoppers in a mall when the earthquake hits run outside with merchandise, and when the tremors subside, they go back inside to pay for the items.
At the height of the tsunami there are no cries of panic, no swearing or exclamations to be heard on YouTube videos, just sounds of dismay as houses and cars glide away under the force of the deceptively slow-moving wave.
Then there is the respectful way rescue workers go about retrieving the dead, with a blessing for each of the bodies removed.
The owner of a sake factory roaming the streets trying to account for all 50 of his employees, and quietly overcome when he finds one.
The doctor at Senen General Hospital in Tagajo whose staff call him a "samurai" because he is managing 113 patients with no water or electricity and little food or drugs.
"Shikata ga nai," (it can't be helped) he tells a reporter. It is a common saying in a country whose fatalistic people are used to misfortune.
There are the people in shelters sharing their food with strangers.
A solitary man, full of dogged hope, riding silently around the wreckage on a bike with a handwritten sign which asks politely if anyone has seen his wife.
The exhausted old lady piggybacked out of the rubble, bowing to her rescuer.
The people looking for relatives emerging from a makeshift morgue in Sensai, legs buckling with grief, hands over their mouths as they quietly weep.
Even the Japanese media, as seen on NHK television, remain calm and level-headed as they explain the nuclear situation.
There are the nuclear plant bosses who respectfully apologise on TV for the "inconvenience".
The calm and careful Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who travels immediately to the fragile nuclear zone to talk to plant operators.
And of course there are the brave workers who volunteered to stay on at the Fukushima nuclear plant battling to bring the blazing and exploding reactors under control, risking their lives to pump seawater onto melting radioactive fuel. You cannot imagine more selflessness. (Sketchy reports yesterday afternoon suggested that rising radiation levels had led them to "suspend" their operations.)
Some surmise it is their mixture of Shinto Buddhism and Confucianism which has given the Japanese such presence of mind in the face of disaster. Or perhaps it is the necessity for strong social order that comes from having 127 million people crammed into a small island with few natural resources, on a fault line, and only their bare hands to create the wealth that once made it the second richest nation on the planet.
In Tokyo, there is virtually no crime in a city of 13 million. You could leave a bag of lovely shopping, as I did once, in McDonald's and come back an hour later to find it untouched.
In some neighbourhoods you might see an eye painted on a wall, a subtle message that locals are watching out for signs of disorder. Rather than offload all responsibility for order to authorities, the Japanese assume the duty.
As a child in Tokyo, I grew up understanding that the Japanese culture requires its people to be self-contained, and persevere through hard times without complaint. Not for them such spectacles as the outpouring of public grief from strangers after the death of Princess Diana. Such emotional flatulence would be unthinkable.
Cultural grit is embedded in the Japanese language with words such as "Ganbatte", newly popularised on Twitter and the internet as "Ganbatte Nihon", which means, roughly: "Do your best, Japan. Never give up."
The veteran Australian ambassador Murray McLean this week described the Japanese people as "long-suffering in many ways".
"They are able to, however, be very resilient," he told the ABC. "They have a wonderful spirit. They're very quiet people, calm people, dignified people ... but also highly industrious."
It would be unfair to compare the quiet stoicism and order in Japan to the chaos, looting, crime and panic of Hurricane Katrina or the whining and demands for handouts after Queensland's Cyclone Larry in 2005. It may be unfair to conclude that self-indulgent, pampered Westerners have forgotten the Japanese virtues of sacrifice, and selflessness, as some have suggested.
After all, we saw resilience and generosity closer to home recently on a smaller scale: in Christchurch after the earthquake where New Zealanders' can-do attitude and lack of whingeing endeared them to the world. And similarly, after the floods and Cyclone Yasi in Queensland and Victoria we saw admirable courage and a calm stoicism from victim and rescuer alike, as well as an outpouring of concern and charity from the rest of Australia.
In testing times, we are learning what it really means to be human.
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