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.
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...
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.
Sorry, not trying to anger anyone or anything, I am genuinely interested. Where in the US was there a natural disaster of significant scale where there was no looting?
I'm actually from Wisconsin, but was living in Cedar Rapids during the floods, and there was looting there. My neighbor was the cop chasing these guys down. I am just curious how other communities were able to avoid looting.
I'm from Cedar Rapids as well. You really need to qualify the claim there was looting in CR. The term is rather loaded and conjures visions of angry Iowans raiding the local Casey's on John Deeres. The burglary rates did rise somewhat; but there was definitely not a feeling on lawlessness or looting. During the height of the flood, thousands of citizens from across the city helped sandbag. The only thing that saved the last remaining water pumping station was a concerted effort to build a large sandbag wall against the Cedar River.
After the waters receded many groups helped clean up countless houses in the hard-hit areas. While I wouldn't say we have quite the serene calm of the Japanese, I think communities in the United States still can effectively work together.
In Japan and other Asian societies, individuals have stronger social ties to their families, neighbors, coworkers. In the US, economic ties are more important. The US was built by people who left their families, neighborhoods, and existing structures to seek their fortune in the US.
I apologize for a non-PC interjection. You can't totally separate race and culture in the US. When a group has differences in language, music, eating habits, values and other social interactions, it becomes useful to think about it as a subculture. At the risk of being non-PC, a 'black urban subculture' may license antisocial behavior that is considered more reprehensible in 'white suburban subculture'.
I hasten to add that people who are white may be strongly associate and be of high standing in 'black urban subculture' (ie Eminem), and people who are black may strongly associate and be of high standing in 'white suburban subculture,' (ie Obama) and that once you start making assumptions about people's values and cultural adherence based on the color of their skin you start crossing the line into racism, which I don't believe anyone of any race is entirely free of.
I think these sorts of occurrences have very strong group effects. If a few people start looting, soon many others will follow, even if they wouldn't really start otherwise. It may be that, in the case of Katrina, there just happened to be those few people who would start the looting.
>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.
(I know the excerpt is from the book, but I feel compelled to respond).
No, they're just different. Better in some ways, worse in others.
If I had to summarize Japan in one word, it would be 'harmony', or 'Wa' (和). People here don't rock the boat, and don't want to upset the status quo. The few that do find themselves more often than not pushed to the bottom of society.
Because of this, kids go through twelve years of indoctrination, where they learn to think, speak, and act like a unit. They emerge from this into a four-year vacation (university) where very little is asked of them, after which it's expected that you will either become a researcher, or put on a suit and become a salaryman.
The Japanese system is great in times of crisis.
It sucks if you want to start a company, or if you've got a startup and want to hire employees.
A foreign minister that calls gang rapists "virile" and all sorts of extremely mysoginistic pop culture suggests not that "the Japanese are so civilised", only that they are merely different.
White friends of mine recall looking for a flat in Japan and being constantly rejected with "you're white, we don't lease to whites", which is not a problem there. There are second-generation Koreans living in Japan who can't get citizenship or the vote.
Japan is an awesome place and the people are very different to a great many other places, but can we keep the cultural cringe to a minimum?
I also find it interesting in the story that there is no mention of Feynman making a fuss about a colleague being stark naked in the same room. Does this mean he's also much more advanced and civilised? Why doesn't Fernman mention this; why is it beyond notice? Why is the maid's lack of reaction that much more noteworthy than his own lack of reaction?
all sorts of extremely mysoginistic pop culture suggests not that "the Japanese are so civilised", only that they are merely different.
It's interesting that sexual violence strikes such a chord with us westerners, but we think nothing of glamorizing gratuitous, sadistic physical violence. We have a popular television series where the hero is a psychopath serial killer with a heart of gold. In some of the Hannibal Lecter movies, Hannibal was arguably portrayed as a hero and he cannibalized people!
>>There are second-generation Koreans living in Japan who can't get citizenship or the vote.
It's not about discrimination why Koreans are not becoming Japanese citizen, but it is their choices.
Because Koreans in Japan have privileges and immunities which people with Japanese citizenship or other nationalities don't have.
They don't feel embarrased if naked public, at least until sometime in twentieth when they finally prohibited child porns. They still have public spas that allow both men and women in one tub.
I don't think your story represents Japanese people's personality regarding not looting. Read <The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture>.
He means that they have mixed bathing, so there's no men's and women's side of the onsen and so everyone goes into the same bath, whether they know each other or not.
There are other arrangements, too, though. In addition to simply splitting the onsen between a men's side and a women's side, they can also change from one to the other, so you can have mixed bathing later in the night, while being split the rest of the time.
... A book written sixty years ago with war prisoners interviews as material. A great book, but not really the state of art. (I'm afraid I've got no better advice.)
eh... we cannot characterize this stuff as civilized or uncivilized. It's just different from our(US) way of doing things. Have you used their public bathrooms or restrooms? It feels very very awkward. I don't like it but I wouldn't call it uncivilized. The way we live together here without marriage and stuff is viewed as uncivilized by most of the world.
The story is that a trader working for one of the big foreign banks was staying at one of the top hotels, and would repeatedly call for room service and be stark naked when the (female) staff came in. I might be wrong about them calling security, I think they just told the bank they wouldn't accept reservations for that trader anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Also, because there are fewer poor people, there are fewer people growing up without access to decent family and educational training and enculturation.
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.
"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."
Please note that I'm not saying all monocultures are safe. I am certainly also not saying multi-cultures are unsuccessful. This has nothing to do with safety or success, more efficiency gains and tolerance costs. I'm trying to raise a nuanced point and I went out of my way to say neither is better than the other.
I think the efficiency gained depends on the culture gaining it. Japan has decided that they value safety. In Bangladesh there are probably different assumptions you can make. I don't know what they are and I don't want to speculate because I don't have any experience living there.
edit: also wanted to add... even though Switzerland is ethnically diverse and speaks many different languages, I would still call it a mono-culture. The swiss are also sometimes criticized for being unique in their ways and resistant to change. Culture is not the same as race or language.
"Please note that I'm not saying all monocultures are safe."
Sure, but you attributed safety and other "efficiencies" in Japan to "monoculture." You also wrote, "Multiculturalism means lowest common denominator."
Now you seem to be attributing safety in Japan not to monoculture but to /Japanese/ culture. Fair enough.
In that case, what would happen if 10 million Japanese moved to Bangladesh, making it more multicultural? Would it be a less "efficient" culture? Would it be anchored by the "lowest common denominator," or would the nation improve through the infusion of new cultural values? It seems doubtful that, after conducting this thought experiment, most people could honestly conclude that, "Multiculturalism means lowest common denominator." It likewise seems hard to imagine Singapore in its present state -- including efficiency-wise -- if all those ethnic Chinese has never migrated there.
The big context here is that you were defending Japan against criticism that it is a "closed off culture" and "too exclusive, too slow to change." That criticism is very well earned; for all its many virtues, there is a disturbing level of racism in Japan, against Koreans and Americans of black heritage (usually in military service there but not always, see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101880815-...). There is also the matter of Japan's depressingly extended economic stagnation, going on 20 years old now, which is widely and credibly explained as being closely tied to an unwillingness to embrace new, often foreign values around business, corporate culture, risk taking, credit and competition.
The one time I visited Japan, for two weeks, I conjured many positive words to describe the country. "Efficient" was not one of them. The grueling, sit-at-your desk 14 hour workdays that are de rigueur in Japan are not particularly efficient. The make-work jobs everywhere also seemed inefficient, like the guy in a uniform bowing in apology non-stop to people driving by a construction detour in the road, or the full time ticket taker/thanker in the back of the bus who collected my payment stub. The many ritual greetings and apologies also did not seem efficient.
I have a hard time seeing how multiculturalism would not ENHANCE Japan's efficiency -- and economy.
Update:
"The swiss are also sometimes criticized for being unique in their ways and resistant to change. Culture is not the same as race or language."
In that case, Brooklyn is a monoculture of New Yorkers, or Americans, and your original distinction between it and Japan is rather meaningless.
Now you seem to be attributing safety in Japan not to monoculture but to /Japanese/ culture. Fair enough.
Yes I wasn't careful enough in my writing. I mean to say that monoculture allows you to optimize around your values. Lowest common denominator sounds too judgmental but I mean it in the set-theory kind of way. I probably should just have said "common values".
what would happen if 10 million Japanese moved to Bangladesh, making it more multicultural? Would it be a less "efficient" culture?
Yes, I think there would be certain generalizations that you could no longer depend on being true. I don't know what they would be. Maybe it would be better, maybe worse. Maybe it would be you would have to order a wider variety of food at your wedding to make everyone happy. I don't know. I would say that's a reduction in efficiency.
I am aware of racism here and I don't think it's good. I don't think Japanese companies are economically efficient but they pretty good at reflecting Japanese values. I eat a restricted diet and it's an inconvenience that people assume that I just eat the standard issue Japanese cuisine. A lot of people complain about that but I understand why it is that way.
I don't see what is so controversial about what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that having to always be tolerant for the way other people do things trades something off compared to living where everyone already does things mostly the way you would.
I think I grok your meaning of "efficiency" now; I'm definitely not suggesting you are an intolerant person.
I would politely challenge, however, the idea that there's roughly equal virtue between Brooklyn-style embraced diversity vs Japan-style conformity. Not only does multiculturalism have a genuine moral attractiveness, which should not be dismissed, it makes for a stronger, more resilient country over the long term. Fresh ideas, fresh values, fresh labor, fresh taxpayers, fresh consumers, fresh inventors and indeed fresh culture are stengths that have been indispensable in allowing the U.S. to overcome its many deep (and often chronic) flaws and attain the level of economic and cultural success that it has. Similarly, a tendency toward xenophobia has hampered Japan's many intrinsic strengths, which have nevertheless been strong enough to set the country as an (oft misinterpreted) example of How To Win.
TLDR: Monoculture is a harmful, false optimization at the national level (though quite useful within, say, an apartment, church or startup incubator).
This reminded me of a quote from Shirow Masamune's Ghost In The Shell:
"No matter how powerful we may be fighting-wise, a system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw. Like individual, like organization. Overspecialization leads to death."
When I visited Zurich a couple of years ago I saw things unimaginable for my city, like people leaving their unchained bikes outside their apartment buildings.
Wait, you live in Tokyo, don't you? (I think we met at one of the meetups)
Everybody locks their bikes here, and even so bycicle theft is common (well, at least compared to the other types of crime). My own bycicle was stolen while I was out of the country for a couple of weeks...
That said, I understand that's not the main point of your comment.
Yes, people lock their bikes: they all have that built in wheel lock thing. It's not like it's a perfect utopia. People are actually very careful about that. Nobody rides around with the giant NYC-style bolt-cutter proof chain like a belt though. You couldn't even have a $1000 bike in NYC but you see them all the time here. There is definitely some theft and crime but it's definitely less.
Also, the biggest bike thief is probably the city. ;-)
A bit of an exaggeration on 'you couldn't even have a $1000 bike in NYC'. I have one and lock it up outside - I see plenty of them locked up around town. But, yes, they're all locked with thick chains and heavy locks, and the seat should be locked to the frame as well if you want to keep that too. Having renters insurance is good too since that will cover you if your bike is stolen.
When I lived in Tokyo my roommate had both his bicycle and a motorcycle stolen from outside our apartment building which was in a very nice quiet residential area.
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!
I never expected much---and I sure didn't expect them to find it a year and a half later. Apparently it was left in a no-bike-zone and they realized it was stolen from the registration number. Glad I registered!
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.
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.
Sure... I've thought about that a lot too. You're saying I should have challenged their values with mine. I probably should have said something. And yet I would spend all day long every day in arguments with people who just don't agree with me. I tend to be rather non-confrontational and don't like arguments. Many people can just shrug it off but I get upset by them. In my mind, this is an example of an efficiency gained by the monoculture.
edit: Just thought of another little anecdote: I was sitting outside roppongi hills eating a bento on a bench when a woman with a kid and a little dog walked by. The dog stopped to poop and when he was finished she quickly scurried away into her high-rise.
My wife and I were flabbergasted. An old woman and her husband walking by gave her the glare and you could see everyone nearby was shocked. About 5 minutes later she came out without the dog but with the kid and a woman from the front desk of her building. They cleaned it up. I guess she didn't have a bag with her and she wanted to drop the dog off and then grab a bag from her house. During the five minutes that it was there, I was thinking how I should have said something.
Not that I would have done this either, but you could have just picked up their trash for them. Then the dad would have had to explain to his kid why you were cleaning up their mess. Not too confrontational, but it still gets the point across.
My current hobby is to make a visible point of calling out litterers and picking up their litter if they don't (especially cigaretes).
So far, I've gotten ignored a lot, a couple of sheepish looks or mutterings, and I've been assaulted once (after returning a dropped cigarette to the owner, she threw the coffee drink at me, littering further.)
I strongly exhort all decent people to make a point of transmitting their values loudly, clearly, and defensibly. If only vandals and thugs feel free to express their beliefs in public, where will that lead us?
b) You are directly trying to impose your value over someone else's value, with the assumption that you are correct. One has to be very careful sure you are not just projecting your frustration at the littering. What they are doing is completely correct for their worldview, which has a boundary round about where their clothing is.
If someone litters at all then they probably haven't much of an awareness outside of their own egocentric POV and it seems quite unlikely that a single intervention by yourself is going to change that, unless they are a kid of less than ~ ten years of age.
I like to smile and pick the litter up as a gift. If they notice they notice, if they don't they don't.
> You are directly trying to impose your value over someone else's value, with the assumption that you are correct.
I feel this takes political correctness too far. What if someone else's values are that theft is fine, if they need something. If you see someone stealing a bike, should you do nothing because you don't want to impose your values on them?
> The murder in that news story was not triggered by the anti-litter. It seems highly likely that he murderer was already out for blood
What makes you think that? From the story it seems clear that the confrontation took place due to the victim questioning the murderer's right to throw litter in to his sister's car.
Sadly, young men who would kill over such a minor thing as this are not uncommon in London.
I have difficulty imagining a person with the mindset "Violence is not the answer, excepting of course that I will fight to the death to defend a man's freedom to throw his trash in another person's car"
'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'
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.
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 :)
There's plenty of graffiti, just not in plain sight. Look in the alleys.
Regarding the trash, there's two forces at work. One is that there's a rich naturalist tradition here. Japanese love nature, which is why you see so many people enjoying the parks here. Littering goes against that tradition, and the second force at work is that Japanese people really don't buck tradition.
To me, the way they "love" nature, is a bit different form the nature I'm used to. Nature means a weekend walk in the park -meanwhile many riparian areas have simply been paved over. So the love for nature is a little different. It's more "human tamed nature". It's kind of like when humans (yama girls) outnumber trees that you know it's not really nature.
Compare this to the vending machine in the Computer Science department that is always being probed for new attack vectors to allow free products. On the bright side, we do get the latest machines first ;)
I think you'll find that vending machines in the United States can be unlocked with a key just as easily as vending machines in Japan. The distinction in the inventorspot.com article is that in Japan the keys are made available to the landords/administrators of the property.
In the US, I imagine folks would just reuse the axe provided with the fire extinguisher, and not hassle over a key in a time of emergency.
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.
I've lost my wallet quite a few times over the past 10 years in the US, and I've recovered it all but once. Once it came through the mail (missing a single gift card). Today it was waiting for me in Walgreens.
I've found wallets and cell phones, and tracked down the owners, too.
The US isn't the den of iniquity breathless journos like to pretend it is.
I attribute it to a sense of basic human decency that nearly everyone manages to maintain if one isn't suffering from crushing poverty.
My experience of visiting there very much agrees with yours. I particularly remember walking down a dark ally in Kyoto one night, half way down the ally there's this brightly lit vending machine shining like a beacon, in perfect condition, not vandalised, not kicked in, not damaged in any way. I saw many similar examples of this respect for property throughout my time there. This left an impression on me because in my country, a beacon-like vending machine in the middle of a dark ally within a large city would last about one night.
There's certainly pros and cons to the Japanese culture, as with any culture I suppose. The attitude that displays its self in the preservation of the the vending machine is one of the pros. But along with it seems to comes an immensely strong pressure to conform and sacrifice. This is the country that produced the Kamikaze[1] and took ritual suicide almost to the level of an art form.
1. I visited the Chiran Peace Museum (http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/museums/chiran/inde...) while I was in Japan, I found it fascinating to learn of the history of the Kamikaze and see all the paraphernalia on show. I had only ever seen the classic footage of the Kamikaze flying into US ships. I did not know that they also had defensive Kamikaze who would protect Japanese cities by flying into enemy bombers and also small Kamikaze speed boats.
In Japan, one could just reach out and do just that, yet nobody did.
What would be the challenge or rule-breaking here? If you can just do it, there's no accomplishment. The more you guard something the more valuable breaking it becomes. Reminds me of the old story of a mainframe operator who, having grown a frustration against users hacking the system to have it shutdown, simply added a suid script accessible to everyone that shut down the machine. The machine stayed online from that point on.
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.
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.
Vending machines are not vandalized regularly here, but on occasion there is a bust of theft either by breaking them open or machining fake coins so it's not unheard of.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't think you're correct, that's certainly not a "universal" thought, although I suppose there may be subcultures that believe this. I live in the US, and I don't know anyone who thinks this way (at least no one I've discussed it with). We think criminals had a bad upbringing, or that they have some kind of psychological problem (which may be due to physical brain problems).
> "He just looked like a normal person! But obviously he wasn't, because he robbed the store!"
I like this response; it sounds like the response I'd have given.
> I live in the US, and I don't know anyone who thinks this way
You don't know anyone who thinks of any of jaywalking, speeding, streaking, riding in a car without a seatbelt, smoking marijuana, and snorting cocaine as common and often harmless activities? Everyone you know thinks of all of them as activities limited to the mentally handicapped or partially insane?
>Whatever the cause, though, people from the US almost universally think of lawbreaking as a common and often harmless activity
This is to be expected as laws never seem to come off the books, they just stop being enforced. So, in other words, you're probably always breaking the law in the US anyway because some laws even conflict with each other.
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."
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.
As a slightly amusing story, a very Japanese-looking American ladyfriend of mine used to live here. She's ex-military, and more than a bit of a redneck, but you couldn't tell by just looking at her.
So, one day she's on the train, and some guy cops a feel. Women here more often than not don't react to it, but ex-Navy chicks are a different story.
Mr. Pervert got decked, cursed out in English, and arrested at the next station.
Another example of this: when I lived in Japan, I used to park (and lock) my bicycle at a very crowded station and leave it there for several hours. I locked the bicycle but sometimes left my coat in the basket. I continued this habit for several weeks, until finally I left my bicycle there over the weekend while going on a trip. When I came back, the coat was gone. The bicycle was still there, of course.
That said, the most likely and annoying thing to happen to your bicycle in Japan is that the parking police will steal it if you park near a crowded place (eg. any train station) and place it in some storage facility far away from where you live, where you then have to go by bus to pick up your bicycle and cycle home. This happened to me at least 3 times..
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.
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.
>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.
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.)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_suici... (South Korea is #1, USA is #20). They may be composed, but their culture is far from an ideal.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
Hah! You should visit Greece sometime. If it's not bolted down when your shop closes, it won't be there next morning. I've heard of people stealing couches from cafes just because they were drunk out of their minds.
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.
According to a 2003 study of genetics in Britain, the Britons weren't driven out. There's a great amount from Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, but the majority of the genes are from the Britons.
Yes, that is true, and I should have mentioned Northumbria especially because that was a wonderful culture, but their numbers were still greatly reduced. Cornish culture is now completely wiped out.
Edit: Cornishness wiped out as far as continuity. I respect the "revival movement" but the re-rooting process will take awhile even if most of the people there support it.
Egyptians have been a distinct ethnic group along the Nile river for longer than the Japanese have been where they are. Let's not attribute magical properties to long-lived cultures.
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.
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.
I think Japan is a bit more unique geographically in this context. Sure there were people in England that long ago (and same for Greece too) but Japan has been isolated by more water, and their gene pool has remained more or less the same. They know their history and it's all their own. Citing 30,000 years as I did was just a bit in jest and probably an exaggeration.
Africans have been in Africa since the dawn of humankind. Do you think there'd be so many 'wallet' stories as in this thread if we were talking about Africa?
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.