The power of water

[RONDAL]

Re: The power of water

god the garbage thing is crazy. there is never litter ANYWHERE. you dont even see garbage cans. people simply take their garbage and put it back in their bag and then get rid of it in some super secret place and way. its unreal!
realy if you havent been, its a must see. Unlike travelling other parts of the world, asia is like a different world. everything is just so different its amazing.

[luunta]

Re: The power of water

the world will help japan out a ton.. thier economy is a super helper for worldwide..
cars, electronics, etc.. tom cruise the last samurai.. we couldn't live without this stuff

japanese economy hasn't been very hot for a few years now, if i'm not mistaken.

[RONDAL]

Re: The power of water

youre not. they were in serious debt and have been on a downward spiral since the collapse in the 90's

[luunta]

Re: The power of water

yeah. also tom cruise doesn't really drive the economy either.

[R_Ethug]

Re: The power of water

tom cruise joke aside

andrew you been to hong kong.. your description reminds of of that

SUPER nice people.. train line ups to get on/off nobody is pushing,etc
nobody is on the train talking so loud or ipod'd up to volume 10000

city was insanely clean.. we didn't see a single piece of garbage! and no gum..i swore they used street cleaners every night! (oddly we saw this in barcelona! haha)

anyways i hope the country gets better.. its really sad to see the events that have struck around the world in the last many years

sometime in the back of my mind says NA is in for something too

[Canadian Turbo]

Re: The power of water

Ryan I have been to Hong Kong and it is nice and fairly clean but Tokyo is still on another level in comparison. Really hoping things improve for the Japanese people shortly.

A great article on the attitude and culture of the Japanese people from the National Post:

Amid the uprooted trees, the cracked mud, and the sea of grey concrete, a cloaked body -one of the thousands yet to be retrieved -lays outstretched before him. The man, a Japanese police officer in rubber boots and a neon safety vest, pauses to bring his hands together in prayer, and bows.

All around him, there is death and uncertainty. But in that moment, with his white helmet tilted to the earth that swallowed so many, there is respect, order, even politeness.

Elsewhere, survivors in the wrecked northern prefecture are overheard apologizing to rescuers for the inconvenience -surely someone is worse off -and an injured woman saved by a Japanese soldier bows to thank him.

These are just some of the stories that convey the extraordinary sense of calm on the Japanese archipelago amid conditions that in perhaps any other place would have led to chaos.

Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake was so violent that the planet shifted 25 centimetres on its axis, the 24-hour day was shortened by 1.8 microseconds, and the Pacific Ocean swelled into a hungry tsunami -a Japanese word meaning "harbour wave."

But the fierceness of the geographic upheaval cannot erase a culture that for centuries has met disaster with stoicism. The earth may shake, but the Japanese remain resolute, although sometimes shaken.

"It was a scene from hell," said Jin Sato, mayor of the fishing port of Minami Sanriku, where as many as 10,000 may have been swept into the sea. "It was beyond anything that we could have imagined."

Save for the sirens, footage from the disaster is eerily quiet, devoid of the screaming or frantic verbal outbursts typically associated with calamity. Even now, as the nation braces for a potential nuclear reckoning, pause prevails.

Queues for water and fuel are single-file. Shoes are neatly arranged in the shelters throughout the hard-hit northern Honshu prefecture of Miyagi. There have been no reports of looting, as there were in earthquake-ravaged Haiti or after Hurricane Katrina or in a flood-riddled England in 2007.

"When 10 bowls of soup arrived [at the shelter], they would pass them to the back of the queue, yielding to others," a man in the Miyagi prefecture told the Korean Herald. Rather than publicly lament their loss, the man said survivors at the shelter "were holding their own grief so that someone who had graver sorrow could hold theirs."

The international community has watched with wonder as the Japanese confront their three-fold catastrophe with fortitude. Western journalists seeking emotional victims -sobbing with grief or flailing with anger at the government for this or that -have been hard-pressed.

"What I have seen in the past few days is pretty unusual, and pretty impressive," said Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent.

"The Japanese culture encourages a heightened sense of individual responsibility, but also a very powerful sense of solidarity, and that is a very powerful combination."

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan described Friday's earthquake as the country's worst crisis since the Second World War, and he called for the population to remain calm.

"In the past we have overcome all kinds of hardship," he said. "Each of you should accept the responsibility to overcome this crisis and try to create a new Japan."

The Japanese know natural disaster well: There was the Great Kanto quake of 1923 that killed more than 140,000, and there was the 1995 Kobe quake that took the lives of 7,000. The record of earthquakes and tsunamis goes back to at least 1896, when more than 30,000 souls were washed away by a 25-metre wave in the now-wrecked city of Sendai.

But a history of catastrophe and renewal is not the sole explanation for the ingrained stoicisim. Culture and religion also play a role.

"In Japanese culture, there's a sort of nobility in suffering with a stiff upper lip, in mustering the spiritual, psychological resources internally," said John Nelson, a cultural anthropologist and chairman of the department of theology and religion at the University of San Francisco.

"There's even a word for quietly enduring difficult situations: Gaman."

Gaman broadly means a calm endurance, and as a cultural concept dates back to the medieval period, when Japan faced a smattering of regime changes, social disruptions and civil wars, Mr. Nelson said.

Today, the Japanese are hunkering down for the worst disaster since being pulverized by Allied bombers in the Second World War -since enduring the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then, three days did not pass before public services were up and running.

And today, as in the past, the Japanese are hunkering together. Whether driven by culture, or Buddhism, or Christianity, or by the indigenous spirituality of Shinto, the people of Japan -especially in the hardscrabble rural regions -have a tremendous sense of community.

"It's part of Japanese nature," said Reverend Koichi Barrish, an American Shinto priest. "People are cooperating instead of turning on each other."

"The sense of trust and solidarity in your neighbours is quite unique," said Mr. Furedi, who reminisced about stories from the 1995 Kobe quake, when, fearing that aftershocks might swallow their homes, people trusted one another and left their belongings on the street.

Mr. Nelson said the tradition of cooperation and silent resilience is perhaps rooted in necessity, too: Japan, a nation of more than 127 million, is roughly the size of the U.S. state of Montana. "You have to submerge emotions and feelings in order to get along with people," he said.

But Mr. Nelson reminds that these are the same people who last week watched as their homes and loved ones were swept away by a roiling sea. "Make no doubt," he said, "these people are traumatized by what's happened."