The last week hasn’t been an easy one for those of us who follow the daily news. There was the triple whammy of nuclear disaster, tsunami and earthquake in Japan. I watched the numerous Youtube videos of the oncoming monster waves sweeping all in its path – houses, boats and vehicles alike – and felt horror (I really hope those houses I saw on those videos had already been evacuated) at the awesome destructive power of nature at its fury. While Japan is more than 5,000 kilometres away from Singapore and that we’re still reasonably safe from any sort of radioactive emissions coming this way, like many others, I felt great sympathy and sorrow for those who have had their lives or livelihoods wiped out by the destructive forces.
As these things go, there’s been an outpouring of like sympathy from everywhere around the world, and that news media has been widely reporting a group known as Fukushima 50 has contextualized a good portion of that to the supposed indomitable Japanese spirit and propensity to self-sacrifice for the common good. There’s also been that thing about looting apparently being non-existent in Japan despite the calamities, though that’s already been debunked because there’s already been crime, albeit very low.
What has also piqued my interest though is that those sentiments have also resulted in comparisons between the Japanese and the rest of Asia. Some people here, especially those in discussion rooms, have started wondering would Singaporeans react with the same discipline. One of our friends certainly wrote one such post about Japanese discipline in contrast to others, a strongly worded piece that Ling disagreed in parts with, or so she told me over Sunday brunch.
And I agree with the wife. Though the memories of Japanese brutality 65 years ago still linger in many Asian minds and the relative lack of public remorse since that fact has only exemplified that for some, it’s unimaginable that people would dance with glee like how news media reported some Middle-Easterners doing so at 9/11, or like some Chinese netizens making contemptuous remarks of Japanese suffering last week as them receiving just-deserves. I sincerely think the Japanese stoicity is admirable. I am, however, uncomfortable when some of us start putting a race facing adversity up on pedestal and simultaneously run down the rest, especially when our admiration and liking for Japanese culture might be blinding us to the difficulties they face in their own society.
Some of what Japanese society faces is social and well-reported, like schoolyard aggression and bullying and truancy, suicide, gender inquality (Aware really has an easier time here), high divorce rates, or moral depravity (e.g. school girl obsession, hentai). Others are still social but not as widely known, like classroom disintegration from discipline. Then you have those problems that occur at the highest levels; like a government that experiences so much infighting between its major constituent parties, or the recently media reported incidents of cover-ups at Tokyo Electric before it finally exploded in their faces last week. Then we have the behavioral ones that elicit different reactions from different persons experiencing it; like how we were easily able to find really crappy food in Japan despite all that stuff about them exercising great care in cuisine, or that I witnessed a lot of sneezing into open goodness by passer-bys in Kyoto and without apology despite the purported hygiene standards, or that I still personally find loud slurping offensive.
To be fair, a couple of incidents like what we encountered in our December trip to Japan don’t make for general rules. And I don’t for a moment think Singaporeans are saints, what with all those letters written to The Straits Times about dangerous driving, ‘choping’ of seats, bad taxi driver behavior, food wastage at buffets, not always giving up MRT seats to pregnant women or the elderly etc.
But my point, and like what Ling was sharing over brunch then, is that fundamentally, there is no perfect or even near-perfect species of human beings. We’re all cut from the same cloth, more or less. Admiration for specific cultural traits is one thing. Adoration and forgetting the other side of the same coin is something else. And a lot of these social traits might only be obvious when you actually have to work and live with the race and not merely visit them as a tourist.
That said, we in Singapore have never faced a disaster the scale of what happened in the Sendai region last week – and may we never have to – but I for one am hopeful that we’ll be able to rise to the occasion like the Japanese have been able to.
Well said. Indeed, there’s no perfect race/species of human beings. Adoration will truly blind one to many things.