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If your home was
hit by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and radiation from a
nuclear power plant, you’d be forgiven for not remaining calm. Yet
that’s what many Japanese quake victims appear to be doing. People are
forming lines outside supermarkets. Life is “particularly orderly,”
according to PBS. “Japanese discipline rules despite disaster,” says a
columnist for The Philippine Star.

Anyone who has seen
“Big Bird in Japan” knows the shorthand for Japanese culture: they’re
so honest and disciplined! They’re a collective society! They value the
group over the individual! Of course they’re not going to steal
anything after the most devastating natural disaster of their lifetimes
— unlike those undisciplined thieves in post-Katrina New Orleans and
post-earthquake Haiti. Even if they’re desperate for food, the Japanese
will still wait in line for groceries.

There’s a
circularity to these cultural explanations, says Mark D. West, a
professor at University of Michigan Law School: “Why don’t Japanese
loot? Because it’s not in their culture. How is that culture defined?
An absence of looting.” A better explanation may be structural factors:
a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police
presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations.

Honesty, with incentives

Japanese people
may well be more honest than most. But the Japanese legal structure
rewards honesty more than most. In a 2003 study on Japan’s famous
policy for recovering lost property, West argues that the high rates of
recovery have less to do with altruism than with the system of carrots
and sticks that incentivizes people to return property they find rather
than keep it. For example, if you find an umbrella and turn it in to
the cops, you get a finder’s fee of 5 to 20 percent of its value if the
owner picks it up. If they don’t pick it up within six months, the
finder gets to keep the umbrella. Japanese learn about this system from
a young age, and a child’s first trip to the nearest police station
after finding a small coin, say, is a rite of passage that both
children and police officers take seriously. At the same time, police
enforce small crimes like petty theft, which contributes to an overall
sense of security and order, along the lines of the “broken windows”
policy implemented in New York City in the 1990s. Failure to return a
found wallet can result in hours of interrogation at best, and up to 10
years in prison at worst.

Police presence

Japan has an active
and visible police force of nearly 300,000 officers across the country.
Cops walk their beats and chat up local residents and shopkeepers.
Police are posted at ubiquitous kobans, police boxes manned by one or
two officers, and in cities there’s almost always a koban within
walking distance of another koban. A survey in 1992 found that 95 per
cent of residents knew where the nearest koban was, and 14 percent knew
the name of an officer who worked there. Cops are paid well — the force
attracts many college graduates — and can live in cheap government
housing. They also care a lot about public relations: The Tokyo
Metropolitan Police even has a mascot, Pipo-kun, whose name means
“people + police.” They’re good at their jobs, too: The clearance rate
for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2 per cent, according to West
— so unbelievable that some attribute it to underreporting.

Organised crime

Police aren’t the
only ones on patrol since the earthquake hit. Members of the Yakuza,
Japan’s organized crime syndicate, have also been enforcing order. All
three major crime groups — the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, and
the Inagawa-kai — have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their
turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t
occur,” writes Jake Adelstein, author of “Tokyo Vice: An American
Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan,” in an e-mail message. “The
Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of [humanitarian aid]
supplies nationwide and I believe that’s a conservative estimate.” One
group has even opened its Tokyo offices to displaced Japanese and
foreigners who were stranded after the first tremors disabled public
transportation. “As one Sumiyoshi-kai boss put it to me over the
phone,” says Adelstein, “’In times of crisis, there are not Yakuza and
civilians or foreigners. There are only human beings and we should help
each other.’” Even during times of peace, the Yakuza enforce order,
says Adelstein. They make their money off extortion, prostitution, and
drug trafficking. But they consider theft grounds for expulsion.

That’s not to say
that a culture of reciprocity and community doesn’t play a role in the
relatively calm response to the quake. It’s just that these
characteristics are reinforced by systems and institutions. Adelstein
quotes an old Japanese saying that explains the reciprocal mindset:
“Your kindness will be rewarded in the end. Charity is a good
investment.” But there’s a flipside, too: Unkindness will be punished.

New York Times