Modern values, not tradition, kept Japanese public calm
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It's a truism of disaster studies that panic by elites and the armed forces about mobs, chaos, and looting does far more damage than the supposed "looters," who are often just struggling to find the elements of survival.
After the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 in North China's Hebei Province, for example, the People's Liberation Army had to forcibly disarm local militias who were opening fire on people they suspected of looting and sabotage.
In New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina, white vigilante mobs murdered AfricanAmericans who were looking for help in the wrong neighborhood.
After the Kanto quake, at least 2,500 Koreans, and perhaps as many as 7,000, were murdered in a brutal pogrom. Local vigilantes set up barricades and asked passersby to say Japanese words that contained sounds hard for Koreans to pronounce.
If people failed this shibboleth, they were killed. The victims included not only Koreans, but also Japanese citizens from more remote regions, like Okinawa, who had accents strange to the paranoid locals. Over 700 Chinese were also murdered, as were dozens of ordinary Japanese accused of "looting."
In the chaos after the earthquake, farright Japanese army officers also murdered leftwing activists and their families, including a sixyearold child. The officer responsible, Masahiko Amakasu, served only three years in prison, before being released and going on to become a prominent Japanese official in occupied Manchuria, where he ran the police force and the propaganda department.
Japan has come a long way since those dark days. But it's achieved the remarkable virtues displayed during the recent earthquake not through any inherent cultural qualities, but through the hard work of building a clean, trustworthy system of government.
The story of the Kanto earthquake is grim, but it can also be inspiring.
If Japan can come so far, what can other nations achieve?
The author is an editor with the Global Times and a historian. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com. cn
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