Interesting to fully realize the impact on culture on how people cope with large disasters.
Nine days after Japan's tsunami, the remarkable truth is this. The people who have lost absolutely everything are coping far better than the people who have lost absolutely nothing.
For 200 miles along the coast, the scene is an exact copy of an earlier Japanese horror. In the flattened towns, with their isolated skeletons of buildings and their hectares of rubble, Hiroshima is the only possible comparison.
But at the evacuation centres in north-eastern Japan, survivors hold doors open for each other and bow politely to visitors. Postal service has resumed. The relief effort is going full blast, with
even visiting foreigners offered food because there is so much. There's not much of anything
else, admittedly. But across the disaster area, journalists have searched in vain for a single case of violence, looting, panic – or even queue-jumping.Time and again, you hear of lives saved by calmness, organisation and discipline. At one low-lying secondary school half a mile from the sea, the children lined up in the playground for a post-earthquake headcount; surely hundreds must have perished.
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