Loyalty and Honor

Along with news about the catastrophe in Japan we are seeing coverage about the Japanese people and the sense of honor and loyalty that characterizes their culture. Not only in helping and saving strangers as people tried to get out of the way of the tsunami, but especially now the workers trying at great personal risk to prevent meltdown in the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. 

Stationed in Japan from 1963 to 1966 we lived in Navy housing in Yokohama, about fifteen miles from my office at the Navy base in Yokosuka. Six officers shared driving in a carpool back and forth in that day before there were many air-conditioned cars; in fact, my ’63 Chevrolet station wagon was a novelty and luxury, the only air-conditioned car in the group.

The drive was about an hour each way and the road from Yokohama to Yokosuka wound not through Japanese countryside but through a densely populated area that varied industrial, shops, residential, past temples and shrines with torii gates marking transition from profane to sacred, and we drove by any number of small manufacturing plants. With the car windows open we could hear, coming from every plant every morning, the workers gathered and lustily singing the company song. Americans with loyalty to not much but ourselves, this always seemed odd and amusing. 

That was nearly fifty years ago and things may have changed, but we also thought it quaint and peculiar that once a Japanese person took employment with a company in Japan, there was no job mobility of moving from company to company seeking career advancement. People stayed with their company for life and the company was obliged to keep them on until retirement. The Japanese way of life, it was even so with the Japanese who worked for us in the offices, warehouses, and industrial facilities of the U. S. Navy.

Looking back to those days, it is easy for me to understand the loyalty of the team of fifty or so who are working to prevent a nuclear disaster, working fervently in conditions of radiation exposure that surely will destroy health and even life. They are working together to save others. It’s the way the Japanese are as a people. Nothing, not even life itself, is valued more highly than honor and loyalty. From a different day and age it explains the sacrifice of the Japanese suicide pilots who attacked our warships toward the end of World War II: the Kamikaze, divine wind. 

From today’s apocalyptic nightmare of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear calamity in wintry snow and cold, seeing the character of the Japanese people may be a blessing for the rest of the world.

TW+