Japanese is not scared of dying if it’s with everyone, but scared of living alone.
On the other hand, Japanese is starting to lose the sense of community.
Japan is known to be a country of cooperation. Actually, Japanese tend to have strong group mind.
Their group mind appears as variety of versions and tie people up to Japan instead of evacuating.
In rural areas, it’s represented as “the loyalty to land inherited from ancestors”. This is a type of animism for farmers.
In city areas, it’s represented as “the loyalty to the job or social status”.
However, this is the obsessive loyalty for something, but not a strong connection among individuals.
Unexpectedly, Japanese don’t help each other.
Let’s see it in two different cases, in city, and in rural areas.
In city areas, the crime rate is very low and infrastructure is well maintained. However it is covered with the atmosphere that you can’t talk what you think.
Since 5 or 6 years ago, the mentality has been highly evaluated, which is “read the atmosphere”.
This is something called social pressure, but it doesn’t lead anyone to do anything specific.
It forces you not to disturb the atmosphere, which is very subjective and vague, and discourages you to express yourself.
Because this is stressful, people start to force others to follow this to share the pain.
In 60s or 70s, “the power” was TV, movies, and newspaper. It was easy to see how they are expected to act, but now, people are to have “the power” inside of ourselves and required to guess how “the power” wants us to act.
Because people have been trying to read the atmosphere for too long, they are starting to be unable to know what they really want to do.
It seems like to make people grow and more mature, but it actually stops people mentally growing up.
This is preventing people from having social movement against the government like Tunisian revolution, which started from Internet, and also from helping each other to evacuate to share the information.
Japan is still strongly united, but it’s not the connection among people, it’s the connection between the government and individuals.
Japanese people are becoming more and more individualistic but it’s an empty individualism because they forgot what they want. They are separated, empty, and lonely. The high suicidal rate comes from this phenomena as well.
In rural areas, individuals are not required to have “the power” in themselves yet, but it’s in the community. The community exists only for itself.
No one is allowed to change the community whatever it is for.
Now the most important rural areas are Fukushima and Okinawa. Fukushima is the ground zero, but still most of the people can’t evacuate. Okinawa is the last radiation haven. However, because of the government policy to share radioactive debris and food, it’s becoming not safe anymore.
In both of the areas, people are forced to absolutely obey and community. In Fukushima, knowing it’s totally meaningless and rather to be harmful, people are to join community decontamination or marathon race. There is no clear punishment rule, but if they don’t join it, they will feel excluded from the community and it is likely that their children are bullied in school or street.
I often hear that people who managed to evacuate to Okinawa had to join the local dinner party and eat mushroom or rice from the main island of Japan. The local citizens do not have any bad intention to make the evacuating people internally exposed. They are just ignorant. However, same as in Fukushima, they can not resist. If they resist, they will be excluded and the children will be bullied as well.
They don’t learn new things eagerly because if they study radiation risk, the community changes. The absolute loyalty for the community does not allow them to do anything which may change the community. They choose to kill enlighten people to save the community.
Japanese is thought to be good at team work, but actually, it’s only the team work under a certain rule.
When they don’t have a rule to follow, they restrict each other and the life of individual is unfairly underestimated.
Iori Mochizuki