Why Is There No Looting in Japan?

A Telegraph blogger asks a good question:

The landscape of parts of Japan looks like the aftermath of World War Two; no industrialised country since then has suffered such a death toll. The one tiny, tiny consolation is the extent to which it shows how humanity can rally round in times of adversity, with heroic British rescue teams joining colleagues from the US and elsewhere to fly out.

And solidarity seems especially strong in Japan itself. Perhaps even more impressive than Japan’s technological power is its social strength, with supermarkets cutting prices and vending machine owners giving out free drinks as people work together to survive. Most noticeably of all, there has been no looting, and I’m not the only one curious about this.

This is quite unusual among human cultures, and it’s unlikely it would be the case in Britain. During the 2007 floods in the West Country abandoned cars were broken into and free packs of bottled water were stolen. There was looting in Chile after the earthquake last year – so much so that troops were sent in; in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina saw looting on a shocking scale.

Why do some cultures react to disaster by reverting to everyone for himself, but others – especially the Japanese – display altruism even in adversity?

I'll offer my own theory. The concept of "saving face" and shame is very powerful in the Japanese culture. That's one of the reason so few prisoners were taken during the island-hopping campaigns of WWII. The Japanese would fight to the death or commit suicide rather than be subjected to the humiliation of capture.

That same aversion to shame exists today in Japanese culture, while people in many other cultures who engage in barbaric looting activity simply have no shame. We've seen it in the incidents mentioned above, as well as some situations right here in the Los Angeles area such as the 1992 riots or the "celebrations" following Laker championships.  While the Japanese would consider it shameful to steal another's property, especially in a time of disaster, that trait seems to be rare among others in similar situations.