Walking down the stairway in the main lecture hall on my campus the other day, I noticed a small, pink cloth zipper-bag perched neatly atop a crook in the marble banister. Instinctively I knew that someone had found it in that general vicinity and placed it in its perch. The finder could have taken it, together with his or her contact information, to the “otoshimono” (lost and found) area of some nearby office, where the owner might eventually drift in, claim it, and contact the finder to thank him or her (as is a custom with Japanese lost-and-founds), but this would be more trouble for everyone. Conversely, the pouch looked chock full and somewhat valuable (although I didn’t open it to see what was inside), and it could have easily been stolen from its perch in the lonely stairwell. Yet, knowing that the owner had already lost it, no clearly marked ‘lost and found’ was located in any obvious location, and the owner would be most likely to notice it in such a place where one passes by every day, this solution actually seemed the most reasonable. But the rationale for it clearly depends on a belief that passers-by would not steal it.
In the past, I have found items and money on the ground and been encouraged to take these to the police office. Having done so at Narita Airport once with a 1000-yen bill (a little under US$10 at the time), its owner drifted inside the police office, but it was too late; I had already submitted the bill to the police, who were then loathe to simply hand it back to its owner without confirming the owner’s identifying information as well as mine. Even with mutually hectic travel schedules, it took a little bit of convincing to get the police officers to abbreviate the lost-and-found procedures they hold with deep conviction.
Once when at the American Embassy, I had an encounter that punctuated this cultural difference to me when an American coming for some paperwork happened to find a 1000-yen bill on the floor. He looked around and, seeing no takers, slipped the bill into his pocket. Almost as if it were a comedy skit, the bill’s Japanese owner stumbled past me into the office only 5 or 10 minutes later and, glancing around, began to ask if anyone had seen a 1000-yen bill. When the American fellow produced it and tried to hand it to her, she began to refuse it, saying she did not want to ask him to replace her bill for her (not fathoming that it was her bill in his pocket). This American fellow’s Japanese wife was becoming visibly embarrassed, as she found herself sandwiched between two value systems and collective moral responsibility for her husband’s reprehensible handling of his discovery, within the Japanese cosmology. After considerable negotiation efforts he finally convinced the owner to take it back from him with no official mediation by the office staff.
Contrast that to the larger bills (perhaps Canadian $100, if I recall correctly) that were stolen out of a traveler’s wallet at a youth hostel where I stayed in Montreal this past March. The owner of the money brought this theft to the attention of the front desk, where employees helplessly told him they had not received any money identified as lost, and the traveler apologetically disclaimed the fact that he had not been careful enough in his placement of his wallet. This turning of moral tables irked me deeply, because, even though I realize theft is not unheard of in Japan, it is sufficiently rare that the locus of responsibility was much closer to the thief than the victim in my Japan-conditioned mind.
Why do Japanese people return things so dependably? I would like to think of it as a superior moral code, and that would not be all wrong. But clearly there is some training involved here, and it entails a number of specific protocols about bringing found items to socially agreed upon officials and undergoing an information relay procedure to facilitate the expression of gratitude, and even a 10% reward, to be paid without coercion by the owner to the finder. Material honesty is one behavior that is extremely difficult to enforce with external rewards and punishments. The high level of moral honesty one encounters in Japan, therefore, serves as a critical piece of evidence demonstrating the role of empathic training of young people.
Neural science tells us, according to an episode of the BBC’s The Forum I listened to this morning, that there are certain parts of the brain that “light up” when an individual exercises empathy, and some people light up those neural pathways in more consistent patterns than others. In fact the Japanese word omoiyari, or ‘empathy’, is used frequently in Japanese educational discourse, as researchers like Joseph Tobin et al, Merry White, Lois Peak, Catherine Lewis, and others have long pointed out. That is, Japanese educators avoid punishment like the plague, as a means of managing young people, preferring to appeal to young people’s sense of empathy. How many times have I heard the expression “aite no kimochi ni naru,” or “feel what the other person feels,” by adults dealing with children with absolutely no means of enforcing their will other than coaxing! This can be annoying when students in public schools don’t feel like feeling other people’s feelings. But the empathic training Japanese people receive so often throughout their school days must certainly have its effect in everyday life within Japanese society.
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