“No one seemed to be out of their minds. No one blamed, complained or instigated anyone or anything. They seemed to be focused on settling the situations and to maintain the orders,” Choi Sun-hee, a 53-year-old housewife, said Saturday night as she watched TV news of people queuing to be rescued and children waiting patiently for their teachers’ and parents’ directions.

“Usually, people would cry out loud asking for food and shelters. They would blame the government for ill conduction of measures against natural disease. The shops would be vandalized and moral hazard would be detected everywhere,” she said.

Such chaos was reported in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the earthquake in Haiti last year. The confusion was perceived as quite natural, observers said.

However, Japanese took a different stance. A reporter staying in the disaster stricken Miyagi Prefecture witnessed a sense of strong order and unity.

“At a hotel, which was used as a shelter, people lined up for supplies. They would put the elderly, disabled, sick and young people to the front of the queue so that they could get the items ahead. When 10 bowls of soup arrived, they would pass them to the back of the queue, yielding to others,” he said.

He said people were sharing items with one another, trying to encourage each other rather than moan about their loss. “It was as if they were holding their own grief so that someone who had graver sorrow could hold theirs,” he said.

“I was totally moved by the way people reacted to the nightmare-ish disaster. I pay all my respect to the people standing calm, working for the recovery,” a college student, Kim Eugene, said.

Japanese people’s attitude caught Koreans’ eyes when 10 Japanese tourists were killed by a fire in a shooting lodge in Busan in 2009. The bereaved families did not shout for compensation or make a scene. They wept and expressed their subtle grief, collected the dead bodies of their beloved ones and went back to their country without fuss.

“Japanese people are known for not showing too much of their emotions, especially when they are negative ones, exteriorly. They also believe that death isn’t the end of their lives,” Kim Eun-jung, who has stayed in Japan for several years, said.

She said the Japanese people’s sense of “meiwaku,” a desire to not offend anyone, led to the harmony. “This is something we should learn from them: Always think about others and grab control of yourself amidst the deep and overwhelming devastation. That will save us at the end,” she added.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)