I was fortunate enough to receive a one-year scholarship from the Ministry of Education to study at Hirosaki National University, located in Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture. Aomori is the northernmost prefecture on Japan's main island, and the winters get pretty cold.
The classrooms were without exception freezing cold. Students kept their coats and scarves on during classes. I knew that some American schools have a policy of not using the boilers until a certain date, pretty much regardless of what the actual temperatures are. I assumed that Hiro-Dai must have a similar policy. There were radiators in the rooms, but they were all always cold to the touch.
I asked some students when the school would start to heat the classrooms. No one knew. I asked the professor. He didn't know. Nobody knew.
Then one day, while standing by the window, I could clearly hear the sound of steam hissing through the pipes running outside the windows. Yet, the classrooms remained like meat lockers. I asked the students if we could turn on the radiators. They felt that it was not allowed for students to touch them and just went on freezing.
Getting tired of freezing, I decided to sit next to the radiator and turn it on during the class, and then turn it off again later. Some students seemed sure that lightning would strike me. Of course, there wasn't time for the radiator to heat the entire room, but at least I got warm (a bit).
This was my first exposure to a phenomenon I later ran into again when working as a truck driver: Often in Japan, responsibility or accountability for a particular job or aspect of a job is not clearly assigned to any one person (not always, of course). The students assumed the teacher would take care of the heat. The teacher assumed the building staff would take care of the heat. And the staff assumed that if the students were cold, they would turn on the heat themselves. As a consequence, everybody just sat there and froze, with pipes hissing with steam running right outside the window. Heat was just a twist of the radiator knob away. And Japanese nature just prevented everyone from asking someone else WHY there was no heat. They just assumed that the proper people must be tending to it.
We can see shades of this now everytime there is a disaster in Japan. Government reaction as a rule is uncoordinated, misdirected, and ineffectual. It seems that every agency just assumed that some other agency was supposed to take care of things. So often, the left hand of the Japanese Government has no idea what the right hand is doing.
A couple of the first things the government did during the Kobe earthquake were to have a meeting to decide what to call the earthquake and another to argue about what the magnitude had been. There was some question as to whether it qualified as a 7 on the Japanese scale (on which 7 is the strongest possible) or as a 6 point something. The yakuza actually reacted with food aid faster than the government did. When Switzerland volunteered a rescue dog team (there were NO rescue dogs in Japan) they were told the dogs would have to go through a two week quarantine period before being allowed in Kobe. When the Phillipines offered to send aid and volunteers they were flatly refused. It apparantly hurt the governments pride to accept aid from a country that it normally provides aid to.
Yet another example of this is the debacle concerning the Russian tanker which broke up and coated areas on Japan's west coast with crude oil. Official reaction has been extremely lacking and ineffectual. Though Japan imports practically all of it's oil, no preparations had been made to deal with a disaster of this sort. The local prefectural and municipal governments were pretty much left to clean it up on their own. Again, some offers of assistance from other countries were refused. Some individuals offered to send special equipment which would aid in cleaning up the oil. They were told that first Japan would put the equipment through a two week testing period to check that it was safe and effective. That was a hell of a thing to say when the most effective thing they were doing was sending people out in fishing boats with little (less than one liter, perhaps) scoops on the end of long handles to scoop the oil from the surface of the sea. The bow section of the ship had run aground (not ashore) near the beach and efforts were made to pump out the oil. At the same time it was decided to build a road out to the bow section fo facilitate the pumping. A reported $40 million was used to build a road out to the bow section. But by the time it was completed, most of the oil had been pumped out and it was no longer necessary. It will now be necessary to demolish the road to avoid damage to local fisheries (yes, I know, the oil already did that)
Japan Banner Exchange Site