Strength of humanity in crisis...

[shootingstar]

It isn't a matte of bravery or not. The workers who are the walking dead know that they will die soon maybe a month, two... maybe a year from now...

They may have volunteered.

They may have been asked. If you were asked to do this job, you can not turn it down from cultural standpoint. To refuse, implies you are selfish and self centered and not thinking for the good of all. Your honor is tarnished and so is your family.

My heart goes out to the walking dead. They are doing this to save their loved ones, their neighbor, their way of life. If I lived in Japan and if my expertise was in nuclear power, I would seriously consider volunteering. I don't have kids, Only family I have is my elderly mother, my sister and her three children and I'm already in my 50's. I've had a good life. This is the strength of the Japanese culture.

smilingcat

I think this attitude of what some, (stress some) Japanese might do to volunteer for something deadly as self-sacrifice, is something to me personally, what distinguishes "traditional" Chinese cultural thinking from Japanese. I mean there is a Japanese word for this.

It's very sad, smiling cat.

I'm sorry, after losing 2 family members to suicide for completely different reasons, this form of self-sacrifice is not something I agree. The mothers in their anguished grief for the kamikaze son-pilots who died in WWII... by willingly gunning and running their planes into enemy planes or into the ground at instant death.

I guess it's no different from serving in war willingly. Though the difference is that the latter is always the possiblity you will kill /maim civilians not the "enemy" army/navy member on the other side. Dousing a nuclear blown out plant, you're not intentionally hurting anyone,...just yourself....

[Crankin]

It's very hard for me to understand how some can do this. I know it's cultural and thus, I won't comment more, because, of course, I am not Japanese. I wouldn't do anything where I was knowingly putting myself in this position. Yes, it's selfish in the eyes of a different viewpoint and I totally understand that.
This was the main argument I had with my son when he joined the military. Why would you do something that intentionally put yourself in harm's way, when you don't have to? Of course, now that he's married, I think he is starting to see this from a different viewpoint.

[NbyNW]

Interesting account of a man who recalls his experience with the Three Mile Island meltdown.

[OakLeaf]

I really think the thread title is appropriate, that this is about the strength of humanity in crisis, not about the strength of Japanese people distinct from other cultures. From yesterday's LA Times:

examples of heroism are common in such situations, said Dr. Fred Mettler, a University of New Mexico radiologist and advisor to the U.N. on radiation safety.

At one point during the Chernobyl disaster, he said, workers were conferring about how much water was in one reactor pool. No one knew the answer and their instruments couldn't tell them, he said. "An Armenian engineer slipped out and came back in 30 minutes. He said, 'There's 3 feet of water,' " Mettler said. "He did that on his own."

The engineer died soon after of acute radiation poisoning.

And the American man at TMI that NbyNW linked to, who is lucky to have survived - apparently health intact - but couldn't have known that going in.