Article on Nichibei Times' Columnist Editorial
"My jaw dropped in astonishment after reading this," writes Omori. "Leave it to the Japanese to react in this vindictive, cruel, hostile fashion."
Though she is puzzled by Japan's reaction to the hostages, Omori recognizes some of the values that lie beneath it. "The Japanese, underneath all their surface sophistication, their adaptations of Western ways and their great prosperity, still maintain their old value systems," she writes. "[Japanese culture] still values 'group think' over everything else. Any behavior that is maverick and untraditional calls for punishment and even banishment."
The Japanese public's reaction reflects some of the same cultural values that castigated Japanese Americans for speaking out against the internment camps in the 1940s, writes Omori. At that time, Japanese Americans who protested the internment camps were shamed because the community was desperate to project the image that they were patriotic Americans.
"The absurdity in this situation was that such conformity is so much more Japanese than American in sprit," she writes. "The Japanese ethos, as exhibited in this story of the vilification of the return of these Japanese hostages from Iraq, smacks of some ancient, village mentality in which anyone who deviates from village norms is punished, expelled and made to feel that they are no longer welcome in the group, and their families are made to feel that they are also bad to have such a person within the family. Such a shriveled mentality hardly seems fitting for a modern, sleek contemporary society, but there it is."
