Thoughts arising from the incident at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and the extraordinary exit:
On Tuesday Japan Airlines Flight 516, carrying 367 passengers, many of them revelers returning from the New Year’s holiday, collided on landing with a Japanese coast-guard plane that was carrying supplies for earthquake survivors of the Noto Peninsula. Five of the six on board the latter aircraft died as a fireball engulfed it. Flight 516, an Airbus A350, also quickly began to burn, its cabins filling with smoke so thick they turned pitch black and flight attendants had to use flashlights. In less than 20 minutes the jetliner was consumed by flames; it burned to a husk. Yet all 367 survived, as did the 12-person crew. It has been called a miracle.
From reporters Motoko Rich and Hisako Ueno in the New York Times: As smoke filled the cabin, “the sound of a child’s voice rose above the din of confusion onboard. ‘Please, let us off quickly!’ the child pleaded, using a polite form of Japanese despite the fear washing over the passengers as flight attendants began shouting instructions.” Order held. Attendants evacuated passengers through the exit doors that were usable. Of the factors that produced a good outcome—a well trained crew, a veteran pilot—“the relative absence of panic onboard during the emergency procedure perhaps helped the most.”
The Times quoted a 17-year-old passenger from Stockholm, Anton Deibe: “The cabin crew were very professional, but one could see even in their eyes that they were scared.” Still, “no one ran ahead to save themselves. Everyone waited for instructions.” It grew hot inside, and people yelled, but, Anton later told the Times, “there was a lot less commotion than I would have thought. The passengers were calm.” He and his family crawled to the door and made it down the emergency slide. “It was a long drop.”
From Journal reporters River Davis, Megumi Fujikawa and Alison Sider: As a blaze spread in the back of the plane, passengers understood “they had only minutes to save themselves from a fiery death.” They shouted to open the doors. Joseph Hayashi, 28, was in seat 27B. He said people screamed at the initial impact, “and then everything got eerily quiet.” The woman in the next seat seemed to know something about emergency procedures. “She started yelling, ‘Put your head down, keep your seat belts on, stay in your seat,’ ” he said. When some people tried to get their things, other passengers responded. “People were like, ‘What are you doing? Those things don’t matter.’ ” Hiroshi Kaneko, a 67-year-old philosophy professor, told the Journal no one around him panicked. “He was more scared when he got home and saw the footage on television.”
After the crash a friend visiting Kyoto wrote me to say he felt the primary reason no one lost their life is that the Japanese are “less individualist and more consensual.” They see themselves as a corporate entity; they are part of something, a nation with ingrained mores and ways of being.
I asked Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, what it is about the Japanese that saved the day. “It’s a society that places high value on personal honor, responsibility to community, and respect for authority,” he said. “No one in Japan would mouth off or be violent with a flight attendant trying to protect you and the rest of the flying public, for example.” He followed up, in a text: “Also, here five year olds walk to school unaccompanied, crossing busy streets for blocks. Cars stop and kids at walkways cross. It’s sublime.”
A question that I suspect crossed a lot of American minds: What if that had been a Delta flight at JFK full of Americans revelers home from holiday? Would it have gone in such an orderly way and ended so successfully?
My guess is that it would have been different. More every-man-for-himself. American individualism is a beautiful thing but can tip toward narcissism, and we’re tipping. The guy in seat 3A would be rummaging through the overhead looking for his bag and blocking the aisle. The 20-year-old woman would be standing on her seat and screaming as she live-streams on TikTok. The social-media influencer in 15B would be demanding someone come and lift her from her seat.
We less and less see ourselves as part of a large corporate endeavor, something with traditions and expectations. We have less expectation the other person will do the right thing. We spend a lot of time on social media watching Americans let other Americans down—robbing them, hijacking cars. We are demoralized by what we see of us. We haven’t absorbed in a long time a healthy sense of “we are the people of America, we stay calm.” Because the meaning of “we are Americans” has changed from “we come from something real and hold just pride in it” to “we come from a rapacious nation founded on wicked things.”
Who wants to be part of that, and carry on that way of being? This too has demoralized us. And since the internet and its constant images, we honor emotion more than thought; and if at the moment what people feel is wild fear, well, be true to your emotions. We don’t respect self-restraint so much, and wonder if it’s cowardice.
Our current virtues, off the top, right now in 2024? We are a people of wild creativity—it’s still there, though more and more feels latent. We are inventive—we find the latest in medical research and devices. We are involved—we’re always fussing about the world and trying, in sometimes dizzy ways, to improve it. We are ambitious: We mean to rise, we like money, fame and glamour, but more-serious attainment, too. We are by nature and tradition egalitarian, deeply so, always have been. Our religious faith, among those who feel it, is profound and unembarrassed, though they seem fewer each year. A lot of us wish to be artists—we’re writing scripts and songs, eager to perform. And we’re friendly: Everyone in the world still acknowledges that.
But we do need to work on our national style. In these areas: common courtesy, which doesn’t have to be an old-fashioned thing. A shown respect for others, an actual concern for them. Putting reason back up there with emotion. And yes, the adults being the adults in the room and on the plane. And looking around and spying the guy in 15F, who looks like an Army Ranger on vacation, who’s alert, focused and capable. And asking him to pick up the guy in first class who’s blocking the aisle while he rummages in the overhead bin. “Just pick him up and put him aside like he’s a piece of luggage.” And the Ranger does, and then announces, “OK, everyone, we’re walking forward. Follow.”
A sense of somebody in charge—that’s one of the things that we lack. A sense of someone taking responsibility.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we’d all be peerless on Flight 516. But it can’t hurt to ask: Who you would have been in that crash? What role would you have played?