Japanese Fail at Fire

Japan has been fighting a centuries old losing battle with fire. In the early days it's not that hard to see why, people lived in closely pack wood and straw houses with non-enclosed firs pits for cooking and warmth. All it would take is one wayward spark and half the city would be gone. Indeed Edo/Tokyo has been burnt down more times that anyone can count.

In some ways though nothing has really changed, though people are more aware now about the dangers of fire than in past decades. For example when I got here we went to the disaster center to practice for emergencies like earthquakes and fires by trying to navigate through a dark smokey room. Most of this was brought on after the Kobe earthquake in which more people died from the resulting fires than the quake itself.

This of course doesn't stop people from being stupid with fire. It's not uncommon to see people burning vines and leaves in their yard only 5 feet from their house, smoking is still a large problem and many people do it indoors. Many fires are caused by people smoking in bed and falling asleep. Smoke detectors are still a rarity as a sprinkler systems.

Interesting to see in a country in which the worst disaster is fire that there is very little done to curb it. But perhaps what makes it all the more worse it people do not know how to deal with it. Take for instance last night at my dorm:

Sometime at 1:00am in the morning the fire alarm goes off. For one it's not particularly loud, had I been sleeping I probably wouldn't have noticed right away. As nobody in Japan has any idea what to do, the first thing everybody does is go out into the hallway and stare at the flashing alarm. Unable to figure out why it's flashing everyone proceeds to the lobby where the master alarm control is. They want to turn it off so they can go back to sleep, so they investigate it while someone calls the dorm parents who apparently didn't hear it or just took their sweet time because they didn't come out for a good 10 or so minutes. The first thing instructed was to turn off the siren by pushing a button. The board indicates that the alarm on the 3rd floor was pulled.

So the dorm mother sends some guys up to the 3rd floor to investigate. 5 minutes later they don't come back so she decides to go herself. So she hops in the elevator and takes it up to the 3rd floor. Nobody knows why the alarm was pulled, maybe someone was smoking and the alarm went off or maybe somebody ran into it. Eitherway, after the quick investigation the master alarm which is still going is turned off.

At no time during this whole process was the fire department called. Nobody left the building and the whole process took about 20 minutes. I could only imagine what would happen in a real fire.