OFUNATO, Japan – There are no cars inside the parking garage at Ofunato police headquarters. Instead, hundreds of dented metal safes, swept out of homes and businesses by last month's tsunami, crowd the long rectangular building. Any one could hold someone's life savings. Safes are washing up along the tsunami-battered coast, and police are trying to find their owners — a unique problem in a country where many people, especially the elderly, still stash their cash at home. By one estimate, some $350 billion worth of yen doesn't circulate. There's even a term for this hidden money in Japanese: "tansu yokin." Or literally, "wardrobe savings." So the massive post-tsunami cleanup under way along hundreds of miles (kilometers) of Japan's ravaged northeastern coast involves the delicate business of separating junk from valuables. As workers and residents pick through the wreckage, they are increasingly stumbling upon cash and locked safes. One month after the March 11 tsunami devastated Ofunato and other nearby cities, police departments already stretched thin now face the growing task of managing lost wealth.
All right, all right. We get it, you're better than everyone else on Earth. Now if you'd like us to keep donating can you throw us a bone and loot a store or crack open a safe that doesn't belong to you?
I don't mind donating to a good cause, but youv'e got to try and help yourself here. Your family just lost everything, you're accepting financial aid from all over the world, the least you could do to help that situation is crack the safe that may or may not belong to you and use the money to buy your family some food or a night's stay in a hotel room. No one is going to judge you, we swear, we just want to feel a little better about ourselves.
Of course in America we wouldn't have this issue with the safes. American's don't have a life savings. We have credit cards. Who needs to save money when you can just run up debt, right?
