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RELATED TOPIC:
THE JAPANESE FAMILY

RELATED TOPIC:
EDUCATION & WORK

RELATED TOPIC:
JAPANESE SOCIETY

RELATED TOPIC:
POP CULTURE

RELATED TOPIC:
RELIGIONS

 
CONTEMPORARY JAPAN:
URBAN & RURAL LIFE

Volunteer Fire Departments
The Japanese archipelago — with more than one thousand islands in all — spans diverse living environments: snowy mountains in the northern island of Hokkaido; bustling cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka; tropical rice paddies in southern Kyushu. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre describe the character of both urban and rural life in Japan.

Theodore Bestor :: You wouldn’t think that a city like Tokyo would need volunteer fire departments. After all, it’s a big modern city, an industrial society. But in fact volunteer fire departments are everywhere; there are hundreds of them throughout Tokyo, and they play an important role in sort of defining the social institutions of particular neighborhoods.

But there are also practical reasons why volunteer fire departments are necessary. If you look at a map of Tokyo, for example, you’ll see that throughout the city, the street plan is this mass of twisting, turning, little alleyways. There’s no straight line between here and there. And so in many neighborhoods volunteer departments are needed if only to be able to guide the professional firefighters to the scene of a fire, tell them which alley to go down, which street they need to turn at, because unless you’re a native of the neighborhood you may not be able to find your way.