No looting, just keeping calm and carrying on: Ordinary Japanese try to get back to normality

Japanese people affected by the earthquake and tsunami maintained a quiet dignity today as they patiently queued for water and food.

Survivors were seen searching for loved ones or helping to clean up streets with few explosions of anger, despite the severity of the tragedy.

Only near the troubled Fukushima nuclear plant, where fears of radiation leaks are frightening residents, were tempers seen to fray.

Stoic: Ordinary Japanese people strive to help each other in the wake of the disaster in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture

Osamu Hayasaka was among those receiving free drinks handed out by the owners of a shop in Tagajo, north-eastern Japan.

'There are a lot of older people near where I live, so I'll give them some of this,' the 61-year-old said, strapping two boxes onto his bicycle.

His extended family of six has no power, intermittent water and little food.

But, he said, he is not angry at the government; he understands that officials have other priorities.

Japan is a nation of 127 million people with a long history of disasters, both manmade and natural, from a 1923 earthquake that killed 142,800 in the Tokyo region to the country's doomed entry into the Second World War, which ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

All through these and more recent traumas, including a 1995 earthquake that killed 6,400 in Kobe, the Japanese have endured and rebuilt their country with a usually quiet and uncomplaining resolve.

Now the country's spirit is once again being tested by what its prime minister has called its most severe crisis since the end of the Second World War.

The earthquake and ensuing tsunami killed untold thousands and left many more without shelter and electricity and struggling to find water, fuel and food.

Even as rescuers begin to reach them, officials are desperately trying to prevent serious radiation leaks from the Fukushima nuclear reactors.

Amid the chaos, foreign journalists have remarked on the polite demeanour, the lack of anger, the little if any looting or profiteering that seems to characterise disasters elsewhere.

An American academic, Robert Dujarric, was stuck in a halted bullet train overnight after the earthquake.

Passengers remained calm and didn't pester train staff with questions, said Mr Dujarric, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies at the Temple University campus in Tokyo.

'If you have to spend 16 hours in a stationary train and an additional nine hours getting home, do it in Japan.'

Two phrases offer some insight into the Japanese psyche.

One is 'shikata ga nai', which roughly translates as 'it can't be helped,' and is a common reaction to situations beyond one's control.

The other is 'gaman', considered a virtue. It means to be patient and persevere in the face of suffering.

Theories abound on what makes the Japanese so resilient and prone to group effort.

Some cite the centuries-old need to work together to grow rice on a crowded archipelago prone to natural disasters.

Others point to the hierarchical nature of human relations and a keen fear of shaming oneself before others.

'It strikes me as a Buddhist attitude,' Glenda Roberts, an anthropology professor at Tokyo's Waseda University, said.

'Westerners might tend to see it as passivity, but it's not that. It takes a lot of strength to stay calm in the face of terror.'

While those near the nuclear plants are understandably jittery, survivors elsewhere seem at least outwardly calm.

The low-lying parts of Ofunato, a city up the coast from Tagajo, are flattened. Crushed cars and boats are jumbled with destroyed trees, utility poles and wooden building frames.

Residents are cleaning up the few cleared streets, leaving neatly folded stacks of salvaged clothes on the roadside.

'We've got no clothes, no jobs, no home,' Junko Niiruma, 63, said. 'We don't know what we're going to do.'

At a refugee centre, where children played cards and elderly men read newspapers, some residents said there is frustration, but most people are used to helping each other without being asked.

Orderly: Evacuees wait for food in a makeshift shelter in Fukushima, northern Japan

Calm: Nursery children are led to an evacuation site in Tokyo's Ikebukuro area after a severe aftershock

Bitter experience: Natural disasters are not uncommon in Japan. In 1995 thousands died in the Kobe earthquake