The news from Japan is bleak. Rising Sun, meet dark days.

I've learned to keep the latest news developments from my wife, who can trace her ancestors to Japan.

Over the past 15 years I've regularly been engulfed by my wife's extended family at social gatherings, and the glaring differences between her relatives and mine are easy to observe. It helps me make sense of how the Japanese are dealing with survival in the face of the natural and manmade disasters at their doorstep.

First, but only if it's OK with you, I'll deal with politeness.

Reach for the last pork chop at my family's dinner table and you risk having a fork stuck into the back of your hand. If two people were to reach for the last piece of salmon at my Japanese in-law's house, they would both recoil and insist the other take the final filet.Politeness and deference to others permeates Japanese-Canadian society, often two or three generations removed from Nippon.

While politeness is the most obvious trait carried to Canada by the Japanese, stoicism takes a little longer to identify.

My family is English, as in England. Loud England.

When we get together, we yell and argue and debate anything that comes to mind: religion, politics and all the other topics people avoid at all costs. We laugh at each other's opinions and call each other idiots.

My wife's family knows how to laugh, but religion and politics are never discussed. Someone might get mad and that will never do. Emotions are something you share carefully, if at all.
That may sound like a criticism, but it's not intended to be. It's just a difference.

If someone from fun-loving Jamaica or live-out-loud Italy observed my English family, they might conclude we're emotionally repressed.

But Japanese society's lack of visible emotion is making a difference in how the world responds to a massive earthquake, a tsunami and ongoing nuclear worries. Our TV screens don't show people wailing and crying. There are no signs of panic.

I spent days glued to TV news after the earthquake, and the first time I heard of any disorder in Japan was when some foreign nationals fought to get on buses sent there so they could evacuate. The lack of visible panic – the lack of emotion – is driving a global lack of concern. And maybe lack of donations.

It's not a contest between Haiti and Japan, but donations to help the Japanese have lagged behind the Haitian relief effort.

Japan is a developed, wealthy nation, so that may be tempering donations from other countries, but the current need is not so much about cash as getting food, water and heating fuel where it's needed.

I fear the Japanese will accept loss of life if the recovery efforts in the most damaged parts of the country are slow. They will make do. They won't complain. They will shed few tears in front of a TV camera.

How you think Canadians would deal with a disaster like that in Japan. How would we act? Would we pull together or fall apart?