Lessons in dignity and service we can learn from Japan

FOLLOWING on from Michael Stephen Mycroft’s letter “Ten lessons from a nation as it grieves” (Yorkshire Post, April 6), here is another example of something which would never happen in this country.

My brother lives in Tokyo but has a house in the mountains, so remote that it is some 10km away from the nearest village. He had problems with his internet access a few weeks ago so phoned the helpline. The young lady who answered said it was probably a fault with the modem so she would get one sent out to him. How long would it take? A couple of hours, was the answer.

Sure enough, two hours later a man arrived in a van with a new modem. When that didn’t work either, the man suggested it might be a fault with the telephone line and said he would replace the cable.

He took a ladder from the van and replaced the wire from the telegraph pole to the house. Just as he had finished, the young lady on the helpline phoned back to say the fault had been discovered – my brother had been disconnected because he hadn’t paid his last bill!

My brother was mortified but his profuse apologies were cut short.

“Don’t apologise, sir,” said the young lady, “It is my fault entirely. I should have checked that most basic of details before anything else.” The workman who had just put the ladder back into the van had the same attitude, that of apology that no-one from the company had realised where the fault lay.

That is just one of the reasons my brother is staying put in this dignified country rather than return to the “safety” of England.

From: John Adamson, Dickinson Street, Bombala, New South Wales, Australia.

IT is of great interest to me that the small town of Bombala has appeared twice in the Yorkshire Post in the last 12 months. Bombala is an isolated small country town with a population of 1,400 residents in the south east corner of NSW, Australia.

We had a late season snow fall which was reported in the Post and two weeks ago we had heavy rain causing the river to overflow its banks which was also reported.

I receive the notification of your reports from friends who live in Market Weighton, East Yorks, my old home town, who have visited Bombala and therefore are very interested in these news items.