I am utterly fascinated by this story...
So you may recall that there were some Japanese citizens who were held hostage in Iraq, then released. Well apparently the Japanese public is totally pissed off at the (former) hostages. From the NYT:

"You got what you deserve!" read one hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. "You are Japan's shame," another wrote on the Web site of one of the former hostages. They had "caused trouble" for everybody. The government, not to be outdone, announced it would bill the former hostages $6,000 for air fare.

The former hostages' transgression was to ignore a government advisory against traveling to Iraq. But their sin, in a vertical society that likes to think of itself as classless, was to defy what people call here "okami," or, literally, "what is higher."

To the angry Japanese, the first three hostages — Nahoko Takato, 34, who started a nonprofit organization to help Iraqi street children; Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photographer; and Noriaki Imai, 18, a freelance writer interested in the issue of depleted uranium munitions — had acted selfishly. Two others kidnapped and released in a separate incident — Junpei Yasuda, 30, a freelance journalist, and Nobutaka Watanabe, 36, a member of an anti-war group — were equally guilty.

So there you have it...we told you it was dangerous there, you went anyway, and now you deserve whatever you get. Which is so, well, foreign to me. I heard an interview on the radio with a U.S. civilian who went to Iraq to work as a truck driver for one of the private contractors and he took the job because it paid $80K a year for unskilled labor. Now obviously it pays so much because of the hazards involved. Lots of jobs work that way...commercial fisherman can earn quite a bit of money but it's terribly dangerous and everyone knows it's dangerous. Still, if a ship capsizes off the coast of Alaska I don't think that we, as a society, would say "Well what did you expect?!? Swim or drown, we don't care but if we have to send a helicopter you better believe we are going to be PISSED"