When I returned from Tokyo, I described it as “New York, but clean, with more neon, and full of polite people.” Evidently I’m not alone in that assessment. From Lost in translation:
Ask the average Westerner to tell you what they know about Tokyo, and it’s a pretty safe bet you will get a sentence or two about the “New York of Asia”; streets full of neon signs but no graffiti or litter; the trains running on time and a crime rate so low as to be almost invisible. And that most men go out most nights and get drunk.
I guess I’m a fairly average Westerner.
This sounds very … 1980s to me:
To understand the duality of Japanese society — the strait-laced conformity, on the one hand, combined with what we might consider almost reckless abandonment — it is necessary to get to grips with two Japanese concepts: honne and tatemae. Honne means your true feelings, which you normally keep to yourself. Tatemae is the face you present to society, the way society expects you to behave. Japanese people always understand, when someone says or does something, that they may be merely expressing tatemae. It may well not be what they really think or feel.