I spent a week in Washington DC once just looking at museums and loved the public subways. So nice to read instead of navigating traffic to travel. I’ve heard others who had bad experiences on the WDC subways but I didn’t. The hours I used it were not peak so maybe that was the difference. Lots of people would use public transport if they felt it was safe and could be left alone.

A bloody outrage, it is.

What isn’t nice is that Sydneys toilets don’t flush. Come on. That’s a very low bar.

Japanese society didn’t kill the libido, they merely get it satisfied in a way that’s convenient and low stress.

Reinforces my own belief that I wouldn’t really want to emulate Japan too closely. I still figure the Anglosphere was once perfectly capable of doing all the things that article praises about Japan, in our own way and our own lesser degree of severity and intrusiveness. Although I suspect I would have found the 1940s level of intrusiveness tiresome. Or a small town in any era.

We should look to our own pasts if we need these qualities.

Interesting, if somewhat different, takes on registration with the police in Japan.

I don’t know that Canada or the US ever had such things for foreigners, exactly, let alone citizens. I understand France used to but have no idea how it worked.

The UK, at least as late as the 1990s, required aliens to register with the police and carry the “Alien Registration Card” on their persons. This rule applied in London, at least. It did not cover tourists, but temporary resident aliens like students, work visa, etc. I suppose it could be considered a green card equivalent save that it covered students who fully intended to go home and didn’t necessarily work, and required check ins with the Met.

It never applied to me, as I then had UK nationality as well, and it would not have applied to me as a Canadian anyway [Commonwealth citizens were exempt]. EU nationals had become exempt by the 1990s as well. The only students I knew who had to do it were the Americans.

Japanese expats are not a representative group by any standard. There are more who come back to Japan and say “foreign countries are a great place to visit, but not to live in”. You don’t normally meet the latter abroad. It is true that the Japanese system is very different and not really compatible with modern American, and it does cost a lot to maintain, but the American system has its costs too. It’s a trade-off.

Couple of things: The ubiquitous Koban system, where there are police substations everywhere, and where you are expected to report to whenever you move. A friend of mine, who lived in Japan for years, recalled being arrested because he hadn’t done that when he moved apartments in the same building–He was reported by his neighbors, and the police arrived within minutes of the report being made to arrest him. He was literally hours outside of the window of time you had to make that address change report, but he still spend a day locked up. All this was likely due to his status as a foreigner and the fact that the neighbor who reported him had an “in” with the police, but… Try to imagine that in a Western context. You can’t.

Additionally, all that “social conformity” comes at a horrendous price, in terms of things we Westerners value, like privacy, the right to be an individual, and a whole host of other things we take for granted. You want your eyes opened, spend some time around a Japanese national who is living here in the West, sometime, and question the fact that Japan often doesn’t want those people back. There are reasons–Not least of which is that the Japanese expat returning to Japan often no longer sees things in Japan as being either desirable or positive. I knew a Japanese girl who was going to school here after her father had been assigned to the US as an executive with a Japanese company. She was quite happy to be going back to Japan, when she graduated, but… She was back here in less than two years, completely unable to accept Japan anymore. When I met her again, after that, she sadly informed me that she no longer had a “place in Japanese society”, mostly because she would no longer submit to the unspoken rules, a bunch of which she really wasn’t even aware of. Her status as a US-educated engineer wasn’t good for much more than window-dressing, to show that the company that hired her had an American-educated engineer, and a woman. She was given no real work, and was expected to be the “tea lady” for the office she worked in, with no duties or responsibilities past that. Rueful comment made to me? “I did more real work when I was an intern for Weyerhauser than I did in two years working for X in Japan…”.

Japan. Great place to visit, not a really smart one to emulate. Jealousy is misplaced, I think–A lot of Japanese are really not happy there, which goes towards explaining the drop in the birth rates they’re experiencing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPLrNWAsBWU

As for the rest, I would endorse embracing all manner of Japanese government policies and many cultural norms, but I don’t think I would want my country [Canada] to imitate everything about Japan. We may none of us ever have been quite as efficient or self- and socially-disciplined, but I dimly recall a time when Canada, the UK and [I must presume] even Australia seemed to manage respectable behaviour of most of the kinds the author mentions.

Without any apparent difficulty for anyone, I might add.

For example, the self-organizing queue has fallen from omnipresent to mostly gone in just my lifetime.

I wonder what changed?