People who wonder about this stuff should travel to Japan.
It is sort of amazing and uplifting to see a whole society with a high level of good behavior.
- People trim their bushes and trees (they frequently look like Dr. Seuss trees)
- The sidewalks are clean, even in the most urban environments
- I've seen women leave their purse on the table when they go to the bathroom.
- People wait to cross the street
- Cars are carefully parked and aligned inside the lines
- People wait in line
- stores are well organized
Yes, and it generally isn’t because of laws, there’s just a lot of sensible social customs (don’t walk while eating on the street because it encourages litter, etc) and others will remind you of those customs if you break them. And unlike the US, if you break those unwritten rules and then start a fight for “content” when confronted (assault is illegal), police will actually put you in jail or deport you instead of looking the other way.
It’s not authoritarian to have a sensible set of laws that you enforce rigorously, backed by soft norms that are only enforced through social customs. Yet in the US we seem to want the inversion of this, legal enforcement of social norms with weak enforcement of hard laws. Very strange.
For the purposes of this specific conversation, the layout of typical Japanese supermarkets, the cost of groceries and the frequent lack of specialized parking for supermarkets, Japan is probably an irrelevant comparison. Where there are parking lots, people typically purchase only what could be carried back to their car without carts. Bicycles are used for shopping with much greater frequency than countries like the U.S. Shopping carts are typically taken and returned at the entrance of the store before the customer exits. At Uwajimaya in the United States (a Japanese asian market with stores in Oregon and Washington), remarkably, the same cultural use of shopping carts occurs.
Most people in Japan live outside of the Yamanote circle in Tokyo. Rural and Suburban supermarkets have parking lots (although in central areas they can still be quite small) and people still use cars for shopping trips, especially in the countryside.
It is true that grocery packages are much smaller than the US (since Japanese houses, even in the countryside, are smaller and I guess the average household size is smaller as wel). Shopping carts in regular supermarkets are smaller than abroad, and are usually built to house 1 or 2 shopping baskets you can also carry by hand.
But hey, we still have Costco in Japan, and package sizes and shopping cart sizes are just as big as they are in the US (although the parking lot is probably considerably more crowded). And Costco is extremely popular here. It's far messier than a Japanese supermarket and I do see inconsiderate people sometimes in Costco, but the cars are still parked nicely and most people do return their shopping carts. It would be interesting to compare Costcos in Japan and the US directly though.
I lived well outside of Tokyo and most supermarkets were eki-mae (near train stations) and did not have parking lots. I did go to markets by car, and the practice I mentioned, shopping carts used exclusively within the store, was practiced. There very well may be exceptions, but as I noted, the cultural practice even extends to Japanese markets in the United States.
This has much to do with the history of Japan and its inhabitants vs the history of the US and the type of people who moved here and occupied / colonized it (don't use "settled", there was no settling, only stealing). The US was largely built on individualism, high risk-high reward, lawlessness, aggression, and a lack of social cohesiveness (don't like it somewhere? there's plenty of other places to go and be on your own). Japan on the other hand, while it had wars/violence too, that happened within a highly structured society built on a form of feudalism.
Yeah it's the small things, friend of mine was in Japan recently and first thing he noticed is that everyone wears backpacks in front of them while riding the train as to not bother others. There are also signs for that (in fact Japan has A LOT of signs for foreigners on what to do).
It's a rare example of a working high-trust society.
Japan also measures the waistline of everyone over 40 and fines their coworkers if they are too fat. Difficult to find a balance with the shame culture. US clearly not enough Japan too much.
They don't fine workers, they fine companies and only after a certain threshold which is rarely enforced. And encouraging not being fat is not a bad thing and shouldn't be controversial, it's healthier overall.
It’s not being healthy that is controversial, it’s the culture of shame that Japan enforces.
Idiotic and completely untrue statement.
You get your waist and height measured as part of your routine health examination every year since you become a worker. Eyes, hearing, etc are also included. Its just your body's "metrics".
Your company CAN look at these (they rarely care to), but they can't fire you for them - you especially aren't fined over it. Japan is an incredibly hard country to fire or penalize workers. They can only check them in the first place because its the company that pays for these screenings in most cases. Free EKG, blood screens, and other basic health marker checks.
I'm so tired of people spreading orientalist crap about this country on the internet.
The metabo law is absolutely real and coworkers are still to this day being fined by the government because of fatness.
"Fine your coworkers." Looks true:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/19/japan