Japan keeps its unemployment low in a very forceful way. There are a huge number of people employed for low pay doing low efficiency work, just to keep everyone working a job. For example, you might see someone telling pedestrians to watch their step near a construction site, and the voice announcing trains at the station might be a real person holding a microphone.

> and the voice announcing trains at the station might be a real person holding a microphone.

Before the privatization attempts, the Deutsche Bahn used real announcers on the major train stations.

Now, after decades of cost-cutting, it's pre-recorded audio pieces played by a computer. They sound broken and mismatching (because it's no TTS engine), they fail to be played half the time (and frequent rail users would claim the failure rate at 90%+) and of course the stuff breaks down when something unexpected happens (like emergency rail closures, due to people on the rails, med emergencies, police action, ...).

In Britain, all the station names are pre-recorded by a professional voice actor, as well as common problems, and many not-so-common ones.

"The nineteen fifty two ... Southern service to ... Brighton ... is delayed by approximately ... twelve ... minutes due to ... trespassers-on-the-railway. Please listen for further announcements. We apologize for the inconvenience."

(Replace with "a passenger taken ill on a train" or "action by the police".)

"The train approaching platform ... two ... is the ... delayed ... nineteen fifty-two ... Southern ... service to ... Brighton ... calling at ... Clapham Junction, East Croydon, Gatwick Airport, Haywards Heath and Brighton. This train has ... twelve ... coaches. Platform ... two ... for the nineteen fifty-two service to ... Brighton."

I much prefer it to a live announcement. The slightly ... odd pauses are distinctive, but mean derivations from the usual announcement stand out, whilst the whole thing is soporific for commuters. For others, there's the much-needed repetition of the most important bits; the destination of the train is spoken three times.

Examples: https://youtu.be/0cg-n-GF38E?t=139 (At 3:20 there's a Welsh one!)

(I don't like the repeated keep-your-luggage announcements, but maybe they're justified since people are still trying to bomb railways with abandoned luggage.)

Absolutely love these mad libs style announcements. I can't say why but they give me a rather pleasant feeling, and the clear tone of voice change seems to signal to me "important stuff here" while the rest is "filler here". Lewisham, especially, is so out of character. Highly amusing.

Same in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Still better than when the train driver makes the announcements, which are often hardly intelligible, because they're either too far away from the microphone, or because the cockpit is too noisy. It gets even better when they have to speak English as well: Then their favorite technique is to speak so fast that they skip every second syllable, hoping that it will be over soon.

I agree with you on the train drivers' announcements, they tend to suck most of the time and usually suck most when the train is moving, because the mike picks up all the noise from the engine. Or because the connectors between carriages / the cabling wears down and signal quality degrades.

But on a station it is possible to only put people in front of the mike who speak accent-free German and English, and to properly adjust and maintain the amps, speakers and wiring.

Unless they are in a soundproof room somewhere you still have the problem of background noise coming through the speakers. One of the great benefits of automated or prerecorded messages is that they have no background noise.

One thing I like and heard for the first time on public buses in Bamberg (Germany) is prerecorded station names as in "next stop X" where each stop was read by a different school child. Made it a lot more friendly than the standard same voice for everything...and I'm assuming it was a local school class and they probably enjoy having their stations :D

For the Berlin S-Bahn, there is a weird mix of automatic and manual announcement. Where the train is heading is announced automatically, whereas "Einsteigen bitte" (board please) and "Zurückbleiben bitte" (stay clear) is announced by the driver. I imagine a driver saying this every 2-3 minutes in an 8 hour shift.

But also, I disagree with the failure rate of 90+%, from my experience I'd say it works pretty well in 90+% of the time. The system can even announce the "umgekehrte Wagenreihung" ;)

Personally I mostly find the scheduling of announcements annoying. Often it will broadcast generic reminders in batches of 2-3 and sometimes repeat them another time for good measure.

The pronunciation of city names is also rather lacking in many instances, and like you say often doesn't match the surrounding speech.

You haven't spent a lot of time in Japan. There are a lot of unemployed older men who have been out of work since the 1994 recession.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but how is "very forceful"?

Aren't these people are voluntary doing this work?

"forceful" probably means those jobs would not exist in pure capitalism.

I think they don't exist because there are minimum wage laws and it simply doesn't pay off to employ someone for ~8.50 (EUR or USD) an hour to do this because it generates less than it costs. Combine that with labor laws, unemployment benefits, food stamps and other "poverty fighting schemes" and no one is ever incentivized to take such a job for such a pay.

Summing up, my conclusion is the opposite of yours - those jobs would probably exist in pure capitalism.

Japan has undergone massive changes in the last ~20 years due to their "missing decade." But their culture for forty years before that included employment practices that would surprise many USians.

For instance, until recently ir was unusual for a person to have more than one employer in their lifetime. You entered the workforce just after high school or college and stayed with that employer for the rest of your career. People didn't quit and get a different job. And employers didn't fire people.

The elderly person standing in front of the construction fence warning people to be careful because of the danger used to be construction worker. Maybe they worked their way up in the company until they bumped into the Peter principle or until they physically or mentally couldn't do the job. Then then moved over, around, and down as their abilities declined. The folks who made it high enough to earn a retirement retire. The folks who didn't build a nest egg or spent their egg on Grandma's hospice care, or whatever, depend on the company to keep them in the mail room or sweeping the front lobby or something that will pay the rent and buy groceries.

I have seen many US companies that created Mission Statements and formalized a list of Corporate Values that included Loyalty. But I have seen very few US companies that are loyal to their employees. I suppose there are a lot of ways to be disloyal, but Japanese companies have generally been loyal in maintaining some level of employment to even the least competent of their employees.

Posts like yours are why I come to HN. Thank you.

If you liked that, you probably really want to read this blog post by HN user patio11 regarding his experiences doing business in Japan. It touches on this salaryman culture in way more detail.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

I have to say I enjoyed how you guys argue wether or not something would exist in a pure capitalist economic system, that itself could not possibly exist outside of an Ayn Rand novel

>Combine that with labor laws, unemployment benefits, food stamps and other "poverty fighting schemes" and no one is ever incentivized to take such a job for such a pay.

Such laws subsidize automation research. As I think this research is undersupplied by a market with access to cheap labour, I'm all for them.

It generates less than it costs at the point of delivery. On the other hand everyone agrees that Japan is a lovely civilized country so this low-efficiency work seems to be generating a very large positive externality, just one that's a bit harder to measure.

Japan has minimum wages.

I'm having a hard time imagining how a significantly below minimum wage job would allow a person to exist and not starve in a 'pure capitalist' system. Minimum wage jobs only make sense now because those people have their expenses heavily subsidized by the state.

I mean, sure, I'll do whatever if it keeps me and mine alive; but if I'm gonna starve either way, I'm gonna starve hanging out in the sun reading a book.

Minimum wage is a destructive force

I agree, but you're getting a lot of downvotes. Perhaps explain why minimum wage is a destructive force.

It's not about cleaners in Japan, but you might find this article interesting, gives a bit of an insight into the different approach the Japanese have to employment:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs...

They have a huge army of (mainly old people) cleaning them, so I think it's a sort of public works program to keep people employed -- and one I approve of.

Germany has a huge army of unemployed immigrants.

i'm guessing those people aren't going to be real happy with the toilet cleaning job.

Work is work. While I've never enjoyed cleaning toilets in jobs where my duties included that I've never especially objected to it either. I much prefer it to, say, cleaning out the grease traps in a commercial kitchen.

> Is it because Japanese people generally take better care of public spaces and keeping the toilets clean and operational is thus cheaper?

It's not because Japanese people are cleaner in public toilets - I have seen enough "dirty" toilets in Japan to convince me that it's not the key factor. The secret is simply very frequent cleaning - in some toilets you'll see a list with stamps showing when the cleaning lady came during the day, and it can be as frequent as every hour.

I'm all for it. Having no free public toilets is just another reason not to go out or to feel annoyed staying out for too long. In Japan since this is free people can shop for longer and spend more time in public places and I am pretty sure this kind of factor has a positive effect on consumption, which is why malls and areas with large concentration of shops usually have the cleanest toilets.

> in some toilets you'll see a list with stamps showing when the cleaning lady came during the day, and it can be as frequent as every hour.

In Germany, in many places, you've got paid public toilets - usually a few cents per use - but there will be a cleaning lady cleaning every few minutes.

"In Japan public toilets are ubiquitous, free, and fairly clean. I wonder how they do it?"

Just another rewording of:

In (rich, homogenous country X) they managed to organize (nice, progressive social program Y) and had good success. I wonder how they do it ?

It's easy to pay for your neighbor to have free health care when his name is also Lars Larson. It's easy to fund public initiatives when the end users are also named Asahi Ito, just like you.

I'm not really seeing the link between (I presume racial) homogeneity and clean toilets - there are plenty of developed countries with multicultural societies and progressive social programs.

For example Australia is just as multicultural as the US, has a good public health system, and public toilets are clean and ubiquitous. Maybe not quite as clean as Japanese toilets, but far cleaner than what you'd find in San Francisco.

Hah not where I live. You must live in a fancy part of Australia. I saw more cleaner toilets in the backwaters of China than here. At least when I did see them haha

IMO disrespect to public spaces arises from apathy (India/China are good examples), social tensions and abstractions (government taxes/responsibility).

While I don't think racial homogeneity is apart of it, cultural compatibility absolutely is. It's mostly co-incidence that differing racial groups carry differing culture baggage. As any race can adopt kinder cultural values and principals.

My first instinct was to agree with you. Sadly, I know quite a few Americans who could care less about their homogeneous neighbors, let alone those of different colors/creeds/cultures.

I found the public toilets in Singapur amazing. I'm not sure about cheap labor, but they certainly have draconian penalties for making a mess.

Singapore is still working really hard on being hospitable to foreign businesses. It works quite well.

>I'm not sure about cheap labor

Cheap labor is possibly relevant. Salaries and the cost of living are dramatically lower in Malaysia so apparently large numbers of Malaysians work in Singapore, often illegally, while essentially commuting from Malaysia.

Having a large pool of cheap possibly undocumented labor would certainly seem to make getting repetitive unskilled tasks done easier and cheaper.

Speaking of 'care of public places', at my office, there's someone who is hygiene-minded enough to put paper all over the toilet seat, but not enough to put it into the bowl afterwards, and so just lets it fall onto the floor where it can get all manky. I've always thought that that was a very specific level of hygeine-OCD.

Apparently they don't want to touch it once it's made contact with the toilet seat and their butt. Probably 'contaminated' now.

And yes, small failures like that seriously annoy me because they leave the bathroom looking dirtier than when they came in.

(Or those people who do not flush properly - don't get me started on them...)

It surprises me that we don't have reliable self-cleaning toilets and bathrooms. We have people unwilling to do their bit to keep them remotely clean, and then others whose job involves cleaning up the excrement of others.

I can appreciate it's a difficult problem, but we have the means to change the design of the bowl itself and many other aspects. While there are self-cleaning pods in parks, I've never seen the approach taken to internal toilets.

Same in Australia (Melbourne at least). It was really weird going to other cities (especially San Francisco) and having difficulty finding a toilet.

Melbourne even has toilets in train stations!

They seem to lock the majority of them at non-main stations though. I had your SF experience in Rome. Had to queue in McDonalds for 20 minutes. Fun!

When I read the title I thought it was about tackling a different issue, I didn't even think what they've solved is an issue. The real problem whether a toilet is owned by a business or government is about cleanliness. If it's true like you say that Japanese toilets are clean then this is not a financial issue but a cultural/behavioral one. Here in London whether public, a coffee shop, or a pub/bar excpect to walk through pools of urine and perhaps even find some poo on the seat. Changing behavior is harder than changing a funding model. Related is how many people will have shoes on seats on a bus or leaving half a sandwich on the chair.

Another difficult to replicate cultural norm, public restrooms in Japan also don't normally have paper towels or other hand drying methods. Most people carry a handkerchief with them for drying their own hands, and everyone saves from reduced paper towel waste.