This is pretty laughable. To me, almost every Western country is half-broken. When I lived in the US, I was surprised how frequent power faults were there. Streets are full of bumps and corroded pipes were everywhere. And in Europe. Do they have any concept of a decent public bathroom over there? Oh, and don't get me started on how badly their trains are operating. I bet that many train accidents are due to the poor maintenance. It's probably true that maintenance is less paid an attention in poor countries, and there are more non-Western countries that are poor. But it's funny that people can get away with a claim like this. It almost sounds like a white supremacist to me.

TL;DR: Japan is nice.

The GP quote contrasts "the West" to Russia, which is itself overwhelmingly White. It's hard to see a white supremacist angle on a comparison between two majority-white blocs.

In the taxonomy of white supremacists, Russians are "slavic". This was literally part of Hitler's justification for invading eastwards.

("Whiteness" is not simply about skin colour. There's a fascinating/ugly history of how various immigrant groups to America became "white")

Yeah, Japan was my first thought when I read that. You can't tell me with a straight face that they don't maintain everything to within an inch of its life.

Ironically except for the single most maintained item in the west, which is a house.

In Japan they are treated as basically disposable.

Gotta have a gold sink in your economy somewhere to fight inflation.

> TL;DR: Japan is nice.

True, but was also devastated by a war that allowed rebuilding almost from scratch.

Maintaining things coincidentally, and thinking in terms of there being such an activity as "maintenance" that you might want to start doing on any given thing if you aren't doing it already, are different things. I can believe that some cultures have no concept of "Total Cost of Ownership" distinct from purchase price, for example.