I contrast this to my own country, Denmark, where we are much more lax about drinking. You can buy alcohol lower than 16% at age 16, and you can get your drivers license at 18. Parents accept that people will probably slowly start out drinking before this though, and are therefore more involved with this aspect of young people’s lives. This means they also has a chance to supervisor, guide and help their children manage this new experience of being drunk, and educate them on how it works.
At least that’s my armchair take on it :)
Of course, if we assume a completely different culture around alcohol, the results might well be different.
I’m not suggesting that it’s an easy thing to do though.
Volvo has keys with a built-in breathalyzer: https://accessories.volvocars.com/en-us/C30/Accessories/Docu...
And of course, autonomous vehicles could make drinking a non-issue for getting around, just like trains and buses do today.
Public transportation in Japan is great. In urban areas it's also quite easy, accessible, and affordable to rent a capsule hotel "room" or net cafe seat. This is true no matter what your age or credit history, they won't ask for your drivers license, you can pay cash. It's honestly strange that I have to state some of these things, but I live in the U.S., and this country is all kinds of screwed up.
Also, the enforcement and norms for drunk driving (setting aside age entirely) are totally different. From my experience it's not common to have _a_ drink and drive, and the limit is "detectable".
For a driver in the U.S., the legal and cultural expectations are that you assess your own inebriation and decide when it's okay and when you need to get a cab. That standard doesn't really exist in Japan.
While I might not agree, I can understand people's hesitation about putting the U.S. standard on people aged 18 and 19. But Japan's standard? Pure nanny state.
And drunk driving in japan? It’s much more common than you would think.
(Source: Bought a lot of alcohol from vending machines while I was in Japan. Never got asked for ID.)
EDIT: Found a source "In May 1995, to prevent underage drinking, the All Japan Liquor Merchants Association decided to eliminate outdoor alcohol vending machines, so it is now rare to encounter these machines outside." https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00258/vending-machines-i...
In stores they will not even check ID's or ask your age verbally but you just tap a button that says you are old enough to buy alchohol.
It's mega strict.
To add another voice of dissent to the Danish poster's point of view, in Australia, you can drink at any age with parental consent (though child abuse laws would come into play if you do anything ridiculous) and you start to get your license at around 16 depending on the state.
Also, getting a full license in my state is a much involved process. It takes around 5 years if you aim to get it as young as possible: 1 year of supervised driving with a fully licensed passenger (there must be 120 hours of driving until you move to the next stage), then 1 year of a limited probationary license ("red P's") and finally 3 years of a less limited probationary license ("green P's").
Throughout this entire process, you cannot have _any_ alcohol in your blood while driving.
I think this, plus public awareness of drunk driving, is much better than just restricting drinking until you're 21. It means that usually, before you even get behind the wheel, you've had years to experience the effects of alcohol and get the thrill of it out of your system. Then once you're driving, you get used to the idea that you can't even have "just a little bit".
That said practically the 16/18 distinction also isn't that important. If you are 16, you typically hang out also with some people that are >= 18, and which will then buy the other things. People might not necessarily start drinking with hard liquor, but the time to it is typically not 2 years.
Source: I'm german, and had been 16 and 18 a long time ago.
Because making the legal drinking age 21 has stopped people between 18-21 from getting alcohol.
See also the “War on Drugs”
I'm against having the drinking age being above the "adulthood" age, and I KNOW lots of kids violate these laws, but it is absurd to say that every single person violates them given the chance.
Me.
Plus various other, similar situations.
(I am in complete honesty unsure whether to regret it.)
(I'm eliding and slightly distorting a lot of surrounding details both because my memory of the time is often fuzzy and because I don't feel inclined to detail too much of my ancient personal life here. The central points, however, I'm clear on.)
It might be worth adding, to circle back toward the original topic, that while I notice that this isn't “normal” in much of the US (where I live), people around me have wondered whether I got this tendency from somewhere else. (In fact, I had one (non-Japanese) Asian immigrant parent, and while that one was quite chaotic about following the local laws, it's possible that more indirect connections had strong subtle influences.) Some societies are much more regimented and/or conformist, and Japan is frequently described as both (not that I would know what bearing it has on these specific questions). The “natural pattern of rule breaks” is not universal, neither in cultures where it's nearly-expected, nor between cultures.
My sense of “honesty” isn’t dictated by the government.
Now whether I obey the law is determined strictly by a risk/rewards calculation
But those are still entirely different.
> Now whether I obey the law is determined strictly by a risk/rewards calculation
That's the most intellectually dishonest answer I've seen to "I followed the law in a specific scenario".
Have you ever downloaded a movie off of bit torrent?
Do you think that Black people should have moved to the back of the bus in the 60s because it was the law?
There were laws on the books in many southern states until recently making homosexual sex a sin. Should that law have been followed?
There were laws against interracial marriage until the 60s and Utah is just now debating whether a law against premarital sex should be taken off the books.
Would you speed if the penalty was $1000 a mile over?
What’s the moral difference?
And in either case there shouldn’t be anymore of “a debate” about how two grown people decide to have sex and who they should marry than whether a grown person should be allowed to drink.
That 18 year old college student who the government doesn’t deem to be mature enough to drink is mature enough to vote, fight in the military, sign for a student loan that can potentially put them in 10s of thousands worth of debt, etc.
Some people who know me have joked that I would hate learning to drive (here in the US) because of the issue where most drivers break the speed limit most of the time and expect others to do the same. I think I could get used to it or find a way to deal with it, but it's possible it would stress me out for a while at the beginning.
As I sorta-mentioned, I'm not sure my original level of tendency to follow the rules is actually adaptive here. The point was more the existence proof. And between cultures it may vary even more widely than this.
You've gone from “implying that an attitude is out of the acceptable/plausible range” to “implying that the visible counterexample doesn't understand why anyone else might hold a different one” in the span of three posts.
I can imagine several reasons why this might be a hot-button topic for you, especially given what you've just said, but I am not putting my nature up for attack here. If you expect me to have a generalized disregard for or incomprehension of people who don't share my tendencies, I don't think it's true, though I don't expect you to believe me. If you feel like my attitude or existence is a shock or an affront, I'm sorry. If you resent feeling stuck with the institutions that surround you because they're not serving you well, I'm sorry. I would ask that you not extrapolate my personal attitudes about alcohol and speed limits to assuming that I follow social institutions “unquestioningly”, if that's what you were doing, and especially that you not extrapolate it to much wider and deeper issues.
This will be my last comment on this topic.
That was more aimed at the statement (that you didn’t make)
That's the most intellectually dishonest answer I've seen to "I followed the law in a specific scenario".
My apologies. I attributed that statement to you.
Regarding alcohol, it seems to be a tragedy of the West, whatever the age of consent. The long-term effects of daily alcohol were under-rated, in an age were many adults did hard physical labor many days, and life expectancy was lower.
joke: in Scotland, they swore that the Irish were the worst drunks; in Germany they swore that the Russians were the worst drunks; in Denmark, they swore that the Norwegians were the worst drunks; and you know what, they were all terrible drunks.
Some people said that the Italians and the Portugese give children wine at a feast, mixed with juice. This seems tragic in modern light.
It's hard to make an intellectual case for disparities between things like voting age, military service (which is why the US voting age was reduced to 18 in the first place), drinking/gambling/smoking, age of consent, etc. but pragmatism still sometimes wins out.