It's like the 3rd biggest economy with a large population, and basically the closest thing Asia has to the West while at the same time being so not Western.

Interest in Japan is higher than average among the software developer crowd. My wife teaches Japanese and her biggest clientele demographic is single, male engineers in their 20s.

I'd argue Korea is as close to the west, potentially closer.

A fascinating tool for comparing countries is Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, which looks at power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, long-term orientation, and indulgence vs. restraint.

https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/japan,s...

I computed the cosine similarity between Japan, SK, and the USA to get:

Japan-SK: 0.933

USA-Jap: 0.8315

USA-SK: 0.670

So it does appear that Japan is more similar to the US than South Korea using this metric.

Well, the Japanese were once called Yankees of the Orient...

I think the least surprising result of all is that Japan and South Korea are both more like each other than they are like the United States.

Pretty much. They both are. They stand in stark comparison to everywhere else in Asia.

You mean South Korea. There is no country called Korea.

Strictly speaking, there's no country called South Korea - there's the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, both of which make a territorial claim over the whole peninsula.

You mean the 'Republic of Korea'?

I'd bet a lot of them also like anime.

I think you replied to the wrong thread.

One day there are rubbish bins around the city. Next day there aren't. Boom. Yeah. They're a curious bunch of people.

There was a legitimate reason for that. And calling any group "a curious bunch of people" has weird implications.

I can imply weird things if I want. What if that's what I was going for? They are, after all, a curious bunch of people.

edit: Also, I challenge the notion that the reason was legitimate. I know the reason. But I wouldn't make that trade-off.

They, really are not "a curious bunch of people". I'm calling it a weird implication because it's reductionist and kind of fascistic to try to write off huge groups of people as being inherently different.

Cultures can be wildly different, and 2 different huge groups of people can have different cultures, and as a consequence be inherently different to one another, so there's that...

For all the talk of individualism, for example, it's pretty easy to blindly tell a random American from a random French with great statistical success just for their opinions on things. And those two cultures aren't even as different as each is with Japanese culture...

Whats weird is you implying I think liberal democracy has had it's day and that the state should be all powerful and led by a strong-man based on a summation of my decade of experience interacting with people from Japan noting the individual differences and aggregate similarities are something I find, and I quote, "curious".

Any examples?

For me the biggest one was not smoking on the street. Possibly it's because it happened just when I arrived (2007). Everybody and their dog would be smoking while walking down the street. One day a sign went up that showed a picture of a person with a cigarette and a child. It had a caption that read, "A cigarette butt is held at eye level for a child". Literally the next day smoking on the street stopped. I very, very rarely see it any more.

Interestingly, perhaps bouyed by the success of the cigarette sign, on the train they had signs of "Do it at home" with pictures of people doing makeup, or whatever. Everybody ignored it :-).

More generally, apparently sexual harassment used to be common in the workplace. I never actually saw anything extreme, but I did see a massive change in attitude. One day guys would be talking about inappropriate things at work without anyone ever saying anything and the next day when the same thing happened the section chief would be yelling at them about sexual harassment. It was literally night and day and it wasn't like there was an announcement or anything. It just went from being tolerated to not being tolerated.

I often see things on TV that makes me wonder if the government is kind of sounding people out on stuff. For example, one day they had a piece on Korean schools for ethnic Koreans whose family members were essentially abducted to Japan during WWII. The children and grandchildren (and probably great grand children now) for many of these people are still in Japan. Because the Japanese law doesn't allow dual citizenship, these people have to choose between Korean and Japanese citizenship. If they decided to choose Korean citizenship, they get permanent resident status, but not citizenship. This is considered a pretty big problem with a lot of people and so it's been a question for literally generations about what to do: should these people be granted dual citizenship? What about school systems that include Korean culture? How much should be paid by the government etc? It's a horrible mess and, of course, in Japanese style virtually nothing has been done about it (very weird to be born in a country and not have citizenship of that country)! But this NHK program was very sympathetic to the plight of these people, so it made me think that maybe a move was afoot (the NHK is not as arms length from the government as the BBC is from the UK government...). But not so far anyway.

The USA is one of the few places which confers citizenship based on place of birth. Most countries confer citizenship based on the citizenship of the child's parents.

Jus sanguinis is more common than jus soli, but the US is far from unique in conferring citizenship by birth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli

Almost every country in the Americas works this way, Colombia is the only big exception. It is certainly not "one of the few".

Mobile payments is a good one, PayPay signed up 9MM users since May last year, leading to what seems like every company in Japan starting their own payment app, with one spectacular disaster already (7pay).

It's easy to gain users, when you give away money.

When you used PayPay during the original campaign period they discounted purchases by 20%. At random, they would also pay the whole price, without deducting your balance.

I've been told they had a 100MUSD budget for that campaign.

Essentially they threw money at user acquisition. By using PayPay you were getting free money... it was kind of nuts not to use it.

So, it's not surprising that they gained so many users. On top of that, digital payment systems were already popular in Japan (as well as being able to use your railcard for payment, there's a bunch of store cards/other digital payment cards).

Meiji restoration and industrialization. End of World War II. Flip phones to iPhone. Using Facebook.