The writing is in English, published by someone who spent an entire life growing up in the West. And, as you mentioned, this "returning item phenomenon" seems not to be the case in modern China, even in the cities.
If you want to even begin to describe Eastern culture in English, maybe take a look at how hard it was, and still is, to articulate the internal world of the Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_soul
Don't assume Japanese people are more honest than people in other countries, there are many social and cultural factors at play that influence behavior.
Generalizing a group of people is almost always inaccurate, and often frustrating to read, but I don't think this article is an egregious example of that. This is a fluff piece to get people interested in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, don't mistake it for serious cultural analysis.
Needless to say, this culture does have its drawbacks, but I think the key takeaway is to increase people's sense of ownership in our communities.
Oh, and lower levels of inequality, relatively, and a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust.
I've lived in a Scandinavian country with similar quantities most of my life (well except low levels of immigration) but I can't recall a single time lost property came back, even at a local small town bakery. The experience is very different from my life living in Tokyo.
>Oh, and lower levels of inequality, relatively, and a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust.
Considering my homecountry having almost the lowest level of inequality in the world, and a highly aligned political/media system I don't think this is a factor either.
But my experience is the opposite: Managed to leave my backpack on a bench in the busiest part of Oslo S when taking the train with too much skis and stuff so I forgot it in the struggle. Anyone could have just snatched it walking by, but instead someone saw it was unattended and delivered it at some lost&found so I got it back a week later.
Also in Oslo, I forgot my laptop at the table on an outside cafe. When I came back to fetch it a few hours later it was still where I left it.
So while there probably can be differences between countries, I also think it's too easy to extract too much from one's own experiences, which may not be typical.
But yes, Japan is not a small country even if it is a relatively small landmass.
Japan is essentially a right-wing, one-party “democracy” put in place by US intelligence services, postwar. The current prime minister is literally the grandson of a CIA-backed war criminal, who was famously known as the “Devil of the Showa Period”:
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi
Freedom of the press is absolutely abysmal in Japan and has been further on the downslide since Abe came to power:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/13/japan-accused-...
I speak Japanese, have spent a lot of time in the country, and have a great admiration for its people, but about the last thing I’d express any admiration for are its politics and media. And speaking anecdotally, very few people there seem to put much trust in them either.
While the media might not be great, at least the politicians, right-wing as they may be, actually seem to be trying to do things to improve the country, and even pushing some relatively progressive ideas (for instance, they're pushing for more women in corporate leadership positions, something Japan is woefully behind on). I just can't say the same for America these days; our national government (and especially the executive branch) is moving things backwards and making things worse.
Likewise, women still face a level of misogyny in Japan that is truly unimaginable to most Americans. This has been led in no small part by Abe and the LDP, who insist on the enforcement of absolutely regressive social mores. Most recently, they vehemently opposed women being allowed to keep their own last names upon marriage.
>While female labor force participation rates are up, most women are locked into lower-level positions with bad wages and little hope of advancement.
How is that the government's fault? That sounds like a problem at the corporations. In any democratic country, the government only has so much power over the personnel decisions of companies. You can argue they should have more regulation, but how exactly do you force companies to promote more women into the executive ranks without having the government basically take over the corporations (which reeks of authoritarianism)?
>This has been led in no small part by Abe and the LDP, who insist on the enforcement of absolutely regressive social mores.
Examples?
>Most recently, they vehemently opposed women being allowed to keep their own last names upon marriage.
Did they succeed?
As for misogyny and Americans, is Japan trying to ban abortion? They most certainly are in America, and it's quite possible it'll happen to some extent thanks to Trump's SCOTUS appointees.
1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/11/national/japan-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan#Migration_...
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Many of those have probably died by now, but likely not without leaving a few descendants. So there may be a million or so Japanese citizens with a family background involving migration within the last few generations.
Ainu, Ryukyuans and Burakumin should probably also be counted as "non-homogeneous", even though they're not "foreign".
1 in 10 residents of Tokyo are foreign nationals[1]. https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO32872510R10C18A7EA2000/
1 in 10 people in their twenties. (Still more than I expected.)
The fact it's a right wing idea doesn't mean it's wrong. A nation's laws is written by its people. The fact is different peoples have different cultures and follow different sets of rules. The ideal immigrant is the one who naturalizes and fully integrates into the existing society. What usually happens is they stick together in foreigner groups for mutual support. They maintain their culture and continue living by the same rules they are used to.
It is extremely demoralizing to see people not only break the rules we follow but come out ahead for doing so while escaping any retribution. It's even worse when foreigners do it because it simply isn't part of their culture. If a group of people doesn't litter the streets and foreigners who think nothing of it suddenly arrive, they will be looked down upon.
> You can find people of every ethnicity in Tokyo, including many half and full Brazilian people that you could mistake for latinos here in the US
A relative minority. Many more japanese live in Brazil than the other way around.
Which is why proactive government outreach and support is so important. Why trust-building is important. People need to understand the VASTLY different role police play in Japan, and they need that information communicated in accessible ways. Harsh enforcement degrades that trust and creates insularity. Immigrants provide benefits to the host countries' economies, but rather than use some of that wealth to create and foster social programs, host country politicians instead use these communities as a scapegoat for the anger generated by austerity's impacts on the working poor.
Countries want the economic benefits of immigrants without the necessary investment in immigrant communities.
>They maintain their culture and continue living by the same rules they are used to.
Every person understands theft and the effects it has. This notion that the immigrant or their community is somehow inherently lesser or more tolerant or capable of anti-social behavior is textbook xenophobia.
Indeed. It increases the risk associated with being part of that society. I don't know what the correct answer is.
> Countries want the economic benefits of immigrants without the necessary investment in immigrant communities.
Many immigrants also want the benefits of living in a developed country with a high quality of life without fully integrating into the society that made it possible in the first place.
> Every person understands theft and the effects it has.
Yes, but the rules and consequences for violating them are not universal. Depending on where they come from, violence may be an acceptable way to resolve conflicts. In some circles, people are immediately held accountable for their actions. In other circles, they might be quietly excluded from a group.
> This notion that the immigrant or their community is somehow inherently lesser or more tolerant or capable of anti-social behavior is textbook xenophobia.
Not all immigrants will be like this but it is a mistake to simply ignore their background. Every immigrant has the potential to naturalize but it is also important to think about what could happen should they fail to integrate.
Ideal according to what metric(s)?
Most of their cases are insurance settlements and divorce disputes. They have a few criminal cases, but the overwhelming majority are foreigners. Americans get occasional shoplifting busts, and virtually all drug and violent crime issues are Brazilians and some Filipinos. “Virtually” as in in the year she’s been there, they’ve all been foreigners except for maybe 2 domestic violence cases. Drug distribution cases involving immigrants come in at a rate of at least once a week.
There’s no slum or anything resembling a ghetto here, and virtually all of them have decent employment with auto manufacturers.
Side note, I’m a foreigner as well.
While that was a joke, that does seem to be how people pick these explanations. Everything about Japan seems to be explainable by social homogeneity, WW2, or philosophy/religion, which is just the set of facts foreigners tend to know about Japan.
I can't explain my own culture, and I've actually studied its history. I'm not even confident I can identify the differences it has with other cultures. We're often more similar than we think.
Comparing China to Japan won't do any good as the cultural revolution decimated its social capital.
An excerpt from the book 'Out of Mao's Shadow':
> Families were torn apart as wives divorced husbands who had been accused of political crimes, children condemned parents, and siblings turned against one another. When the Cultural Revolution finally ended, it was easier for many people just to move on than talk about it...
> ...Such violence has not been expunged from the country’s collective memory so much as repressed, and repressed memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly. There have always been voices in China calling on the nation to confront the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution. Only with an honest accounting and thoughtful examination of the era, they argue, can the country come to terms with the legacy of mistrust and moral decay that haunts it today.
I'm not sure you can point at any country that had gone through such a violent, unstable, and lengthy period of fragmentation and bloodshed, and came out on the other end as a cohesive, high-trust society.
The other's not a very close parallel.
Korea was under Japanese occupation in that same time period, which was no picnic, but it at least had a functional, centralized government, and at least, was not an active warzone through most of it. (It is more similar to post-war Eastern Europe in that regard.)
It also did not go through a multi-decade-long civil war.
Having done business in both, it is an order of magnitude better than mainland China, both in terms of civil society (helping out strangers, littering, tax dodging etc) and in terms of larger-scale trust issues (prevalence of fraud). Same goes for Korea. (As for Korea not being an active war zone and having a functional centralized government in WW2... the Korean War put paid to that pretty quickly.)
Your personal anecdotal experience does necessarilly agree with the statistics. There's a difference, but not an order of magnitude one.
According to the corruption perception index, Japan is at 73, the US is at 71, Taiwan at 63, Korea is at 57, India is at 41, China is at 39, and the Phillipines are at 37. Neither India, nor the Phillipines had a 1966 moment, if I may point out.
According to trust polling, people in China trust their peers, and businesses more than in most other countries, but I'd assume you would want to dismiss that result.
I can't think of a good objective proxy besides those two. Do you know of one?
> As for Korea not being an active war zone and having a functional centralized government in WW2... the Korean War put paid to that pretty quickly.
The Korean war lasted 3 years, and was largely a proxy conflict, with clearly-defined sides, largely made up of foreign armies.
The Chinese civil war lasted 30, without anyone having a clear understanding of who the enemy was.
It's like saying "The United States had a civil war, and it's now fine!" There's more than an order of magnitude difference in the cultural trauma of a war that lasts a few years, and one that lasts an entire generation.
Some (like the Baltics) are doing great, but I don't think I'd rather live in Moldova, the Ukraine or Albania rather than China.
Just walking around in Japanese cities, you see shrines everywhere. Way more than you see churches in US cities even (admittedly the typical shrine is a lot smaller).
All that said, I've greatly enjoyed my trips to Japan and feel the same way about their Shrines.
For what it's worth, as a scatterbrained person, I think it would be great living in a country with so much trust that I could expect my lost things not to be stolen.