Maybe it's just the weird intolerances - but Japan seems to have much worse and bigger intolerances than anywhere else.

What weird intolerances specifically are you referring to? Other than the black hair thing.

Here's a list of bizarre things that my school in Belgium was intolerant about back when I was in school. These are just the ones that come to mind right now, there were many others.

1. No short hair for girls. No bald boys. No dyed hair.

2. No piercings for boys, and only pierced ears for girls

3. No hats. No shorts.

4. No long skirts for girls. No short skirts for girls. Only between knee and calf length or some such bizarre nonsense.

5. No skirts for boys (I tried a kilt once, was not appreciated).

6. No rings for boys. Not "too many" rings for girls.

7. No sitting in boys' laps. Except when you're a girl sitting in another girl's lap, that was apparently fine.

8. No tops with straps thinner than a finger (for girls, I guess).

The problematic gendering aside, all of those rules always seemed bizarre and stupidly specific to me. Did a pierced bald boy with a ring once torch a school? Do teachers have some kind of phobia for specific hairdos? I get that it's a conformity thing, but conformity never struck me as being useful.

Conformity is useful in terms of (illusionary) efficiency: they look the same, they think the same, so you can run the same algo on them and they will produce a curve-bell result which you can use to single out and either eliminate or boost outliers. Problem is, diversity runs deeper than appearances; but few people and even fewer _orgs_ grok that.

> Did a pierced bald boy with a ring once torch a school? Do teachers have some kind of phobia for specific hairdos?

I can't say this was the case for your school, but often certain events or changes in culture cause rules to be established that end up being incomprehensible years later.

For example a shaved head was ok when I started school, but when neo-nazi skinheads became popular in the '90s the haircut became unwelcome (though not strictly prohibited).

You would think that the logical thing to rally against would be neo-nazi behaviour instead of hairdos. Of course the former is much harder to detect & enforce than the latter. So instead we pick a terrible proxy to identify unwanted behaviour. A few iterations later, anyone who doesn't fit a narrow set of criteria is immediately suspicious.

While I agree with the general statement about the arbitrary nature of dress codes, conformity itself not being useful is quite the stretch.

Beyond the observational evidence: that fact that every culture to ever exist in all parts of the planet value some degree of conformity, the conceptual points are just as strong: efficiency, harmony, unity, happiness and many other traits are higher in more uniform groups.

What if everyone in the classroom spoke a different language? What if everyone in the classroom had a different set of values and ethics? These commonalities ARE a degree of conformity, and they made interacting and the rules of engagement clear and simple so more important things can be focused on.

Obviously there are drawbacks: if everyone was the same person then there’s nothing new. One could argue that everyone having the same religion is worth it because now everyone has more in common to agree on, one could argue that removing that freedom comes with too high a cost to the new and interesting.

In summary, conformity is certainly useful, but comes with side effects and drawbacks.

> One could argue that everyone having the same religion is worth it because now everyone has more in common to agree on

LOL, yeah right.

"WHAT?!There are still BITS OF PLANT IN THIS HOLY MUSTARD! BLASPHEMER! Knights of Lord French, SEIZE HER! 'Stone ground'?? WHAT HERESY IS THIS?! The Book of French's, Chapter 8, Verse 3 clearly states, 'Our Lord French, who blessed the world with bright yellow smooth mustard, hath decreed all other mustards to be a blight upon the world!'

You will face trial by hot dog eating contest. Lord French will judge your pitiful soul..."

I’m referring primarily to Islamic countries where islam is the state religion. They’re argument is that it creates greater harmony

>Not "too many" rings for girls.

This is weirdly specific. Were there any gypsies?

Not specific to schools, but Japan is still racist to anyone who is not Japanese, very intolerant to plus-size people, and intolerant to anyone with a differing opinion - those who don't participate in the general groupthink, which is very much far to the right.

It’s surprisingly bad here in the UK as well. At one of the local schools here any uniform violation means isolation. They take your phone away and you are kept on your own in a room until the end of the day and visited by teachers only to issue work.

The student this happened to, my daughter, caused this to be triggered by dying her hair a lighter shade of brown than her normal colour.

I found out about this when she arrived home without her phone because the teacher had left it locked in her desk.

She was moved to a not insane school immediately and complaints raised with the school and the phone was collected by me the next day. Of course all record of all events magically disappeared.

I'm sure this has become worse. It seems to have happened with the change in many places to "academy" schools, where appearance reigns and they're run like businesses.

In the 1990s-2000s, when my parents were both teachers and I was at school, "uniform" meant wearing the correct colours (e.g. dark trousers or skirt, white shirt/t-shirt, blue jumper/sweater). It was still ridiculous, but being punished for it would require repeatedly breaking those rules. The usual response was the teacher saying "tuck your shirt in, William".

That’s a good observation. That was an academy school.

Is the point of school uniform to squash individuality? Is this how we want to prepare children for adulthood? I doubt that conformity, submission to arbitrary rules out of fear, and not standing out are good things to teach children, at least if you don't want them to become a bunch of zombies as adults.

Also, given the choice, who wants the sort of job that mandates a uniform?

A more recent justification was to remove the chance for rich children to "look different" to poor children -- everyone is equal by wearing the same.

Of course, it doesn't work that way -- the poor children have second-hand clothes or the cheapest clothes from Asda, and the rich children will spend money on whatever they can -- fancy shoes etc.

Arguably, this is the point of school, even if I disagree with it.

Uniforms are a big thing in the UK. Many jobs require them, even places where it seems entirely irrelevant. Hell, many non-customer facing office workers get a very strict dress code (black shoes, black trews, x/y/z colour shirt).

I never understood why that was a thing.

The point of modern Western education was to create factory and low-level office workers.

I regarded a uniform as one of the reasons to choose a factory job over an office job, since I would not have to make any clothes purchasing decisions or wear out my own stuff. Remote work is even better -- I got to have my cake and eat it too.

I wore school uniforms for 12 years in school. I don’t consider myself a conformist.

A lot of people decide to become pilots or work for the army.

Japan is pretty damn racist, any white who has there for an extended period of time knows that their skin color means they have a much harder time in certain establishments, or even just aren't allowed at all.

If you are white in Japan they will perpetually treat you like a tourist, which when you are a tourist is great bc they are super helpful, but I could see it becoming demeaning if one wanted to reside there permanently.

If you are black in Japan people treat you like an oddity and take pictures of you without asking, comment on your skin color, etc bc they rarely see black people in person. It’s quite rude and I agree racist.

The thing I've heard about Japan is that they're incredibly racist, but so polite it's hard to notice.

The only people downvoting you are people who haven't spent any time there. I was there for over a year, and most Americans can't pick up on the racism initially because its subtle, but like every Oz behind a curtain, once you slow down and pay attention, its glaringly obvious.

There are entirely too many idiots - and I don't care what anyone here says, they are idiots - who think only Americans can be racist.

Well. 1. Little Boy and Hiroshima. 2. Fat Man and Nagasaki.

3. The Rape of Nanking 4. Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbour doesn’t count. Certainly not in the same sentence as Rape of Nanking

Is it just like having dark skin in white-majority countries, or worse?

/r/2020PoliceBrutality

Please don't lump the US and the rest of the world together. The UK still has racism, for example, but we don't get people being regularly shot by police black or not.

Bobbies are less trigger happy, true, however there are quite a few that will happily hit someone on their head repeatedly. I guess that's common for law enforcement anywhere.

According to the Washington Post police shooting database, 19 unarmed black men were shot by police in all of 2019. Not exactly some runaway problem.

Meanwhile your government can dictate whether your child can live or die based on their calculated prognosis - and won’t let you leave the country for a second opinion.

> According to the Washington Post police shooting database, 19 unarmed black men were shot by police in all of 2019. Not exactly some runaway problem.

Ignoring that 2019 seemed to be a low year, that's still more people than were killed by police in the UK in total.

> Meanwhile your government can dictate whether your child can live or die based on their calculated prognosis - and won’t let you leave the country for a second opinion.

Second opinion from whom? NICE have to balance treatments based on cost-efficiency as well as efficacy, if you want to pay for better treatment they don't stop you because it's not on the NHS.

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/health/nhs-healthcare/nhs-... If you want a second opinion you have to change GP, which is basically exact what you'd do in the states anyway. Just because you want them to give you an opinion doesn't mean you'll get the one you want.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...

Meanwhile, people die every year in the United States because they have no healthcare at all. A Bit of perspective...

> that's still more people than were killed by police in the UK in total.

This makes perfect sense, the US has almost 5 times more population than the UK.

> If you want a second opinion you have to change GP

You can't just change GP, you have to do some bureaucratic BS first afaik.

Do you have the option to leave the country in order to get a second opinion from a doctor in the EU?

> You can't just change GP, you have to do some bureaucratic BS first afaik.

No, this is untrue.

In England you can change GP at any time. You don't need a reason.

For other stuff if you want a second opinion you ask for it.

The case being talked about is of a child who had no brain who was being kept breathing by machine. He had no hope of life.

In the UK the doctors come up with a care plan and put it to the parents. If the parents disagree the doctors have to go to court to get a ruling. The English courts are there to protect the rights of the child, and the rights of the parents. The child is given their own independent legal representative.

> In England you can change GP at any time. You don't need a reason.

This is irrelevant to what I said. I never claimed that you need to have a reason to change, rather I said that you need to "do some bureaucratic BS first", the registration.

Anyway, most GPs are not accepting new registrations due to corona :)

> This makes perfect sense, the US has almost 5 times more population than the UK.

5 (UK Police-induced deaths including Terrorists and the like) times 5 is not 1000.

> You can't just change GP, you have to do some bureaucratic BS first afaik.

The website I linked says change GP, and it's not that difficult to do in my experience (It's still annoyingly non-automated).

> Do you have the option to leave the country in order to get a second opinion from a doctor in the EU?

Practically I think it would arguably be malpractice if your GP ignored you if you did of your own accord, but with Brexit I genuinely don't know what the framework is anymore.

https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/healthcare-abroad/going-abr...

But contrary to what you seemed to be implying they don't stop you from doing that or paying for it yourself.

The NHS is not without flaws, and is arguably (I would certainly argue) empirically worse than other alternatives in Europe, but all this death-panel crap is literally just regurgitated anti-Obamacare talking points from a decade ago with almost no relevance to the ills actually plaguing single-payer healthcare.

> Practically I think it would arguably be malpractice if your GP ignored you if you did of your own accord

I do not think that this answers the question. It also does not need to be in the EU. Do I have the option to get a second opinion from a doctor in Brazil or the US or Russia?

> But contrary to what you seemed to be implying

I never implied that, not sure where you got that from. I find this attack unwarranted.

I have never head of Britain preventing people from leaving the country, except for criminals serving their sentence, and (presumably) people awaiting trial.

Where does the idea that people are prevented from leaving the country for private healthcare originate? (It would be rare, as there's a good private healthcare system in Britain anyway. The opposite is much more common: the UK is a common choice for private healthcare for rich people in the Middle East.)

> Where does the idea that people are prevented from leaving the country for private healthcare originate?

From this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25894454

I've never heard of this, and can't find anything to back it up (which is why I asked). There's usually a couple of reported cases a year where people travel abroad for something that isn't (yet) approved or available in the UK, and others that are routine.

The closest thing I can think of is a cannabis medicine, which isn't available in the UK, but the children involved have been able to go to the Netherlands for it. The trouble was when their parents brought the medicine back.

So, I assume it's American anti-public-healthcare fake news.

I wouldn't call it racist. You are genuinely an oddity if you're not japanese and not a tourist.

Racism is a deeper thing. True racism exists in some form between the chinese and the japanese due to the horrific atrocities committed by the japanese in the rape of nanking.

>I wouldn't call it racist.

I would. Sure, in most cases people don't actively dislike you when compared with some Japanese people that spew vitriol and really have it out for Koreans or Chinese, but you still get treated differently and often not in a good way.

I've met many, many people over the years, myself included, who wound up developing a love/hate relationship with Japan because of the racism.

I wouldn't call it racism because this behavior isn't unique to japan... it's unique to humanity. It will happen everywhere where you look and drastically different from anything the local population has ever seen before.

Only certain places have a unique culture where such treatment is deliberately frowned upon culturally. We are from the west so equality seems normal but it is not the default. If you decide to live in Asia, expect the default, it's not actually racist; it's normal.

Generally you just don't like being treated as a foreigner. But that's actually what you are. Don't expect to travel to another place and have them treat you as a local.

I know that it's the default. Doesn't make it not racism. It's not only racism when it happens in desirable countries people want to immigrate to en-masse.

Functionally it's the same thing. They just turn a blind eye because "hey it's normal, right?". It has been an ongoing shift over decades and even hundreds of years in the so-called melting pots of the world to get to the point people can live alongside people different than them and at least pretend they're equal and should be treated as such. It wasn't always the default in the West.

The rest of the world needs to catch up. They're behind the times.

>The rest of the world needs to catch up. They're behind the times.

It's not about the times. It's about biology, people are born with this type of behavior that is as biologically ingrained as heterosexuality or homosexuality. Humans tend to group with each other based off of race. This occurs everywhere including with Japanese and Chinese people born in the US. If you ever grew up in a community of people where there was a large enough mixture of Caucasians and minorities you will see that races group together automatically little incentive from others even though everyone more or less shares the same culture of being born in the same country.

You can't expect culture to override biology. What you see in the west is the unique phenomenon and everywhere else is basically displaying the biological norm. Because of biology this phenomenon is unlikely to establish itself as the norm for the majority of human existence. You cannot overwrite biology.

If you go to another country and your face stands out like a sore thumb expect to be treated differently everywhere because of nature, don't expect everyone to come to their senses and implement total equality.

The best you can hope for is equal treatment under the law, but the law is an ideal that is a caricature of the actual reality. If you have a two foot long nose, you will be treated differently in every country you go to, no amount of equality in the law can fix this.

I can cite tons of evidence for the biological origins of this "racist" behavior if that's the direction we want to take this. Either way I don't agree to even attack minor "infractions" or call it racism because it can't ever be fixed.

What can be fixed is deep racial hatreds and actual racial tensions. White people enslaving black people then segregating them and shooting them under the cover a "crime" is a real issue. White people forcing and enslaving chinese people to build rail roads is actual racism, Hitler killing Jews is racism. Other things are unfix-able and minor and therefore I wouldn't group it with the atrocities committed above.

Not to mention when a white guy goes to an Asian country they often actually can get "better" treatment along with the "bad" treatment just because of the privilege associated with the caucasian race. It's often one of the reasons why white people go live in another Asian country because Asian girls are "easier" and more "beautiful." No doubt if you lived in Asia it's likely you've taken advantage of this "reverse" racism.

By all means take advantage of it, I see nothing wrong with it, but don't expect total equality, we all know it's not going to happen if we're all perfectly honest with ourselves... especially if you're already taking advantage of the inequalities that benefit you.

I take the same position that it's a fundamental biological modus operandi of human beings to be that way. No need to convince me of that.

What I don't accept it the double standard. I don't live in the US, but elsewhere in the West and I see sometimes on the news "this country is racist because X happened blah blah blah" and when you zoom out and actually look at it we have some of the most diverse populations living side by side in harmony with relatively little tension and an extremely welcoming attitude in general. You go elsewhere in the world and it's not even close to the level we're on as it's a lot of monoculture and not much immigration, mostly people emigrating towards places like where we're from. So there is no or very little culture of accepting that other types of people live where you live and that's ok. If you hold both places to the same standard the non-Western countries are racist AF in comparison.

If it's all just biology and that's the norm, I'm just going to go back to that norm right here in the West. Oh wait... I can't because that would be racist.

I know 1000x over that it's absolutely the case that biologically speaking this is the natural state of things and you can never hope to override it at the deepest levels. But I bet my bottom dollar if immigration/emigration we're to reverse the places that became the new melting pots would be forced to lose those defaults as the West has. The only difference between us is they've never had large enough groups of people jumping up and down and getting in their face about it enough for it to change the cultural norms. We have.

I'm pretty tired of the End Racism narrative in the West because of this double standard. It's like wait... If I were to go to your country and try to live the life you live here I'd get nowhere close to the acceptance and treatment you get here yet WE'RE the bad guys? Like fuck off. If people want to end racism there's lower hanging fruit than the West which is comparatively doing amazing.

> If you decide to live in Asia, expect the default, it's not actually racist; it's normal.

I find that for a lot of folks raised in the West, the existence of this norm is a very rude wake-up call. But to your point, that doesn't stop it from being a norm in the first place in Asia. And it doesn't mean that it's necessarily "on the way out" either.

Your list of “anywhere else” must be pretty fucking short if you really believe that.

Sorry, what?

There are plenty of societies and organisations that embrace diversity or deviation.

Am I reading your post wrong?

Our opinions are both valid, but it is apparent that our core beliefs differ. While I agree that there are societies and organizations that embrace diversity, I strongly believe that itself to be a deviance, not the norm. "Classic" societies, orgs and memeplexes are almost all xenotoxic and value homogenity. Yes, even most flavours of buddhism.

yes, but you said > intolerance to any deviation is inherent to any society or organization.

While I agree that there is a certain amount of homogenity inherent to any grouping (after all, a group has to have something in common to be a group), I don't think that implies that it must be intolerant to deviation.

Historically, I'd agree that societies, etc have been more homogenous, but I don't agree that it is an inherent quality.

If I were to argue my point deeper, I'd say that these societies (orgs) that embrace diversity both are very recent or very recently exerted a significant effort to be more tolerant due to very pressing issues. Otherwise our monkey brains are wired to think "other/them = bad, same/us = good". Groups amplify monkey brain, because monkey brain gets us in groups so that leopards don't kill us at night. Hence the inherence and need for significant effory to override instinct.