I also spent some time in Japan. I want to push back on this:

- my wife found her job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture, beyond anything I have ever seen in the West

- there is vast discrimination against foreigners in housing and many other aspects, more so than in most Western countries

- like the author mentioned, students in Japan (I taught at a university) were less worldly and less knowledgeable about things going on outside Japan, extending into even their direct professional activities

- there is an abnormal amount of nepotism. It is incredibly difficult to start your own business without connections (there is basically no startup economy) and it is equally hard to advance in a large company without being related to someone important

What are you pushing back on exactly? These problems are extremely minor compared to the rate of crime and poverty in American cities.

Treating half the population as undeserving of a career is "extremely minor"?

You mean forgetting the fact that America just literally banned abortion because the country is run by religious nutters, and has more mass shootings than any other country in the world, including the very nice statistic that the leading cause of death for children is America is from firearms. So yeah, I'll take whatever Japan has thanks very much.

> America just literally banned abortion

This is simply not true.

While shootings get a lot of attention, the probability of getting shot is approximately zero.

We literally had a mass shooting where 10 died and 10 were injured, today. And the number 1 cause of death in children is gun violence, for the last few years.

> We literally had a mass shooting where 10 died and 10 were injured, today.

And? Statistically, every day over a 100 people die in motor vehicle incidents and a further 100 from fall related injuries in America. You're just proving my point.

> number 1 cause of death in children is gun violence,

Firearm related deaths are not all gun violence. The overwhelming majority of them are accidents.

It’s not zero at all it’s higher than dying from a bike accident

Just looked it up: 0.3% lifetime probability of dying by gun assault. Mass shootings are indeed lower at 0.01%.

The religious nutters who banned abortion (edit: better put, eroded protections on it) are literally the same people who are trying to get everyone to focus on a severely overstated crime problem, as the grandparent comment did.

In fact you can point to Trump for both of these. On crime: He came in with his outdated world view shaped by 1980s New York complaining of "American carnage in our cities" at a time when crime was at a 25 year low. On abortion: Then he filled a few supreme court seats.

Except that America literally did not ban abortion.

Abortion is technically illegal in Japan.

How kind of you to take one of the most racist and sexist societies that’s politically identical to the religious nutters you’re talking about.

America did not ban abortion and it’s less restrictive than in Japan.

Also weird to call out shootings when a Japanese PM was assassinated with a gun less than a year ago.

Abe was assassinated with a homemade gun because manufactured ones are so hard to obtain. Per capita, the rate of gun death in the US is 1600x Japan's. Hell, the total annual number of gun deaths in Japan is lower than the US's rate of gun death per 100k (~10/year in Japan vs more than 10/100k/year in the US). The US is so much worse on that aspect that it's laughably absurd you'd even make that point.

https://everystat.org/ https://www.businessinsider.com/gun-control-how-japan-has-al...

And yet a longtime head of state got assassinated with a gun. No peaceful nation has political assassinations. The people are just as violent but with fewer resources to act on that violence. The sexual assault of women is one notable projection.

Abe's assassination was an anomaly. Japan is far more peaceful than America (I'm an American)--rather than pretending Japan more violent than the US, you might prefer the more accurate argument: Japan's low crime is attributable to its strong traditional values, homogeneity, conformity, etc.

Lol none of that is true. If you want to cherry-pick stuff, go with mass incarceration or something.

> America just literally banned abortion

Our supreme court overturned a law that enshrined country-wide access to abortion. I personally disagree with this, but the phrasing as stated here isn’t representative of the truth. Individuals in progressive states and those willing to cross state lines in many cases still retain access to abortion.

We didn't ban abortion, the Supreme Court said that states could make their own rules (more specifically, it says that there is no constitutional right to abortion, but state constitutions can change that).

(I'm not defending the US, just trying to correct a misconception.)

I am not convinced that finding "job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture" is the same as "treating half the population as undeserving of a career".

In what way are they different?

It seems like a different description of the same thing.

One is hyperbolic. One can believe that there is some bias against women without believing that they are treated as undeserving of having a career.

Ok, I read the description as quite literal not hyperbolic.

And you think they are the same? How much experience do you have with the Japanese job market?

I am not a female in the Japanese job market, but I do have first hand accounts from them.

Are you a woman in the Japanese job market?

I am not a woman in the Japanese job market. I am merely a man trying to understand how "job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture" is the same as "treating half the population as undeserving of a career". I see "job opportunities and career growth severely limited" for women in many industries in the United States and yet it would be silly to say that many think they are "undeserving of a career".

I am skeptical of some claims made about specific industries and cultures being much worse than others.

The word choice may be the same, but Japan is significantly more extreme than the US.

In 2018 21.8% of Medical doctors in Japan where women vs 36.6% in the US and 48.6% in the UK. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

You can find more and less extreme examples in various industries, but there’s a real difference between the two counties.

Does this existence of fewer women in a job mean that they are kept out by those who think them “undeserving of a career”? Only 4% of sewage plant operators are female. Is that because they are kept out of the industry?

Deserving of a career here implies the career is desirable.

So, I understand if reality makes you uncomfortable but reality doesn’t care.

The reality of the situation has not caused me any discomfort.

I remain unconvinced that the two phrases are descriptions of the same thing.

Both phrases where used to describe the same situation. So they quite literally where describing the same thing.

The two phrases were used by two different commenters. I questioned that one was equal to the other. I still do.

Do you honestly think they aren’t both describing the job situation in Japan as it applies to women from the poster’s perspective?

Because I can only assume you’re playing pretend at this point.

I take offense at your assumption. I have sincerely written what I think. You have implied that you can read my mind and that I am "uncomfortable" or "playing pretend".

User SoylentOrange wrote that his wife "found her job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture." That seems a very believable assertion to me, given what I have read about Japanese culture and seen in many industries outside of tech in Western cultures.

User lozenge rephrased that as, "treating half the population as undeserving of a career".

I have no idea if lozenge has any experience with Japanese culture. I read his statement as a summary of what SoylentOrange wrote.

I remain unconvinced that the median Japanese man thinks that women are undeserving of a career. I welcome those with first hand experience to share more than anecdotes to convince me.

To be accused of "playing pretend" when questioning hyperbole makes me reconsider commenting on HN at all.

Sexism and racism is minor compared to crime and poverty? (Which Japan also has, you just don't see it)

Kinda yes? I’d rather be discriminated (to some degree) than shot dead.

Your chances of being shot outside of an inner city ghetto is so small as to be negligible. You've been brainwashed by sensationalist news. Meanwhile there are places in Japan that won't allow non-Japanese to enter.

Asian standard of crime rate is very different from the US...

I used to enjoy the night hanging out with friends or having fun alone in big Chinese cities (Beijing and Shanghai), hopping on public transportation, and having food in narrow streets. Without even the slightest worry of being robbed (but pickpockets do exist). Tokyo and other Japanese cities are supposed to be better.

But during my visit to Chicago and New Haven, I was strongly advised against going out alone (without a car) at night by my landlord.

You’re comparing Beijing and Tokyo to New Haven and Chicago.

Due respect, but your landlord was an idiot. It's dark at 4:30PM in Chicago in December. You think the city just shuts down?

Honest question: is it OK if I live near UChicago (visiting) and go out alone by foot at 9-10pm?

I have done for over 20 years. Hyde Park is one of the safer neighborhoods in Chicago.

You should, as in all places, be aware of your surroundings.

I'd say the chances of most people being shot inside an inner city ghetto are also small.

But I'm going to guess those complaining about the risk of being shot dead in an American city are unwilling to say the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment is a factor, or that we simply have too many guns.

The correlation between gun ownership and gun-related homicides (by state) is (weakly) negative.

We are happy to talk about the statistics, they just don't tell the story you want to tell.

You're saying that in states with a higher gun ownership rate, there are few (per capita, I hope you mean) gun related homicides. Specifically comparing US states, not the US to another country.

But 100% of gun related homicide happens with a gun. I had a funny read of your comment, perhaps you think those happen with "borrowed" guns ... If they only owned those guns outright, they could benefit from your statistic.

Sure if guns didn't exist, we wouldn't have gun violence. The question is: given that we have guns, what is the right form of regulation that would lead to better public safety overall? After all, there is meaningful evidence that guns are often used (even just presenting the gun, not actually firing it) for legitimate self-defense purposes.

I said nothing about borrowed guns. To my knowledge, most of those homicides are done with stolen handguns, and are used by people involved in organized crime in the most highly gun-restricted cities in the nation.

By the way, some googling on your claim found this as a first hit.

https://www.newswise.com/politics/gun-ownership-and-homicide...

"... [A] 1-per-cent increase in the rate of ownership is associated with a 1-per-cent increase in the rate of homicide by gun, which is three times higher than the previous studies had estimated,” Chalak explained.

There are lots of studies that come down on both sides of the issue. I'll have to check that one out, but experience suggests this one will have methodological issues.

> Your chances of being shot outside of an inner city ghetto is so small as to be negligible. You've been brainwashed by sensationalist news.

So have you. Just the word ghetto shows how disconnected you are from reality (sorry) - I haven't heard it in the city for decades. Your chance of getting shot anywhere is very tiny. People live and work, every day, for their entire lives in the highest-crime neighborhoods; almost all of them never get shot. They aren't idiots or monsters; they are normal people. If it was that dangerous, they would find a way to move. You could go there right now and you'd be fine. (And still, too many people are getting shot.)

That just shows what's important to you. Which is not necessarily what's important to others.

There's isn't necessarily more of either poverty or crime in USA cities than rural areas, it's roughly the same on average. (per capita; there are of course more people total in a city than a similarly sized rural area). Googling for cites, I find numbers all over the place.

I don't know how to compare problems between the USA and Japan, or decide what kinds of problems are "worse"... but our misperceptions of the size of various problems based on our "common sense" probably doesn't help.

I also lived for a time in Germany and in Canada. I want to note that West != USA.

These countries are not without their own problems but I see no need to paper over them. Rather, we can be honest about their faults and their positive qualities so we might learn to build a better society or inform others who may want to try living there.

Multi racial/cultural societies have a different set of problems and advantages. Why can't we be more like Japan is because you can't? It would be interesting to see what a modern multi racial/cultural society built under an Asian country would be like. Dubai? UAE? Not really the place for me.

Attributing problems to race is unfounded, a soft racism promoted by the far right (and unwittingly repeated).

This image of US cities is misleading.

American cities I've been in are dyanamic engines of the American economy, filled with culture and life. Crime is low (though shootings are up nationwide, in every kind of place, urban to rural). Poverty is a big problem all over the US.

The strongest evidence is the very high premium people will pay to live in these cities.

As a foreigner that got a rental apartment in Japan I would like to push back on the image that renting is difficult. I didn't have too much problems despite not being able to speak the language. I just looked up properties myself on Suumo (website to find listings) and arranged viewings, and managed to get my top pick. I would say that whatever problems there are in this area are just overshadowed by the fact that in many places in the US there isn't even enough housing.

My agent here in Japan told me not to bother with half the listings I showed him since they had racist/foreigner exclusion policies. That was of a few months ago.

It heavily varies on the price you’re willing to pay.

Cheapish appartments will have a ton of specific clauses, including no foreigners in general. Slightly overpriced ones will be more open, and you won’t have issues finding something above 160000 a month.

This is one of the reason why getting a meh paying job just to come to Japan is playing the immigration game in hard mode.

PS: for those shocked by “no foreigners” clauses, you’ll be interested to know that “girls only”, “no pets”, “no music instrument”, “no smoker” are also pretty common clauses, and you’ll also get refused depending on your employer if they don’t look good enough to the eyes of the owner. Lower tier appartments are a wild ride in general.

Can you exclude renters with children in Japan? Curious how far the delta goes between US protected classes wrt housing law and Japan.

At least part of the reason foreigners are excluded is because of flight risk. That being said low income, low rent places always give problems to renters even in America. In America you have to deal with credit checks, application fees that do the discriminating in a legal way. In Japan the average foreigner is actually renting with no credit check or income verification, and many forgo even attempting to learn the language which can make it hard to follow rules.

I really like living in Japan, but the first apartment we tried to get here we got denied because I'm a foreigner. Other than that I can't recall any instances of discrimination (been here ~12 years).

I would summarize your criticisms as Japan doesn't have Western values and priorities.

I can’t speak to this, but I can say that many of the Japanese-born students I taught expressed many of these same concerns to me. My female students felt discouraged that they would not be as successful as their male peers after graduating university. Many of my brighter students lamented the job culture and the lack of startup chances.

There's probably selection bias in your experience. They may have come here for school because they were among those that disliked their native culture the most. They may have picked up American values and priorities after arrival etc.

This was when I taught in Japan

Or maybe, instead of that, it is inaccurate to dismiss real problems with sexism and gender discrimination as "just cultural differences".

> There's probably selection bias in your experience.

Is there any argument at all that would convince you? A foreigner is unconvincing because he/she is a foreigner, and locals are unconvincing because of selection bias. So what would convince you?

I say this as a Japanophile myself, but a lot of male westerners experience have a very rose tinted glasses view of visiting the country.

People of Japanese descent, especially women, will give you a litany of reasons they left... most around the rigid work culture, sexism, bureaucracy, limited opportunities, etc.

When a white male westerner visits, the only discrimination we experience is generally in the form of positive discrimination. Talk to a female of southeast asian or mainland Chinese descent how they experience Japan and you'll get quite a different story.

GP says: > I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year, the real culture shock was coming back home to what we call normal.

I think that's really the crux of it - as a place to visit, or even live for a relatively short period of time (particularly if you're a man), it is vastly superior to most Western countries in a whole host of ways.

That is, of course, different than saying it's a place to make your life and career or that the country as a whole is moving in a positive direction. Spending a short time (even a year) in a place, particularly as an outsider, only lets you see the superficial parts of that place. Is it clean? Is it safe? Is the cost of living reasonable? Do people treat you well in day-to-day interactions? These are all important, but the answers can also all be great while the underlying political and social systems and outdated, patriarchal and oppressive to many.

Right, I spent a few years learning the language and really love the people/culture/food/etc. However, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that the only way I would ever want to work there was as an expat for a US company.

Some of the local customs carry over to the firms operating US offices. My friends wife, who had come over to US 10 years ago, told us some crazy stories about working for Japanese companies even in the US office, if it was all Japanese ex-pats.

For example, being given a written reprimand for not using the proper title for the level of boss she addressed in an email once. In English, it would be like if your bosses boss was John Smith, SVP and you failed to address him precisely as "SVP Smith" 100.0% of the time.

Or a reprimand / told to cover up because of the straps on her top not conforming to their office dress code. She was a woman who dressed very modestly, so it wasn't her, it was them. This was as recent as 4 years ago.

You may not realize it, but there’s a strong selection bias at work here. If you ask Japanese women living in foreign countries most of them will say they prefer it there. But if you ask Japanese women in Japan (i.e. the vast majority), most would never consider moving

Agreed this is true.

Asking citizens if they believe there are social problems so bad that they want to leave also has selection bias, and lots of it. I would hazard a guess that most people anywhere are not considering leaving, are not prepared to, and can't fairly speak to the merits of one place vs another, for lots of reasons such as national pride, friends and family, and language and cultural familiarity.

I don't see your comment as push back to OP's comment, because you are both right. On the one hand Japan is very safe, low poverty levels, etc like OP said. On the other hand there are all the issues you described.

From what I gather reading this and previous articles on HN is Japan is either great or terrible depending on what you want to do. If you want to explore another culture, and really experience something different than the west than Japan is probably the best place you can go for that experience. On the other hand if you're trying to start a company, move up the corporate ladder, etc, then the US is going to be a much better place for you than Japan.

> - like the author mentioned, students in Japan (I taught at a university) were less worldly and less knowledgeable about things going on outside Japan, extending into even their direct professional activities

While university may be different, there is a non-small portion of the US that knows little outside their own community/state/maybe country.

There is one exception to the foreigner comment though. Blonde / white foreigners usually have an advantage, even over native Japanese people since the Eurocentric beauty standard is much in play there. You can see evidence of this in their modeling industry where high paying modeling gigs go to those who are Caucasian or half Caucasian.

Source: Interview with a model in Japan (https://youtu.be/VEubSC2CidA?t=157)

That’s true in certain industries like modeling, but not others, even if you’re a white native Japanese. Often, these types struggle to ever be fully accepted into society. They’re seen as outsiders and, at best, seen as “cool” in an exotic way.

Is it Japan's duty to sacrifice its standard of living and culture to make it more comfortable for you, or should they be seeking out the best life for their own people first?

The best life for whom exactly? If Japanese youth leave and don’t want to live in rural communities, if they don’t want to raise families, if their leading cause of death is suicide, then the country does not ‘seek out the best life for them’.

1) Whether you're White or not, and whether the destination is filled with People of Color or not, isn't it a little entitled for anybody to go to another country and agitate against cultural standards that don't align perfectly with yours?

2) Regardless of whether you or Japanese know what's in their own best interest, can you please answer my general question. Is it Japan's duty to try and make life better for themselves first, or for you first? Can we acknowledge that it's any country's first duty to try and seek out the best possible lives for their own people first?

I believe the entitlement is held by those who determine and control what their society should be, when their next generation are voting with their actions that they don’t want it.

It’s entitled to say those people are ‘Japan’ and the other people there, who want change are not.

1) Doesn't Japan have some kind of democratic system where they can cast their vote and make their choices about the direction of their society in a more concrete form than your arbitrary assumption about meaning of the next generation's actions?

2) The reasons for anything large on a societal level usually have more than one nuanced answer, but I'd like to try and figure out your meaning here. What significant evidence exists that certain things you listed such as Japanese youth not wanting to live in rural areas or youth not making as many babies as previous generations has anything to do with their treatment of foreigners? I don't really see a direct and obvious connection, and in fact these trends seem fairly common in Western youth (with a radically different inclusive culture) as well.

The evidence for dissatisfaction is in the article and in suicide stats found online. The issue I’m raising is that this indicates their democracy does not represent the needs of all its people.

I would argue, this is why their economy has stalled relatively, since the 90s.

Well, the same kind of cultural effects among the young exist in the Western world (the youth want to live in cities, not reproducing as much, problems with suicides, etc) and these are countries that are open and welcoming to foreigners and try and respect everybody of every race/gender/etc.

Therefore, I'm not seeing a strong case for Japan's problems being caused by them not being welcoming to foreigners because other countries are welcoming to foreigners and still have these problems in greater number today.

The suicide rate in the US is significantly higher. Japan's isn't that high compared to other peer nations.

In my experience, the discrimination against foreigners regarding housing is much deserved. I've rented out my condo in Japan to Japanese people for years, and my tenants have, without exception, kept the place clean and in excellent condition. All I have to do between tenants is clean a little. Other than that, my condo still looks the same as it always has. Contrast that with my rental property in the US, which most renters turn into a shit hole that has to be renovated between tenants. I always give deposits back in Japan. I rarely can in the US.

Also, I went into an apartment that had been rented by college-aged Americans in Chiba, Japan once. There were hundreds of cockroaches smashed into the carpet, one room was completely covered in black mold, the shoji doors had holes punched through them. It was embarrassing. This wasn't the only time I've seen this either.

In my opinion, the best way to overcome housing discrimination in Japan would be for foreigners to have some pride and treat other people's property with respect.

I doubt it puts us to shame on how failure is dealt with within Japanese culture.

Or how kids from gaijins keep being one for their whole life, even if born and raised in Japan.

Or work to death culture.

> Or work to death culture.

Which leads to the freeta era post bubble economy for so any who didn't want the fate of a salaryman, and the subsequent population collapse and herbivore men.

Not exactly what I'd all a stellar record, when the ethnicity itself is at risk of phasing itself out due to the 'great society they've created. Im bi fan of Japanese culture, but tier society is nearly dystopic because of the social pressures, forced suppression, and ambivalence (if not outright xenophobia) towards anything they see as a threat to the established order of things: be it work related or otherwise.

Still, it's quite a rich culture with lots of to offer to the modern World, but I fear South Korea has surpassed them in everything they resoundingly dominated in the 90s.

You write this while in most Western countries..

..many people who fail (lose a job, divorce, illness, accident) become drug addicted, homeless, mentally ill and are left to their own devices.

..people are still referred to as “Black Americans” and “Asian Americans” instead of just “Americans” (similar in other countries) although they have lived there for generations, while there simply aren’t many non-Asian looking foreigners living in Japan for a long time.

..a barrage of articles on this site reports tens of thousands of workers being laid off, who worked hard and still got no job security.

I give Japan its fair share of criticism, but your take is easily dismissed as naive.

> ..people are still referred to as “Black Americans” and “Asian Americans” instead of just “Americans” (similar in other countries) although they have lived there for generations, while there simply aren’t many non-Asian looking foreigners living in Japan for a long time.

Why is this listed as a fault (or even listed under “most Western countries”)?

This is proud component of American culture. You’re more often to find people embrace this than see it is a con.

Mixing US culture with Western.

Nope, I explicitly qualified my statements. I’m sorry you expected a full list.

For another example, if you want to see drug addicted or mentally ill but untended to people then visit the train station of any major city in Germany.

I fail to see how listing every single negative issue from every Western country, while ignoring the negatives of Japanese society, and worshipping their positives, puts us to shame.

You'll find that people in the West have an unfounded arrogance about the QoL in Western countries (by which I mean primarily the Anglo-Saxon world along with some "white" European countries).

Many countries have better QoL than the West, because it turns out crime and filth don't have to be normal nor accepted. Specifically in the case of Japan, you'll also find that people are much better behaved in general.

Do you mean northern European? Germanic? Scandinavian? What on earth does white mean here?

So well behaved that trains have women-only cars because of how prevalent sexual assault is.

And creep shots are so prevalent cameras have legally mandated shutter sounds.

> legally mandated

It’s not.

A discussion of the details: https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_...

I commuted for a few years in Paris, and have seen a few dozens fist fights between passengers, sometimes at rush hour. And people get their purse mugged in the car behind, homeless shitting in the back of the car, super high guy with completely empty eyes playing with a knife while sitting next to the door.

It was a fucking circus. Having a “women only” car at rush hour to deescalate tensions is such a minor peeve in comparison.

Having a “women only” car shows there are deep societal issues that are normalized due to the country’s ultra patriarchal ways. A normal solution would be to prosecute the perpetrators but Japan doesn’t take women seriously. A “women only” car does not at all address the cultural problem of men thinking it’s okay to commit sexual assault.

I get your point, but having a “women only” car (which is actually a “women and kids and elderly and disabled people only”, from 7h to 10h in the morning) is a lower hurdle than what people imagine.

It is not the high moral ground solution, and two cars among 20 isn’t a big change either, but that’s the most pragmatic solution to this. Catching some random guy during rush hours when there’s a train every 4 min and thousands of people get in and out is more of a logistical nightmare than how you make it sound like.

Intentional or accidental groping also happens in France for instance, and the best you’ll get will be a passenger fight, no cops nor rail staff coming in to do anything, while the other passengers shout insanities at the fighters because the train is already too fucking late (actually had that once on the train I was riding). The equivalent situation is taken way more seriously in Japan[0].

Patriarchy is strong either way, but I’d be looking at school uniforms more than rush hour arrangements if we want to dig on the topic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Just_Didn't_Do_It

Talking about "Western" as one here is meaningless. In Norway it was for a long time common to use the term "American conditions" as a derogatory way to dismiss policy proposals seen as US inspired, and Texas is used as a term for crazy / out of control. Many western countries are as different from each other as from Japan.

> I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year

The people that are gushing the most about Japan, ready to defend its honour on every corner of the Internet, are those that don't have much experience living there. Says it all, really.

It's such a common phenomenon these people even have a slightly derogatory nickname. Also:

> Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan

I'd really like to know how many Western countries have you lived in for at least a year.

I've lived in three and find it amusing how there's two camps arguing with a straight face as if they could generalize anecdotes/conclusions about large amorphous entities. Both Norway and Venezuela are western countries. Tokyo is very different from rural Hokkaido. San Francisco is very different from New Orleans.

The West doesn’t really understand Japan - and never has, going back to the Meiji era - because the Japanese managed to “modernize” without entirely “Westernizing.” To our Enlightenment-derived idea of Progress, these are not two separate things, so we become very confused when a place is futuristic technologically but “behind” culturally, in terms of our own Western cultural history.

What do you mean by "Westernize" in this context? Are you sure that Japan hasn't westernized (assuming no goalpost moving) perhaps just expressed differently?

Well I said “Westernized entirely,” implying that there is some level of Westernization.

I am using this to mean an adoption of Western social and political values: universalist democracy, secularism, individualism, the unimportance of public space being sacred or imposing restrictions upon behavior, “the workplace is more important than the home,” and a million other things. Japan has some degree of these things, but there is a pretty huge difference between the average Japanese city and the average Western one.

I think a lot of those differences and distinctions are less pronounced once you get outside of the Anglosphere but still "western" - a lot of them just have to do with bad urban planning and architecture. The continent probably sits in the middle there w.r.t public spaces.

But based off of what you said, and I of course have never lived in Japan, is there really much difference in practical, day-to-day activities in terms of being westernized? For example, you mentioned "the workplace is more important than the home" and I genuinely wasn't sure if you were talking about America or Japan.

Of course there are differences in government, but are the differences more pronounced with England's style of government versus Switzerland, or are there more differences between France and Japan? Nevermind the Big Tent approach of the American 2-party state.

Genuinely curious to hear your thoughts. I know what you're getting at, I guess I wonder if it's a meaningful distinction w.r.t at what point does one country become roughly westernized? Is Brasil westernized? Mexico?

There are some pretty distinct cultural differences between Western and Eastern cultures, far too many and far too nuanced for me to explain in a brief HN comment. We’re talking thousands of years of culture, language, history, etc.

As my original comment was saying, the reason Western people get so confused by Japan is that it is technologically “ahead” in many ways while apparently “behind” culturally, from the Western perspective. This cognitive dissonance is a result of the Progress ideal which merged culture and technology into one entity. This isn’t the case with other countries that are just perceived as being “behind” entirely, technologically and culturally.

But is Japan perceived as being behind culturally? Many would look to something like housing costs in Tokyo, lack of prevalence of firearms, or universal healthcare as progressive values that Japan has that are "ahead" of at least America in (housing costs probably more progressive than the Anglosphere at least and probably the west in general).

I have a hard time reconciling the general nature of your comments w.r.t Japan isn't westernized with the specifics as well. If westernization is mainly about philosophical traditions (secularism, individualism, etc.) I think Japan is certainly less westernized in some ways (think like many attributes that skew in different directions), but if you look at other things, maybe it's not? You could examine attributes such as the tight alliances with the west to how anime characters are represented.

I'm still wondering if what we're talking about here is just a different expression of being "westernized" versus a meaningful difference.

Personally I actually have a view that's moreso that the Anglosphere (US, Canada, Australia, UK, New Zealand) + Japan and perhaps to a lesser extent South Korea are more "westernized" together than say the Anglosphere and Germany and France.

United States is also a exceptional very weird country in western world.

Yea I mostly agree. It’s really hard to compare a lot of countries.

>“the workplace is more important than the home”

Wait, are you saying that this is a western value?

Japan. Land of the overworked Salaryman. Is like the literal embodiment of this.

Actually I meant it as a Western value, in reference to the fact that women in Japan often leave the workforce to focus on the home full-time. In the West, being a stay at home mom is not really acceptable socially, at least in major cities.

It’s definitely complicated though, as the salaryman phenomenon shows. No simple and straightforward answers.

I don't think there's any social judgement for a woman to quit her job and become a stay at home mom. I think it's only less popular in the US due to lack of financial freedom to pull that off.

I do noodle around this thought in my head though that socially accepting women to work ended up just making family lives harder. If take the assumption that corporations aren't generally giving in how they raise salaries and such, it seems like women were onboarded into the workplace but men and women just share the same slice of pie that men had before the change took place. So instead of a man making X$s a year to raise a family, it's just the same 2 * (X$ / 2) and now the kid has to be raised in daycare which I believe is less beneficial than being raised their parents, dad or mom. This is definitely a showerthought and not something I feel strongly for. It's just more of a what-if question.

Modern Japanese society is closer to 1950s America than it is Meiji or Edo Japanese. Occupation had a profound impact on them and still does to this day.

In fact, I’d posit that the reason why the “West” views Japan with such fascination is because it’s looking into an alternate history. “What if the hippies and postmodernists lost in the 1960s?” A lot of the cultural values Japan exhibits can be found in old PSA videos and newsreel footage of 1950s and early 1960s USA. Then they skipped straight into 1980s yuppie consumerism, spedrun straight into a financial crisis and then skipped straight into the smartphone era.

It truly is a different place but not for reasons of deep history (bushido is a 19th century invention, Sushi as we consume it is only as old as modern refrigeration, Tokyo metro used to be a dirty noisy place).

AFAICT, the Hippies lost in America too, or worse: they turned into people who completely supported the values they professed to abhor when they were hippies.

See also, the Gulf states.

Safe for men. They need to improve safety for women.

And yet it has a much higher suicide rate. What gives?

The US actually has a higher suicide rate than Japan in according to World Health Organisation data.

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

Interesting, thanks.

It looks like over the last 20 years Japan has made a lot of progress on suicide, and the USA, sadly, has been going the wrong direction -- and they've recently crossed over.

So both USA and Japan are higher than the European average, and much higher than an (apparently) happy European country, like Italy.

I do think my broader point stands, which is maybe the things we think makes a country nice aren't necessarily the things that will make people feel happy and satisifed.

And a way lower birth rate.

It’s like it’s paradise but lots of people don’t want to live in it or bring new life into it.

This reminds me of the equally paradoxical longing some have for disasters. You can see this in disaster movies which succeed by playing on this paradoxical longing for “something to happen.”

I also think this is a driver behind nihilistic fascist politics. It’s sort of like “Let’s create hell on Earth so we can finally be men!”

I think we are wired for a much more hostile environment and our brains don’t know what to do with peaceful abundance. We get bored and either depressed or “otaku.”

Generally poorer and less developed countries have much higher birth rates, so I'm not sure the "bringing life into paradise" reason is why people have kids.

That’s kind of related to what I’m getting at.

Maybe there is a right amount of adversity. Too much adversity leaves people broken and traumatized and with learned helplessness. Too little leads to the kind of malaise you see in the most developed nations.

But it has to be real adversity, not fake or cooked up by warmongers and fascist loons. This is one reason I am such a supporter of things like space exploration. We need stuff to do that is both hard and real.

Your comment, from the paradoxical longing part on, has a strong vibe of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning [1]. I think that you might like it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Force_That_Gives_Us...

being a small ethnically homogeneous island nation protected by other militaries tends to help a lot

despite this it has many problems with working people to death (the neet counter culture as a response), an aging population, and misogyny

> small

LOL. Japan id the 11th most populous country in the world. In terms of area, it's larger than the UK.

If less than 2% of the global population isn’t small then what is?

Try Singapore - what I would consider the model country. It’s what happens when a country decides that filthy cities with piss and feces everywhere, drugs openly being used in public homeless tent cities, and casual shoplifting not only tolerated but actually celebrated by some is not a measure of progress or w/e the hoards think it is.

Singapore sounds ruthlessly authoritarian. Mandatory death sentence for drugs is barbaric. I would legitimately rather live in a city like you describe (and probably do by your standards, Seattle) than that.

You’re confusing that with competent leadership. And that’s normal as we haven’t had that here in many decades. Our happiness has been in decline for over 70 years now and is accelerating. Citizens of Singapore have some of the highest happiness scores in the world.

It’s arrogance that will bury us. Rights without the necessary hardship that responsibility brings is just not possible.

Sure, but what do you envisioning this "competent leadership" doing to solve the drug problem, while not resorting to authoritarianism like just killing those who possess drugs?

I agree "competent leadership" is direly needed. But all too often "competent leadership" is used as a euphemism for an autocrat who just opts for simple/expedient freedom-destroying measures.

The only constructive (ie liberty-preserving) answer I can see is to make the bottom of society much less unattractive, reducing both the interest in drugs and also the ill social effects of drugs. But attempts to do that are generally criticized for not being authoritarian enough, or for costing too much.

(FWIW I do agree that all too often, attempts to make the bottom of society less harsh result in lazy inaction rather than more intelligent action, which gets back to the original lack of competent leadership).

America is too far gone and too stubborn in its beliefs and values to be fixed or saved. We will continue to take on a form not dissimilar to South Africa or many parts of South America. We will continue to be the elite global super power and the dollar will be strong and this will help create more and more of a divide of the haves and have nots.

Parts of cities and vast swaths of rural and exurban areas will be littered with decimated communities full of people without any ability to help themselves. The rest of us will continue to “progress” like you said which means liberalize/decriminalize without any action to support it while further privatizing the the things we do care about like education, etc.

There will be islands of prosperity in an ocean of trash. In essence shanty towns/favalas will pop up and be left there. Individual identity will be valued by the upper classes more than anything and tons of “middle class” people will get caught up in but will live in tiny cheap housing in bad locations. The top 30% will thrive.

> We will continue to take on a form not dissimilar to South Africa or many parts of South America

What does this mean?

> There will be islands of prosperity in an ocean of trash

My dude, you have described Singapore (GDP of ~70k USD) next to its neighbour Johor Bahru (GDP of ~33k USD). That's your model place! This is the ideal example you provided and it already fails your test, it is literally an island of prosperity!

I think I described it but if you’ve been to these places then what you see is:

- many things are gated. Armed security that is clearly present in places you wouldn’t expect is fairly common.

- shanty towns abound. All over the near outskirts of Johannesburg for example are established shanty towns where housing is thrown together with sheet metal, etc. Favelas in Brazil aren’t much better.

- pockets of great wealth and prosperity surrounded by disorder and heavy violent crime. This has become very common in these places.

- inflation due to populist government policy. This has now started happening here. Too soon to know if it’s a trend or a blip.

Singapore and Malaysia are different places. Since Singapore left in the 60s and went under new management they have thrived.

No one is celebrating homeless camps.

Ah yes, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". I'm not sure you understand the dynamic that created Singapore, or appreciate the relatively authoritarian measures that ensure that it doesn't become a "filthy cit[y] with piss and feces everywhere, drugs openly being used in public homeless tent cities, and casual shoplifting not only tolerated but actually celebrated". I'd like to know which city you're referring to, I've slummed it in the worst of European cities and I haven't seen anything close to this. It sounds like the right-wing characterisation of San Francisco, though. So if it is SF, I'd like to ask you: what policies specifically Singapore institutes that San Francisco (or the place you're thinking of) don't?

The first step to recovery is to leave the denial phase and admit there’s a problem and it should be addressed. Many American cities and many exurban/rural towns (right-wing country!) have massive issues. They are filthy, violent, drug addicted, and mismanaged.

Let me put it to you this way. In the USA and much of Europe (less so in Europe) there are large swaths of cities in particular where you wouldn’t go. Because it’s too dangerous.

This doesn’t really exist in Singapore, etc. We just assume this is normal and unavoidable but it’s not. You don’t have to “know where you are”.

Would you be fine with me picking any place in Chicago or SF and drop you off in it?

This page will generate a set of random addresses in Chicago. How many times do you have to reload it before you get an address that would be tricky to handle?

https://il.postcodebase.com/random_address_city/CHICAGO

The first address was:

5326 S CALUMET AVE CHICAGO IL 60615-4818 USA

Which is in an area named “Washington Park”. The crime rates are here:

https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/n/washington-park-chica...

It’s no place I’d ever want to be. I feel bad for the hood people that have to live there. Their government has failed to do the 1 thing it ultimately is supposed to do which is protect them.

You realize you just picked a point that is a 10 minute walk across a park to the University of Chicago, and a 5 minute walk to a police station, right? The park is full of UChicago joggers. So, I mean, watch out for that, I guess.

The more I think about national comparisons the more it seems that homogeneous, conformist societies are the winners. The Scandanavian countries provide further examples. America seemed to do a lot better under the primacy of American Nationalism, which was sort of conformist (“no matter where we come from, we are all one people with common values”) but we’ve deprecated that in favor of race/gender/etc identity squabbling.

Ultimately, it seems way easier to make policies that protect everyone when we think they will benefit “us” rather than “them”, and the policies work better when they can make certain cultural assumptions (when the expectation is that people conform to society rather than society conforming to every individual) rather than striving to cover every single variation of human.

This isn’t to say conformity is better, only that it has certain advantages that people massively attribute to the policies it begets (the idea that America could be the harmonious utopia we imagine Scandanavian countries to be if only we imported their policies).

> ...we’ve deprecated that in favor of race/gender/etc identity squabbling.

Was this before or after the introduction of race-based chattel slavery?

In the unlikely event that this isn’t a trolling comment, my “American Nationalism” above refers to the post-Civil-Rights-era idea that we should prioritize our American identity over our racial or ethnic identities (ergo I’m talking about the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century).

By claiming that such an ideology existed or that it had some benefits, I’m not implying that it was ubiquitous, uniformly distributed, or otherwise perfect.

My point was "identity squabbling" predates any universal American national identity, so it wouldn't be a deprecation of the said American nationalism, but a reversion to the pre-independence/antebellum/civil-war/reconstruction/pre-civil-rights-movement race- and gender-identity norm.

Yes, I agree that identity politics were the normal state of affairs; I didn’t intend to imply otherwise.

> Let me spell it out for you: Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan

Definitely depends on where you live.

I have spent most of my life between Italy, Poland and Switzerland, all of those countries offer pros and cons and any of them has plenty of places to live that are absolutely no shit hole.

safe?

Japans former PM was gunned down in public.

Not really a point. I guess because security demand is generally low, it was easy for the assassin. But compare the number of 'everyday crime' like theft, murders and gunfights to the US and I guess you easily come to the conclusion that Japan is safe.

It could be that a dedicated lunatic was able to get a top level politician with a DIY 17th century grade musket exactly because anticipation of such an event at politician public appearance in Japan is lower than on a regular day in US elementary school.

The other thing the Western media bemoans and digs on is Japan's birth rate. That they have aging populations, yet haven't taken drastic immigration measures we saw in 2015 in Germany under Merkle, or Sweden. Measures that have created massive cultural clashes, general chaos and the resurgence of far-right parties, all under the loose guise of funding pensions and other embedded growth obligations.

"Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan." What about all of their societal problems?

- Extreme loneliness and isolation. Hikikokormi cases are on the rise.

- Lack of sex to the point to be considered a sexless society with one of the highest virginity rate and oldest age for loosing virginity.

- Extremely old population with an inverted social pyramid making it a huge burden to the young population and a huge problem for the country overall.

- High depression and suicide rates.

- Lack of affection between the parents and their kids, the father is never around because he is always working and kids are basically raised by their mother.

- Overworked workforce with low yield and productivity.

I don't know where you live but here in Munich we don't have a lot of "filth", crime or misery.

People need to stop using things the read in things like anime or 4chan as if it's the case. For example, japan literally has one of the higher birth rates in east asia[0], above china and taiwan, but no one talks about the "sexless chinese society" because the media narrative for decades has been that china is overpopulated.

Just a note, Japan's birth rate is 1.34, while Germany's is...1.53. A whopping 0.2 humans more. In fact, it was in line with Japan's until 2010 (and the influx of migrants I assume), and no one is talking about the sexless German society, because people are slow to let go of stereotypes and tropes they have about nations, many of them completely separate from data.

[0] https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1615241561159380995

There are plenty and I mean plenty of sources that refer to Japan as a sexless nation:

https://minajp.com/sexless-japan-703

https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/56360

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/16/national/social...

https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/sexless-i...

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-relationships/article/...

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/there-any-truth-portrait-sexless-j...

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/10/01/national/media-...

https://www.japanpowered.com/japan-culture/japan-the-sexless...

And the list goes on and on.

Also there is an important difference between being sexless and having low birth rate. It might not be obvious to you but one can have sex without having children.

It seems to me that it’s you the one that sources their information from anime and/or 4chan.

I find that only a very specific demographic writes comments like this about Japan

From my point of view Japan is a bit like Alabama with a coat of cyberpunk drawn over, but that also has to do with how I'd be treated there.

I guess I'm glad it's a place that works for some people, but it shouldn't take much imagination to see how it's not the utopia you're describing unless you fit in a very specific bucket of being: that's what their society is essentially built on.

I think you've taken it a bit personally, because firing back with "sheer amount of filth, crime and misery that's part of any major Western city" is a cartoonish exaggeration, portraying London or Edinburgh as if they're hellish, fallen nightmare realms like Yharnam[0].

I would say that the article is a bit simplistic and doesn't include any very clear or helpful comparison to the UK. I think it would be interesting to list out some of the various problems affecting the UK, and to compare how Japan attempts to solve these problems and explore whether there are any consequences to these solutions, or whether they're applicable in the UK.

[0] - https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Yharnam?file=Bloodborne-s...

That’s just a straw man. Yes, major Western cities aren’t like Yharnam. They are still full of misery, filth and crime though.

I disagree that it's a straw man - "full of misery, filth and crime" is just a flat out lie and more accurately describes a fictional city in a fallen world. There are problems and there is a conversation to be had about them, an interesting one too! But it's not possible to have that conversation if you want to knee-jerk react to a not-great article about Japan with ridiculous exaggerations that paint "Western cities" (maybe would be helpful if we used examples, like I did) as if they're something they're not.

The article talked about real, concrete problems in Japan. We could level the playing field by talking about the real, concrete problems facing UK cities, explore whether Japan has these problems, how they may have solved them and whether that's possible in the UK. That would be much more productive than than talking as if there are open sewers flowing through the streets of Manchester and armed gangs at every turn. Because that's just gonna end up in a "X country is better than Y" argument and that's tedious

Agreed!!! I just got back from yet another extended stay in Japan. Every time I go, the culture shock is coming back to America and lamenting how far behind we are.