It needs critical mass, but then it cascades.

If you read through the description, what they talk about is that the culture is built around the idea of the individual being part of something bigger, and that consideration and respect for that something bigger (other people), is core to your own identity.

That's not hard for a lot of cultures, but it's almost impossible for most cultures in the Western hemisphere, and to change it would require a cultural reset that would run against the grain of many things that make those cultures what they are.

If it were possible though - and there are times when certain subcultures had standards of etiquette different to those widely accepted today in the West - it wouldn't need 100% of people to "sign up", just enough to make it ostracising to not conform. And then the outliers would conform.

We do this already: it's OK (albeit illegal), to cycle through a red light where I live, because lots of people do it, but if you were to try and get served ahead of your turn in a pub, you might get into an argument, because nobody does that without expecting a problem.

The cracks are already there though in Japan where this is starting to fall apart and has fueled a substantial rise in anti-immigration sentiment there. Particularly at specific groups that are not assimilating (but affecting basically every immigrant).

I feel like half your post is dancing around not saying this.

I'm not saying this, because I'm not aware of this. I have a friend who is enjoying living in Osaka, but I wouldn't feel qualified to talk about Japanese sentiment towards him or any other group of non-natives.

I'm saying that culture spreads through fear of being ostracized and the cost of not conforming to that culture. This is true in any country. It seems Japan has a "broader" and "firmer" culture that is rooted in respect to others, but it would take some serious effort for a similar culture to take hold in Europe or the US, I think.

A sense of "non conformity" leading to issues is not unique to Japan though, in Europe it is described as a problem with "multiculturalism".

The British (of which I am one), have spent thousands of years stealing the best bits of immigrant culture but seem to have forgotten that (or have been unable to absorb, for whatever reason), for the last ~60 years. That's leading to a rise in far-right sentiment and a growing desire for mono-culturalism. I can see evidence of that in Germany, France and other European nations. I could easily imagine it appearing more in Japan.

This is the flip side of East Asian societies where everything is polite and orderly: they're also extremely conformist (sometimes stifling so), and the conformity and good manners are maintained by strict social policing (it's not much fun to stand out and be different)

It only takes a small minority to ruin it for the rest of us. for example, bike theft

Fun fact: despite a national registry of bicycle serial numbers (and most people do this), the majority of Japanese people I know have had a bicycle stolen. Though it isn't unheard-of to get it back.

The West used to. It's not impossible.

simple and easy aren't synonyms. It's a simple rule, but very difficult to implement.

It's brief but it's not simple. "Manners" is an extremely complicated concept.

What qualifies as good manners varies from situation to situation, but the concept of acting with good manners is hardly complicated (conform to the expected behavior of the situation).

Enforcment is a matter of encoding the rules and then applying a carrot and/or stick -- same as any other rule.

"Conform to the expected behavior of the situation" is incredibly complicated. What is the situation? How do you determine what the expected behavior is? What exactly does conforming consist of?

It takes humans years to learn how to do this. Entire books are written on the subject. A major medical disorder affecting millions of people includes a persistent difficulty doing this specific thing. Even normal people have to put serious effort into this if they visit a place where societal norms are different from what they're used to.

If it's not complicated, then I'm sure you can write down the rules for some specific situation real quick. Go ahead....

"Stand to the right on an escalator"

"Put trash in a trashcan and not on the ground"

That wasn't complicated. And took 30seconds. Are there a lot of rules? Of course. Is knowing them all in advance possible? Of course not. Don't confuse that with 'complicated'.

Fine people who litter. Have an ai voice chide people who stand on the wrong side of an escalator. Both simple.

Do I really have to stand to the right on an escalator? I think the nearest one is a mile away, that seems really inconvenient and unnecessary, and it's going to be hard to get my work done.

I'm surprised to find this sentiment on a site filled with computer programmers. The most important and difficult lesson of computer programming is that simple-sounding rules have a lot of details that we take for granted.

> I think the nearest one is a mile away, that seems really inconvenient and unnecessary

I think this way of thinking, being obtuse on purpose to try to win an internet argument (without a prize, no less), is the more unnecessary thing. What point does that argumentation try to prove other than that a hypothetical version of you, as opposed to most humans who live in large cities, are an inflexible idiot?

Most people are not 100% unaware of the context in which they are engaging. We know to apply escalator rules when we're at an escalator. We know to put things in bins when we have things to put in bins. What we don't know, we can learn through observation, reading the atmosphere, and making at least a minimal effort not to showboat our individualism and, apparently, any obtuse refusal to engage with our context.

(By the way, I don't actually think you are an inflexible idiot.)

That's my point. It's a lot more complicated than "stand to the right on an escalator." You have to learn through observation, read the atmosphere, and engage with context.

There are some less obtuse issues with your universal pronouncement. There are escalators where it's too narrow to pass. There's no need nor expectation to stand to one side on these. The same goes for escalators that are so long that nobody's walking up them to accelerate their progress, or when nobody is around, or when it's so crowded nobody's able to pass anyway. And, at least in the places I'm familiar with, it doesn't apply in places where people aren't going to be in a big hurry. Stand right, pass left applies to subway stations but not malls.

Maybe this all seems obvious. Well, go to a tourist-heavy place with escalators and observe how much of this is learned behavior that takes repeated long-term exposure to understand.

Manners are really complicated. The escalator thing is a relatively simple example compared to something like, say, paying for a meal in a restaurant with a group, and it's already pretty deep when you dig into it.

> That's my point. It's a lot more complicated

It's not so complicated that you assume you need to run out at this very moment to find the nearest elevator just to prove a point. That's moronic.

> There are escalators where it's too narrow to pass

So you see what everybody else is doing and do that. Presumably, if it's that narrow, everybody's just standing in the centre.

> The same goes for escalators that are so long that nobody's walking up them to accelerate their progress

The fact the staircase is so long is exactly why people would be walking up an escalator, to save the most time.

> or when nobody is around

Then it clearly doesn't matter.

> or when it's so crowded nobody's able to pass anyway

If everybody's on one side, it's not too crowded.

> it doesn't apply in places where people aren't going to be in a big hurry

Alright, that's fine for where you are familiar. It won't take long at all to notice that's not the case in Japan, there are enough elevators all around the place.

> Manners are really complicated

If you're completely unobservant yet somehow think you need to be on edge at all times, which seems contradictory, I'm sure it is.

Or if you think that they're inflexible edicts without nuance. They're manners, not morals.

Nuance is another way of saying complex.

All you’re really saying here is that our big brains are sufficiently capable to make sense of the complexity, which I mostly won’t argue with.

Fwiw escalator standing rules depend on where you are in Japan.

https://myjrpass.com/ja/blog/Escalator_Rules_Japan

> However, each region in Japan has a different side to stand. In Tokyo, people stand on the left side and in Osaka, people stand on the right side.

It's been done before, and continues to be done in some places. It requires high group trust, and a strong group identity.

In some places it is something sadly absent or overlooked...

And with countries with lots of newcomers it can take decades (well, generations) to take on the host countries manners rather than sticking to home country manners that may not mesh with host country’s manners/customs.

I don’t know. I, the individual, can maintain a lot of manners fairly simply if I really wanted to.

The actual question is if you could move to another country with a very different system of "manners" (read: culture) and throw out your learned behavior and adopt theirs.

My experience living in an incredibly multi-cultural immigrant dense area, is overwhelmingly "No". People like their "home" cultures (generally they believe its the best), and they tend to carry some degree of resentment for their new society for not recognizing that. It creates endless friction at the edges (whereas core values tend to be pretty similar globally).

Japan doesn't really deal with this at all, and what immigrant ingress they have is usually fueled by people trying to live a Japanese like life.

I think they are saying that it's difficult to "maintain manners" for hundreds of thousands to millions of diverse "I, the individual" 's. It's great that you don't struggle with that yourself, but your manners can be made entirely irrelevant by 1 person in a public place who has anti-social behaviors (doesn't share the same set of "required" values for that society).

You're right, it can be read as it being difficult for society to maintain manners. I agree and I should have been clearer. But I also think you may be misunderstanding what I said to fit it into your own model. There is a difference between manners and what results from them. You can maintain (what you believe to be) good manners without it improving society to your liking. This is "irrelevant" in the sense of not changing things, but it is not irrelevant to maintaining your manners. Conforming to the bad manners is the more likely culprit to the bad outcomes anyway.

Caving on manners to avoid the "struggle", or rather, caving on manners because one benefits from doing so is just a reflection of how much one values the values. This is simply saying that more often than not we can maintain them, it just might not be worth it to us.

It's simple if your city is full of Japanese people.

That's the key one -- it should be first and maybe the only one on the list. Japan is mono-culture and high-trust. They are all on the same page. You can't replicate that in western cities any more, such as the US or Europe. In some ways it's at odds with the idea of globalization and multiculturalism.