Oh man this make me nostalgic! My mothers sides family were from an area close/along the Chuo rapid line, west Tokyo probably exactly between Otsuki & Shinjuku.
Otsuki is actually not the most common final destination along Chuo Rapid Line, but Takao is. Takao is close to a popular hiking spot Takao mountain so there's definitely more stuff there compared to Otsuki.
Probably the WORST "getting stuck at Chuo Rapid Line" is Actually mistakenly taking Chuo Line that transfer to Ome Line that could sometime go all the way to Okutama. There's literally nothing there, and you're deep in the mountain. There's so little light pollution there, that my sisters friend that live there told me that at night you can actually see the light pollution from Tokyo inner city from the east, and locals call it 煩悩の光 (The light of lust/carnal desires).
My friends and family like to joke about "anywhere USA." There are places all across the US where the same design language, chain restaurants, etc are all the same. There will be some differences in local business and in political/religious signage, but otherwise, they are cookie cutter, somehow feeling basically the same from Anchorage AK to Tampa FL. Importantly, these are all connected by car line.
I think there are a few things that make Japan fascinating to anyone who lives in a car-oriented culture, and a very important aspect is that even the small, out of the way, rural towns are still connected via passenger train, which changes the relationship of the small town to the central hub in important ways like what's described in the article here. Getting off the train in a small town is very different than getting out of your car in a small town.
You can find this same dynamic in the US, btw. You'll find that old rural towns, that grow up connected to the central hubs by either boat or by passenger train, have a lot of the same charm and feel. But if things are developed along roads, there's no presumption about walkability: they are designed for people to get in their cars and go from one parking lot to another.
Anyway, I'm actually totally clueless about this and speculating with very little informed knowledge outside my lived experience. I should probably delete this comment.
> even the small, out of the way, rural towns are still connected via passenger train
As someone who lives in one such place: no, they are not connected by train. Here in Aomori you can't go anywhere without a car. The whole prefecture is how you describe the US.
Thank you for that context. I had a feeling something like that would be the case. I suppose it would be more correct to be talking about the "idea" of Japan as it is seen by the US. There is probably a similar charm to NYC or Montana cattle-land or whatever as it is perceived abroad. Not exactly incorrect, but also not really an accurate representative of the whole, even if narrowed to "just NYC" or "just Montana cattle-country" parts of it.
Japan has some awesome public transit but at the end of the day, people talk about Japan as if it was just Tokyo. A non-American who has only visited NYC or Chicago might think that America as a whole had good decent public transit.
I’ve been to Japan 4 times and have driven in 25 US states. Rural areas just tend to be car dominated. A few towns have charm but most are just where regular people work and live.
I wonder if it's because of watching anime as a kid. I even love the look of Japanese alleys with lots of wires hanging above. I'm pretty sure it's because it was a common sight in anime that was different from my lived reality.
I have often wondered about this as well. I think the answer is, where else are you going to find a very small town, in the mountains, on a passenger rail line? For good measure throw in extensive local history (including historic sites), modern internet and cellular coverage, and maybe also some onsen.
Certainly there are a few to be had but (my impression) pretty much none in North America. Probably some places in Switzerland and Austria that tick most of those boxes which people seem to find similarly fascinating.
I live in a small decaying Japanese city and there is nothing fascinating about it. With a few exceptions, most Japanese cities and towns are really ugly.
There are a lot of small decaying cities in the US, and I find them fascinating. When I travel (which is frequent) I avoid major highways just so I can see more of them. It's not country-specific and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
Eh, you see the same kind of romanticism about the French, Italian, Greek, Swiss countryside, to list just a few.
It’s more so that US small towns are deeply uninteresting since many have been hollowed out to have the same chains. Japan has followed the opposite model and promotes obscure regional specialties like an obsession.
Does it? Even in this article you see that Japan is dominated by a bunch of big chains. Even in a small sleepy town you find a 7-11 open all night, few other well known convenience stores, a big chain gym, a popular hotel chain as well as a nation wide karaoke parlour chain.
are there chains? sure. but there are also tons of local small businesses and government initiatives like the roadside stations (https://www.japan.travel/en/guide/michi-no-eki/) to promote regional specialty. they're not present in this article because they're generally not open 24 hours, which is the focus of the article.
Here in Washington state a lot of the small towns don't have a whole lot of small businesses outside of super tourist oriented towns.
I am an European guy living in the inaka (Japanese countryside), and to me small Japanese cities and towns look like small US towns: a few big box stores here and there, a bunch of konbinis around the corner, and a million houses scattered around in awful urban sprawl.
Also, michinoeki are cool the first few times, but afterwards they are all the same: a bit of local produce, and the usual assortment of locally-branded senbei / ramen / printed cookies.
Hahaha I thought of this immediately when I saw the article title. I fell asleep on the train a few times and ended up in Ome or Okutama when I was living in Tokyo after a long night out. Ironically Okutama was/is still one of the most beautiful areas I have ever been, did a ton of drives out to that area to go explore the mountains
Something like this happened to me once on a bus, not because I fell asleep, but due to the line I was on changing its route, which I didn't know about. I just assumed it would go to my stop like it always did, so I didn't even bother checking. It turned out that this was the last bus of the day, in winter.
I eventually ended up at the "loop", AKA the last stop where buses turn around, and waited around an hour for a night bus that could get me back to where I wanted to be. Doing this as a blind person, with nobody else around to help just in case, was quite scary.
Have you never taken public transit before? You're one of today's lucky 10000: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Pre-smartphone, or if you don't have a signal, you check the posted timetable. In any decent good transit system, every stop, even the tiny bus stops in the middle of nowhere, has an up-to-date timetable on display. In a complicated area with several lines, they may also have a map showing all the different lines.
Or - ask a human! A bus is driven by a driver, and they aren't omniscient, but they do know stuff because they have to drive buses every day. Worst case, they could point you to the right place to find routes and timetables. If they've got an hour to kill before they drive the next bus back, they know that.
Post-smartphone, you get out your smartphone and check the transit operator's website or app. Transit apps are pretty useful: input where you want to go, and it tells you the fastest route to get there, including where you need to change to a different vehicle. I normally use the app from my local transit company (BVG), or the nationwide one (Deutsche Bahn) for long-distance trips; aggregators like Google don't always have the latest information. In Germany there is some kind of data-sharing program run by the government so that any transit company can give you accurate information for any other company's services and plan a route involving multiple companies. This might not be the case where you live.
wow congratulations to you. I hope you weren't in a foreign country at the same time! I can understand why you might be a creature of habit and an unplanned bus routing is definitely a monkey wrench
Ahhh, that reminds me of my year as an exhange student in Yohokama. Specifically the time when I cought the last train on the Den-en-toshi line from Tokyo towards my dormitory at Aobadai, only to realize that the last train doesn't go all the way - I think it stopped at Tama-Plaza, 5 stops early.
There was a line of at least 50 people at the taxi stand, and I didn't fancy staying for 4 hours until the trains would run again, didn't see any all-night restaurants either. So I walked.
Note that this was years before Google Maps, I didn't even have a cell phone. I just tried to follow the train lines, walking through unfamiliar, quiet, dark residential areas, occasionally passing the areas I knew, around the train stations, but seeing hardly any people even there.
With nothing else to do, I just continued through the night into the same direction, until I recognized the area around the Aoba Ward Office, where I had been to get my residence permit. I knew how to get back to the train line, across the flood plains of the Tsurumi river, and there I came across the only place that was actually busy at this time of night: a distribution center for the morning newspaper where delivery drivers loaded stacks of newspapers onto their scooters. I'm pretty sure it was this building: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YgEAFMGvrkbPkPxR8
I continued following the train tracks for another half hour or so until I finally reached my dormitory to catch at least a few hours of sleep.
The freakiest thing to me is the Lawsons. This was a tiny little convenience store chain that existed in a few counties near Cleveland, OH. It went out of business around 1980, but through some baffling chain of events managed to migrate to Japan where they seem to be only slightly less common than 7/11s.
7-Eleven Japan also got so big that they bought out 7-Eleven USA. But now the Canadian owner of Circle K is bidding to buy 7-Eleven Japan so I guess it's the circle of corporate life.
7-11 trips at any given time of the day are one of my most precious Japan memories from my 3 week trip.
I cannot even explain why, maybe it it the Nintendo-like jiggles and atmosphere of comfort. We have similar markets where I am from any I know 24/7 chains from around the planet and it isn't really what this is about. The products are not super special either ... still it eminates magic for me and when I went to Taiwan a few years later I was EAGER to enter a Japan-style 7-11.
Lawson is big in Thailand, but I only see them at the BTS Sky Train stations. Well, I might have seen one in a mall but I'm not 100% sure, also in an airport.
Interesting to hear they're from Ohio. Their logo is incongruousy milk-just-like.
Here's their Insta, it seems to be their main online presence:
My wife and I enjoyed Tokyo for ten days in October of 2023. After a long day of site seeing, we would stop in at a Lawsons for a variety of snacks to eat while we rested up for the next day. The store was always clean and the small meals were very tasty.
(not related to Lawsons: we discovered the "joy" of a bidet in our hotel room. Upon returning home we immediately ordered a Toto.)
I just wish installing one in North America was a bit easier. Need access to power (usually no outlets near the toilet) and water (requires some minor plumbing work).
What do you need power for? Bidets are relatively popular in Poland and they are just taps for warm water that you can direct wherever with a convenient basin. Not sure what you need the gadgetry for. And yes, bidet is an absolutely essential thing to have in a bathroom.
Do Polish bathrooms tend to have an instant water heater installed in the bathroom like much of Europe? American homes have one main heater, often far from the bathroom. I have to run my shower for nearly a full minute before I get any hot water. A warm water tap that isn’t in constant use won’t get warm using the amounts of water a bidet requires. We need a power supply that can heat the water either a tank in the bidet or on demand. That power supply is uncommon here.
I know we always had a hot water tank in or near the bathroom so hot water was nearly instant. I honestly can't tell you if it's widespread or not though.
There are cheap versions that don't require power and tap into existing plumbing. Obviously not the deluxe Toto experience but still worthy of consideration.
I have 3 toilets in my house. One I was able to tap into the power supply at the light switch and install on outlet for a fancy Toto model. My other two bathrooms would require opening up walls and running new wiring through many studs in order to add a power outlet, so they get the cheap cold water models.
I've tried them a few times (in Japan, Europe, and in the US) and I just don't get the love affair... We even had the plumbing and electrical power put in next to the toilet in our master bedroom when we remodeled our house, but have never bought the bidet seat.
I wonder which other cities have examples of this phenomenon. Presumably any large one with a mass transit system - having lived in London (England) I can imagine some undesirable Tube termini to wake up at, but most terminus stops are still well within the suburbs. That is, unless you end up on longer distance commuter rail lines, where you might just wake up in Portsmouth. Those longer distance trains might be more akin to the line discussed in the article.
Moscow is a severe case. The lines are going radially in all directions from the city center 250-300km away, with your stop somewhere along the first 40 min of the journey.
Well, how to decribe it... Simply put: you don't end up in a clean and cozy Japaneese town, there are few shady taxis who will be ready to propose you a comfortable trip back for around 200-300$. There is no convenience store open 24/7. If you're unlucky to end up there in the winter, then it's probably -20C outside. There is one 24/7 ATM corner which is mostly occupied by the local homeless people – so the ONLY warm option left is to go for a shining 24/7 slots machines/gambling place and try to gamble what you have for a taxi money or just to kill time. I once spent a night like this in Tver, gambling ~10$ what was left in my pockets all night with minimal bets.
I used to know a female comedian who hosted a comedy night once a month. She and her partner lived in Morden for the sole reason that she has fallen asleep on the tube and got stuck there so many times that they figured it was easier just to move there lol
My route home is via commuter rail so I don't have that luxury. I wouldn't possible know what it is like to wake up after a few beers and find myself on the last train of the night, four stations past my stop, but rumour has it that the night bus network is pretty good at getting me^H^Hpeople home, even if the wait can be cold, so long as you've not actually left London. Or Uber.
Crewe is a station of despair for the British rail network despite not being a last stop, instead in fact because it's something like the heart of the network. If you try to travel far enough across the island (especially from the north, I think) and you depart lateish or don't have the right tickets or enounter delays, the chances are excellent that you will be spending several hours overnight in Crewe. You can forget about finding a convenient and affordable bed, so instead you'll be slumped on a chair in the little waiting room, which at least is lit and heated, and feels like it's the secret heart of Britain. Or at least that's how it all still was the last time I was there, but I doubt anything much has changed since.
Crewe native here. It’s a big town rather than a small Mountain village, but aside from that it would be a similar experience to the article. There’s modern Best Western across the street. Pubs open until midnight or 1ish. Indian restaurants accommodate after hours drinkers and diners until the wee hours. There is a 24 hour McDonalds and some late night garages for supplies.
To note, ending within the suburbs doesn't help that much if everything is closed and your choice is wandering the streets, spending 5h at the only opened bar, forking for an hotel or paying a cab.
That said, France is the same regarding commuting trains, oversleeping in Paris's RER will lead you to pleasing but pretty far away towns.
Did it once, and spent about 5h visiting the sleeping town by foot to mark the occasion. Did it again in the midst of winter, and the staff allowed me and the two other blokes to stay for the night in the next departing train with the heating on.
Spain had trains going well into the mountains as well. I can't imagine how it goes for Russia, China and India.
> Did it again in the midst of winter, and the staff allowed me and the two other blokes to stay for the night in the next departing train with the heating on.
That’s a notably kind and humane gesture in the midst of winter.
I was trying to think of one in Berlin, but on weekend nights the metro trains run all night, and don't really cross over huge gaps of non-city like the one highlighted in the article. At any U-Bahn end station on a party night, you'll wait 15-30 minutes and get on the next train going the other way. On non-party nights, get out your navigator app and wait the same for a night bus.
You could definitely take a regional train passing through the city, for two hours to somewhere like Magdeburg, but you don't get on those by mistake as they run infrequently, only stop at the bigger stations, and have separate platforms.
In Copenhagen you could reasonably plan to go from the central station to, say, Høje Taastrup, but fall asleep and end up in Aalborg 5 hours and 400km away.
Høje Taastrup is a large suburb at the edge of Copenhagen, and the end of an S-train line, but anyone who lives there will know an intercity train is faster. Trains to Aalborg stopping at Høje Taastrup leave at 00:50 and at 02:50 tonight. The other suitable intercity and regional trains overnight are to nearer places, 150km or so.
Drunk people on Vancouver's skytrain definitely do end up at King George (the terminus station furthest from downtown) if they fall asleep and miss their stop. The train stops running entirely at about 1:15 AM.
Berlin has this and it's Schöneweide. There is a light rail ring with two lines going in opposite directions... and one line going straight into the middle of nowhere. If you don't pay attention it's easy to end up there by accident.
I have a London-based friend who once woke up in a bus depot with the bus parked and nobody else around. Presumably the driver is supposed to check for anyone left on the bus before parking it and leaving it, but they didn't on this occasion.
A friend woke up in Leeds once. The main problem was the unexpected cost of a peak time ticket back to London the following morning, which is a lot for a student.
Chicago, too, particularly on Metra (the commuter rail network). The longest line is the UP Northwest line, about 63 mi/102 km to the far rural town of Harvard, Illinois.
Or, if you're heading to Indiana, the NICTD South Shore Line can take you all the way from Chicago to South Bend.
In the case of Paris, you would not really have that with the Metro which is confirmed to Paris and relatively immediate suburbs but with the RER (they share the same stations with the Metro) you can easily get off in the middle of nowhere (again - relatively, I am thinking about the south of Paris, mostly)
Milton Keynes (and a few other stops) on the West Coast Main Line function in the same way if you're unlucky enough to fall asleep on the last north-west commuter train out of London.
I wouldn’t want to end up in Chorleywood, near the north western end of the Metropolitan line, late at night. It’s a nice little village, but I suspect it would be pretty dead.
There is something delightfully oldschool about the design and layout and basic functionality of this Sora News website. It looks like webpages I saw about Japan in 2005. Nothing has needed to change since then, so they haven't changed it, and it works just fine.
The "AKIBA PC HOTLINE!" hasn't changed at all in 20 years either. Worth reading with auto-translate for news about weird PC stuff and electronic items for sale in Akihabara.
SoraNews24 (nee RocketNews24) has been like this since 2008, with basically no change in the article style, so yeah, it's a descendant of the 2000s Internet. Glad it's still going strong without changing.
I immediately thought of old school blogs in the 2000s when the page loaded. No annoying clickbait titles, memes, or reaction gifs, just personal reporting with short paragraphs and plenty of photos.
I once read that one of the reasons behind very straightfoward page layout on Japanese websites is a legacy of the internet-on-phone data services, screen sizes, and reading experience in the years before 2007/2008+, when the iphone and then android devices came out.
Japan had its own domestic ecosystem of IP data to phones and web browsing 2006 and earlier, but page rendering features were very rudimentary, and you had to keep the total data transfer sizes down or nothing would load properly.
Ended up on Elmendorf Air Force Base (at the hospital) this way once as a little kid in the early 1980s. The bus actually went from Anchorage onto the air force base and then called it quits. That was definitely my station of despair. "Mom... drive onto the military base and get me."
My favorite thing about soranews is the English writers always call the Japanese writers "us" or "our reporter", but you never see any of them when they post pictures of the office. I assume they're being kept in a dungeon somewhere.
Japan is definitely high trust and has a lot of advantages downstream of that. Though I think lots of that list is more of a "vibrant Japanese city" vibe (go up to some dying onsen town and you'll see plenty of broken shit and TVs dropped on the side of the road).
Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_. There are pockets of land that don't end up people's direct responsibility and end up getting very dirty very quickly. Little micro-pockets of trash that pile up (very quickly!). But lots of places you tend to have someone going around and just picking something up.
For like a year there was a guy consistently eating his cup noodles or lunch box near my building, and he would just drop it near the bike parking. But we had somebody come by the building twice a week to deal with trash and the like and he was picking it up (I'd throw it into a garbage bag if I saw it and had one in my hand). Still though, like if I'd go on a midnight walk I'd see it.
Turns out that the way super crowded places can be clean is by cleaning constantly (see also restrooms, which need to be constantly cleaned). "Nothing is broken" also definitely feels downstream of people fixing stuff promptly. Low latency when trying to deal with issues might be key.
And an aside for the public transit... while the transit feels clean, ask most any woman living in Tokyo how they feel about riding public transit. Many might still grade it above other ones but I have heard many nasty experiences that white guys just don't get exposed to at all. Groping, verbal harassment, the works.
EDIT: I mention lots of this to get to a bigger point: good things are possible! There is no magic entirely localized in the Japanese Isles.
Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_.
Indeed, it’s the same in Singapore.
Despite the law and order reputation of Singapore, plenty of people regularly break laws there, including littering.
All you need to do is get off the tourist strips and you can walk down park paths with plenty of trash strewn everywhere.
What people don’t see is the army of foreign labor who is constantly picking this trash up.
The government is good at enforcement - if an area has problems with trash cameras get put up along with signs warning of the consequences, but if the cleaning staff were to disappear overnight it wouldn’t take more than 24 hours for Singapore to look quite untidy.
In terms of Western countries like the US, cleanliness does come down to an operations issue. Cleaners don’t come often enough, trash cans aren’t emptied enough and littering enforcement is weak. But it’s certainly possible to make the US as clean as Japan with surprisingly little increase in effort.
I lived in Singapore previously and currently living in Japan for the past 5 years. Japan is not like Singapore - yes you're right Singapore is a mostly government enforced society including the artificial cleanliness but Japan is not. Cleanliness in Japan is cultural, people in Japan truly care about cleanliness and it's "common sense" to them and you do not see "plenty of trash strewn about" in non-touristy areas of Japan. (Of course Japan is not some perfect society and there are places that are dirty)
If you think there's not plenty of trash strewn about, you need to spend more time out at night or down back alleys. Once the booze starts flowing or the kitchens get too busy, plenty of waste starts appearing. You're less likely to see a bunch somewhere like Meguro than you are Shibuya, but you don't exactly need to go hunting to find overfilled trashcans where people have given up and just leave stuff beside them, trash bags left out overnight besides the back door to the restaurant kitchen, etc.
(And for anyone not aware, Tokyo is a place where the entrances to plenty of places are down these back alleys - it's not just the service entrance/back doors down there. )
I mean you can just go to the streets in Shibuya at night, loads of people leave their cans wherever. Or if you head out to random small towns in Saitama and see residential spots with plenty of garbage. And you can get into the pathological stuff like gomi-yashiki but that gets into a whole other thing.
Or (the one that's so odd to me given most stations have trash cans) random drinks and the like above the urinals in lots of stations. Plenty of posters asking the dudes to please please please please please please please not leave trash there. Like I get wanting to get rid of evidence or something but they have trash cans right there!
I am not going to comment much on Singapore because I had not seen much random trash, I just really dislike cultural essentialism about cleanliness, because there's still clearly a good amount of people who are just totally not aligned with that. The cleanliness is a result of society doing things despite there being bad actors in the system!
Seems most people in this thread are on roughly the same page, but here's an anecdote to give you an idea of why people are specifically comparing to the west:
Just today I was walking home from Nakameguro station in Tokyo and saw an orphaned protein bar wrapper on the street. I was shocked, it was the first time I'd noticed obvious trash (most likely not intentionally littered) on this street in years.
While living in Manhattan last year, I grew accustomed to holding my nose when walking past actual piles of garbage strewn about the street. This is not figurative as most people have used this phrase throughout this thread—You simply leave your rotting garbage on the street for trucks to pick up (obviously stray trash would get picked up by the wind and tossed into the air, descending upon Manhattan en masse). Only starting last November did they start using actual trash bins.
There was even a day when I saw multiple public garbage cans lit on fire and kicked into the street (in Chelsea, a fairly nice Manhattan neighborhood). Could you possibly imagine that happening anywhere in Tokyo? It would be news coverage for a week.
For all the nuance and exceptions one has to go out of their way to find when talking about trash in places like Tokyo and Singapore, it's unbelievably ages ahead of New York City, the richest city in the world.
A big part of the problem in Manhattan is that most places don't have alleys. There is nowhere for the trash to be left except on the sidewalk.
Some cities have the trash trucks drive around playing music, ice cream truck style, and you are required to bring your trash out to the truck. Logistically that would probably work in Manhattan. Politically I don't think you would ever be able to get it done.
Most places in the US don’t have alleys. The problem isn’t the alleys, it’s the trash cans. Most modern US cities have cans that can be lifted by the truck, and then emptied. NYC, on the other hand, insists on just leaving everything in flimsy bags, open to the rats.
Most places don't have a mostly continuous street wall with little/no setback from the public street/sidewalk.
Part of the problem in Manhattan has been that many buildings really do not have any place they could store those sorts of bins, or at least not in the quantity of them that they need for their trash output.
Manhattan isn't unique — and as far as I've heard, they've recently copied systems in use in Madrid (bins in parking spaces) and London (wheelie bins) to solve the problem.
Trash fires are definitely a rare occurrence in Tokyo, the bigger chaos generation is some bird poking at a trash bag and causing stuff to fly all over.
Though apparently there are about 50 trash truck fires a year? Mostly from batteries in the trash of course…
In most parts of Tokyo if you drop your wallet on the street somebody will chase you down to return it.
Umbrellas? Not so much. Stealing umbrellas is the official city pastime in Tokyo. Turn your back for one second and that thing will be gone. Report it to the cops and they'll just tell you to steal somebody else's.
This is actually a good thing from an environmental perspective. Japan has the type of downpour which can thoroughly drench you (in July for instance), but most of the time you don't need an umbrella. Obviously this means that umbrellas get lost, misplaced, or forgotten. If no one just took any seemingly lost umbrella out of politeness, you would end up with thousands of them going to a landfill.
I had the same thing with my umbrella when I left Japan after a year of studying there. “What should I do with this? It's still a good umbrella.”, “Oh, just leave it at the station, someone will take it.”
In 2024 I have visited Japan. It happened that when we changed quickly the subway train in some station, one of us has forgotten his expensive smartphone in the other train.
Someone from the old train has noticed this and she ran very quickly to our new train, returning the smartphone to the owner. She had to run very quickly between the 2 trains, otherwise her train could have departed, but she succeeded to go back.
The weird thing with the subways is you can ride around on them all day as long as you have a ticket that covers the fare from where you entered to where you leave.
A lot of the stations didn’t have shops, and a lot of those were outside the “turnstiles”, but there are some places where for lulls you could change trains to get a drink or a snack then backtrack to where you were “supposed” to get out.
So someone chasing you down is just lost time, not lost money.
Near my building it was the building manager. Most shops it's just a shop member that cleans up the stuff by the shop. At the McDonalds there's a staff member _constantly_ roving around cleaning tables up and picking up trash people leave (and they tend to not be able to keep up with the patronage trash generation...)
It's just in the job description for most things honestly.
You know how there are pictures of certain immigrants to NYC and other places in the early part of the XX century and they would show those people sweeping their stoops and sidewalks and generally keeping their neighborhoods tidy?
Well, in Japan, you still see that. Shop owners will go around their shop with a duster cleaning away any dust or cobwebs that might have sprung overnight. Awnings, signs, etc.
That was a political machine thing. In the days before social security, destitute old people with connections to the local ward leader would be handed a broom and a modest wage.
In my small city (~120k people at the time) they had a few thousand people on the payroll doing stuff like this.
Walk off the main thoroughfares of Tokyo and you end up with plenty of grunge and grime, too. I got invited to step outside for a cigarette at a craft beer joint down an alley in Shibuya and our 3rd companion was a rat as large as any I'd ever seen in NYC. Plenty of trash in the alleys, kitchens dumping buckets of waste water and not caring if plenty splash over the street or sidewalk instead of going down the drain, etc.
It's impressive how well kept the main areas are, but any metro area of 40m people is gonna generate plenty of trash.
It's not common, but it's a notable widely publicized issue - so if you're writing a video game and you want a low-level antagonist for the hero to fight, it'd be one of the default options.
Not saying this as whataboutism or to defend anything, just that men are probably not always aware of the problems women face even in the west so be vigilant when you ride public transport and don't think it's only a Japan problem.
the problem is that complaining and making a fuss about things that bother you is frowned upon. especially for women. so they suffer in silence. and the games probably are mostly made by men, who of course don't think it is as much of a big deal. not much different from what it used to be in the west. if only samurai chivalry was more prevalent. but unfortunately keeping appearance (and not embarrassing others) is more important.
The RGG games are pretty open about widespread societal problems in Japan. Indeed, the game before the current one had a pretty humanistic depiction of sex work that was not at all glamorous or lecherous.
As we all know though, low latency is often opposed to high throughput or efficiency. If the average person had to work one hour less each day but the toilets weren't spotless (but still clean enough), wouldn't that be a worthwhile trade?
Having never been to Japan, I don’t dispute anything you say, and as an American I definitely agree those things sound great.
However I do think it’s fair to point out the existence of women-only train cars in Japan, which I believe exist at least in part due to groping. Seems like YMMV depending on gender.
One thing that occurred to me recently is that Japanese book stores will wrap your books in paper to protect one's privacy while reading on mass transit. There are still some bookstores in Taiwan that still preserve this tradition as well.
There's quite a lot of interviews with western women on this subject on YouTube. Can't remember the channel.
I felt so incredibly safe in Japan and I don't remember even seeing a cop. As an American, that felt crazy to me for how large those cities are. I had some expectation of that but it still surprised me, particularly in the touristy nightlife districts with the street drinking.
Obviously seems like there might be some downsides to the culture that leads to this.
You probably didn't realize what to look for. There are quite a lot of kobans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban), especially in busy locations. Seeing police patrolling around the area is rare sight from my experience though (disclaimer: Experience strictly as tourist).
I mean, groping on the subway is a problem in New York City too. We just close our eyes and plug our ears while singing "hire more cops". A women-only car would be most welcome.
Yup, and it's always "impossible" to add doors, when Tokyo added them over the course of a decade with no problems and significantly more complicated through-running schemes.
Japanese are obsessed with being clean. Like wiping the pen with tissue paper before handing it to you. On more than one occasion I have had a stranger passenger on long distance train clearing my cup of coffee as she goes to throw hers in the trash. May be she is signalling you can't trust these foreigners to clean up before they leave!
I don't know about clean, I saw hardly any (men) wash their hands after using the bathroom. Sometimes they'd wave their hands under the tap. Without turning it on.
Seemed more like obsession with being tidy than hygeinic.
Central European here (Poland). The bizarre and amazing thing is the change that's been happening in the region over the last 20 years or so: the large cities have become very clean.
So, what you wrote stands true for smaller places, but large cities are now very clean. Not quite Japan-level, but close, and certainly much cleaner than anything in western Europe.
Yeah, true. I know that phenomen. And it is true in eastern germany as well.
Dresden for example has always working elevators and the stations are looked after regulary.
The small towns? It can take weeks, before a broken elevator is fixed, or a public toilet reopened. (If there is one at all in the first place) Until then you have to step over pee and shit.
> Looks pretty similar to what I'd expect to a regular European town.
Europe is not one country, and even within the same country, there may be big differences between regions, and within the city itself. Naples and Geneva for example are like polar opposites.
Japan is very uniform by comparison, and about as clean and well maintained as the best European cities, I'd say the US is about average by European standards, but with less variation. The general, very rough idea with Europe is that the further north you go, the cleaner it is.
Same in Germany. Graffiti everywhere; walls, buildings, fences, signs, historic monuments. It's awful and I don't know why they can't manage to do anything about it, but it also seems like no one cares about it as a problem to begin with. To me, such an individual invasion of the public space seems like a mockery of the common trust and the notion that the Europeans (and the Germans especially) have some sort of communal responsibility.
Things are actually open. In Switzerland everything closes. Japan is notable because there’ll be people everywhere and things will still be clean. Compare football games as example.
It's for workers' rights. Even ole' John Calvin (who probably started it in Switzerland) wanted Sunday as a day off because it protected workers rights against overwork, not because he saw it as mandated by the Bible.
Hi, Swiss person here. This does not address why it should be Sunday for everyone. Nobody's saying you should work 7 days a week. We could have different off days for different people.
> […] working the disadvantaged 7 days a week with no breaks.
In countries with a high development index, the employment law usually prohibits 7 day long working weeks, and there is a provision of at least one day off (granted, since employment laws vary across jurisdictions, there is no universal rule).
The situation is different for small businesses and self-employed as they are the masters of their own fate (so to speak), e.g. if a cafe owner decides to run the cafe 7 days a week and work there in person themselves, that is their choice.
I disagree with the implication that Swiss/European people are morally superior to those in other parts of the world and their choices are de-facto better than those being made elsewhere. Seems like a common, ignorant and bigoted stance.
Cleanliness and a general sense of respect for the public spaces IS de-facto better than trash everywhere and a society where everyone only cares for number one. If it's offensive to you, your moral compass is wrong.
> Sure, because there are worker rights and we do not keep people working at night unless there's a reason.
Part of this is low wages, but the population density also means you can easily find people who'll work the night shift. Or sometimes the store owner does it.
But no, they aren't like Europeans who think workers should have the right to work five hours a year.
Hmmm the few people that clean up at Japanese football games don't actually represent everyone. Many leave drinks containers behind or bento boxes that they brought with them, and often you are given bags of goodies (not actually that exciting, I got a branded folder of the team, and a salad dressing one time) which end up being 'forgotten'. Whilst yes some fans do keep it very tidy, as with many things in Japan, there is an idolised view that isn't based on reality.
Not football, and i've only been to one baseball game in Tokyo, but it was crazy , after the game everyone spent time to clean up their area - it was like a peer pressure thing almost & didn't seem like just a just a few people but the entire stadium for the most part
Don't bother :) There are other examples, but the US/HN audience is particularly fascinated with Japan in a "if you have to pick one" kind of way. Perhaps also because it's an old adversary.
It's much better than 0 outside benchmarking, so I've learned to just let these threads roll on.
I’m a frequent user of public transit in LA, NY, and my current smaller city and I’ve never felt unsafe or unwelcome. I mostly see these sorts of takes from Fox News shut-ins tbh
> - Accessibility strip for blind people (bumpy yellow stripe in train stations and sidewalks)
Have you tried to find an elevator? There's one in every station, but they don't tell you where it is.
Also, they like making sidewalks out of the slipperiest substances you can find. It's a problem when it rains and can't be easy for anyone who walks unsteadily.
I have not had any such problems living here for 7 years… elevators always have signs all over the station telling you exactly where to go to get to them, with standardized coloring and symbols, and text saying what it’s about in Japanese and English. They tell you even while you’re on the train which car the elevator will be in front of.
I would chalk up your experience to being generally overwhelmed and not used to it, mixed in with being illiterate in the local language (despite there being English and symbols to assist further).
I do know how to read. I was thinking of the case of finding it from the outside, especially at a large station like Shibuya where they're always closing random entrances. Jorudan/Google/Apple Maps also don't incorporate them into search.
It's fine once you've learned where they are of course.
Most stations play sounds to indicate stairs and ticket gates. Typically a slow ding...dong sound, and birds chirping. Though I'm not sure if they indicate elevators with those sounds, I need to check next time I'm in a station.
I notice that too, just carrying luggage around. Same with pedestrian overpasses some places. Overall, I’d say Japan is noticeably less accessible than the US or western Europe.
I went to Japan (first time) a few months ago, and I was blown away by almost everything (including what you mention). It's just so different from the US in almost every way, but so nice overall (people, cities, transit). I loved it and want to go back already.
There's a sign in Otsuka (northern Tokyo suburb) like "Otsuka has half the crime rate of 10 years ago!" Things are the way they are, up until the moment that they change.
Things can change if people will it into existence. My 2-bit belief is basically
simplified "broken window theory", where stuff being broken leads to more stuff being broken, trash leads to more trash... so dealing with cleaning stuff up quickly is good.
Generating an environment where people have some pride in what's around them and are also benefiting from the thing themselves, on top of the thing not being busted probably helps a lot.
There's a lot of anti-littering campaigns and the like. I feel like the gov'ts as a whole are pretty responsive to new kinds of crime and try to build a public consciousness against it as soon as they realize what's up.
Plenty of hooliganism in Japan all over, and plenty of raging, but at the end of the day if there's a nice bench that someone is allowed to sit on in a chill way, people probably tend to not take their rage out on it.
Maybe everyone in Tokyo is just ground down from having to work all the time and is just subservient to authority. Who knows!
Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
Japanese culture has an exceedingly high focus on the appearance of cleanliness and politeness. The inside of someone's home might be a hoarder's dream, but the outside will be clean.
Someone might be an absolute jerk, but to act on that in most social spaces would have very real consequences. Rude behavior, like dancing and playing loud music on a train, will get you arrested here.
Misbehavior in Japan is dealt with, and quickly.
On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.
Do not break the law in Japan.
There is a de-facto truce between the Yakuza and the police, as the Yakuza deal with foreign gangs and other problems that would be... difficult to solve with normal police work.
Japanese gangs are fiercely nationalistic. If the police don't handle you, the Yakuza will, and although I don't have any data to back this up, I'd wager that the police are the better option.
Additionally, Japanese neighborhoods have social responsibilities. Every couple of months, I am responsible for cleaning our trash area for two weeks, and there's usually some kind of repair or cleanup event twice per year.
In Japan, many people have lived in the same place for multiple generations, and can trace their ancestry within Japan back for thousands of years.
Japan is, quite literally, their ancestral home, and they act like it.
> On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.
In 2024, US police shot and killed 1,173 people [1]. That's 0.35 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
In 2022, Japan had 289 homicides, or 0.23 per 100,000 people [2].
I.e., an American is more likely to be shot by police than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
I don't speak Japanese, but if "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese, then maybe that's because such a thing is unthinkable in Japan.
Do you think that physical violence is the only sort of thing that police can unjustly inflict upon you?
I love Japan, have spent a significant quantity of time there, and if I was a billionaire, it'd be the place where I bought the penthouse luxury apartment. So if anything, I am very favorably biased towards the country.
But it also has a 99% conviction rate, and not because their police are so stellar that they always get the perpetrator on the first try. They hold you for extended periods of time and the system is set up to extract confessions. We know that people are weak to being coerced into false confessions even in countries where there is significantly less pressure and attempts to get them out of you.
Also plenty of laws that have penalties that would be considered quite harsh compared to much of the western world - simple possession of pot can get you 5 years in prison, and intent to distribute/profit can get you 10 - and personal stash levels are plenty to bump you into that range.
Police aren't going to arrest you unless they're pretty sure the charges are going to stick, but once you're in custody, they are... well, let's just say "highly motivated" in getting you to sign a confession, and they have a great deal of leeway that is unavailable in the US.
> I.e., an American is more likely to be shot by police than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
Many parts of the US are stuck in a bad equilibrium where there is lots of police violence and lots of crime, because the police violence is targeted on the basis of ethnicity rather than whether someone's actually breaking the law or committing antisocial behavior.
> Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.
The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.
Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.
Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.
The Japanese government, like France, doesn't keep track of ethnicity. That number means citizens and everyone just reports it as if it's ethnicity. You wouldn't be able to tell if some of them are half Korean or Chinese.
Tokyo in particular has a lot of immigrants these days, and I think you'd only notice if you read their nametags at the convenience store.
Last year, less than 9,000 foreigners naturalized into a population of 123 million.
In order to naturalize, you must present a compelling case to do so: you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education, must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially, must have no criminal record in Japan or elsewhere, and nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
I said "half" for a reason, I wasn't talking about naturalized citizens but rather their descendants or people with part foreign ancestry. Zainichi Koreans are the main example I think.
Nope. You must give a reason statement but it doesn't need to be compelling.
> you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education
Technically true but misleading - yes it's permitted to leave school at 14 in Japan, but very few children do.
> must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially
Up to a point. It's more "must have a household income equivalent to a minimum-wage full-time job, or equivalent lump sum assets, and not be behind on your taxes".
> nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen
What? No.
> Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
Right, which is exactly what makes "less than 9,000 foreigners" a very misleading figure. Naturalisation gains you little compared to living as a foreign permanent resident, and requires renouncing citizenship, so most people don't.
For the overwhelming majority of people just becoming a permanent resident is more than enough - there's not a strong need to become a Japanese citizen vs. permanent residency outside of the right to vote, and for overwhelming majority, the trade-off isn't worth it.
But Japan is not a particularly difficult country to naturalize in if you so desire. The N1 can be studied for and passed without being fluent. Supporting yourself financially basically means having roughly full-time employment. No idea where you got the idea you need to be married to a Japanese citizen, not true at all.
In the million of these discussions I've seen, this is usually the first/only explanation people jump to. (moreso for people only superficially familiar with Japan).
I'm speaking more generally about all comparisons between countries. The US is constantly compared to the Nordic countries and people constantly wonder why they're so much better on axes like healthcare and education. Very little attention is given to the obvious explanation that it's easier to treat and to educate a relatively homogeneous population.
… In the 1980s, Ireland was _extremely_ homogenous. This was not a place that people came to, it was a place that people left. Today, 20% of the population was born outside the state, and Ireland has one of the highest immigration rates in the world.
Spoiler: The education and health systems in 1980 were _far_ worse than today. Like, really, there’s no comparison. They’re not exactly world leading now (in particular the health service has a constant staffing crisis) but they were really quite bad by European standards back then. When I started primary school in 1989 or so, there were more than 40 kids in my class; today there’s a cap of 30 and the average is 22 or so. Health, education, and social services were bad because we didn’t spend enough money on them.
Organisation and resourcing seem like more obvious causes of problems with US healthcare and education than _demographics_, tbh.
Strongly disagree. People jump to that when they see a healthy society that's relatively homogeneous, and ignore counterexamples like relatively homogeneous countries, or states within countries, that have poor education/healthcare/etc. It's a post-facto explanation with no predictive power, and people jump to it only because it's superficially obvious.
Please do elaborate—what is the "this" that is not new? People cherry picking words out of which to construct strawmen to attack instead of actually engaging with the ideas actually put forward?
> Genetic profiles? Advocating for racial purity on HN, that's a new one. Wow.
You know full well that's not what I said. Deliberately misconstruing someone's words to make them sound crazy is unfortunately common enough on HN.
One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo, to the point where people genuinely have begun to believe that they don't. There's a world in which we respect the effects of genes while still also respecting individuals as fellow humans. I hope some day we get to that world—many lives will be saved and improved if we can get past this politically-medicated denial of the science of genes.
> Have a Jamaican newborn adopted by a Japanese family in Japan and a Japanese newborn adopted by a Jamaican family in Jamaica and see how each ends up.
If "genetics cause a real difference" here, what are they? If the difference is negligible in contrast to the influence parenting and society have, why not acknowledge that? To just ignore it is pseudo-science.
I didn't respond to that because OP's line of argument was just:
* Misconstrue what I said to be supportive of ideas of racial purity.
* Pretend that I didn't already build in culture into my original argument ("the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for")
Obviously culture plays a role, and culture can be adopted. I didn't respond to that part of their post because I already argued as much. I'm very much in agreement with them that culture is an enormous factor, and in many types of outcomes it's certainly the largest.
Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
What they're missing—and what too many people feel like they're not allowed to talk about—is that genetics also plays a large role in many types of outcomes, especially in the realm of healthcare. Ignoring that because it's politically inexpedient is a problem, and pointing it out doesn't make me an advocate for racial purity: we can talk about the role of genetics and the difficulty in treating a diverse population while still believing that diversity is, on the balance, a good thing!
> Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
FWIW I don't have that impression, that's not what I'm arguing against, I just think the cultural factors (speaking the same language fluidly) are really so much more important that I'd even say they're the only thing that "really" matters. For example, how much does healthcare have to do with social cohesion? If there were no people with myopia or only people with myopia in a country, would they get along better?
Also, consider how women were and are neglected in medicine.
Taking account of genetic differences seems mostly an issue of just actually doing it. If only women or men or Japanese people lived somewhere, the doctor could make a few, tiny, assumptions more. If people are mixed, they have to investigate what's in front of them, and while that may be a bit more work or more costly in a few instances, I think it would just make medicine more robust.
> One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo
I think this hot take should be reconsidered! Surely the above consequence is not anywhere near the top 10. There were entire ethnic groups virtually wiped out, cities leveled, European society set back decades.
And: the cautionary tales for naive reliance on genetic explanations for "good" versus "bad" tendencies in society go way beyond Nazism -- historically, they didn't even start there.
This. There is a fundamental cultural difference which is also reflected in the priorities of municipal governments. Yes, this is a generalisation and yes, it is slowly changing over time. Nevertheless, it’s probably the single biggest driver of this phenomenon.
Culture and mentality. They don't have the same urge to vandalize or graffiti. Same as Singapore.
They are much more united and much less diverse in various ways. While they have many subcultures, they mostly adhere to a greater social cohesion.
To make up for that a bit, they do allow people to get plastered and spray vomitus publicly, including public transit and no one bats an eye. That said, you don't get the public defecation that we get.
Even their bums tend to take care of themselves as best they can. They try to maintain a certain decorum despite their dire circumstances.
Americans, in a sense, lost quite a bit of their sense of shame.
At the risk of stereotyping an entire nationality, Japanese culture puts a high degree of emphasis on conformity, obeying rules, obeying social hierarchies and keeping things in a generally orderly fashion.
For instance, many Japanese primary public schools have no janitor. This is normal. The children scrub the floors, bathrooms and do all the other cleaning tasks in a defined schedule.
There's certainly a lot of tolerance for smoking, that's just not a drug that makes you commit crimes. (Except littering.) But they're only into mild stimulants because of memories of pervitin abuse.
The main difference I can think of is we think it's cool if a celebrity does drugs, but they get insta-canceled so hard they disappear from society entirely.
I don't believe Individualism is the issue, unless you mean by that a specifically American variety if Individualism. Individualism also comes with the idea of individual responsibility, and many relatively individualistic countries are close to, or in certain ways exceed, Japan (e.g., in Japan people tend to leave trash in public spaces to a degree that would be inconceivable in many Western countries).
Japanese are more individualist than Americans. They just don't apply this to graffiti.
They do sometimes litter, throw up in the sidewalk after drinking, and don't wash their hands after using the train station bathrooms.
I mean, Tokyo isn't even that clean. I was just there and saw a rat on the sidewalk every night. They're like NYC and just leave commercial trash bags on the sidewalk instead of using trash bins. (Also frequently saw aggressive "no dumping" signs on the pile of trash bags. Not very high trust!)
I think by individualism what people usually mean is the general "me, I got mine" attitude & the idealization of not giving a care to what other people think, i.e. "do your thing". I lot of what happens in the East Asian countries from peer pressure/accountability is to be actively defied in the West, and particularly in America. Keeping things clean because otherwise you might get judged by someone else is almost an incentive to litter.
> They're like NYC and just leave commercial trash bags on the sidewalk instead of using trash bins.
You might have mistaken it with the organised rubbish collection. It is common in New Zealand where business owners pack up rubbish at the close of business in dedicated, pre-paid rubbish bags that they leave in the front of the shop. A garbage truck comes by later and quickly collects rubbish. The cost of the service is included in the price of the rubbish bag, and the garbage truck won't collect a random or unrecognised bag but people do not do that.
It also seems cleaner as rubbish bins require cleaning on a regular basis, and the bags do not.
Given the extent to which it's discouraged, it can' be true as a general rule, regardless of the nations inventions. Although most of those examples in the blurb of the book you linked refer to corporate inventions, not individual inventions.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean I have no idea what I'm talking about. Japanese culture's suppression of the individual in favor of the community is well documented.
My honest opinion of "Japanese society works great because the whole society is formed by a unique strain of humans who lack any sense of individualism" is a pretty shallow take in my opinion, where most of the corroboration are other clueless people repeating the same basic stereotype.
The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression, but if you need academic citations then here's some from even back in the '90s arguing that Japan is not less individualistic than the West, and even arguably is less collectivistic depending on how you measure that. [1][2]
Here's an example purely from a Japanese stereotype that shows a type of individuality that people could generally understand (just in a form what westerners tend to look down on)—the concept of an otaku [3], or in other words, someone who follows some interest much further than anyone thinks is socially "normal" or "reasonable." And yet these people are generally accepted by Japanese society, if not empowered in the form of a respected "craft" culture, in a way that would just make you a total loser in most of the West.
My personal experience actually living in Japan for 7 years now, matches a different common trope in Japanese culture, wherein what people outwardly say to people they don't trust is completely different than what they actually believe and say to people they do trust (honne/tatemae [4]).
And unfortunately for the Westerners parroting these stereotypes, they firmly fall into only hearing the tatemae.
To the original thread, there are plenty of rational, direct reasons for why Japanese cities can be clean and orderly, that aren't that "Everyone in Japan is some kind of brainless drone," but unfortunately people who justify things based on that excuse will never learn what those things are, doomed to make the same mistakes... very drone-like, in my view.
> My honest opinion of "Japanese society works great because the whole society is formed by a unique strain of humans who lack any sense of individualism" is a pretty shallow take in my opinion, where most of the corroboration are other clueless people repeating the same basic stereotype.
It's not just a stereotype though, but a long held opinion and observation, literally the subject of study and research. To an extent more than other countries, this claim is objectively true - or at least I would have said that before seeing your links which reveal the idea to be one that is debated somewhat.
> The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression,
I was never denying individual expression can exist, but that doesn't mean most of society can't still be less individualistic than western countries.
Everything you have written is interesting, and I don't doubt that the stereotype can be exaggerated, over-repeated and misused, but it is a long-held observation about Japanese culture that has been intensely observed and studied. For that reason I think it is wrong to just dismiss it as an incorrect stereotype.
I lived and worked there for several years and I agree with them. Pretty sure my wife, who I met there, would also agree.
You can’t just lob a “you don’t know what you’re talking about” without some actual context like that - this forum is supposed to encourage more useful discussion.
While not as diverse as the US, Singapore is a melting pot of cultures and religions and is arguably safer and cleaner than Japan. Singling it out to diversity simplifies the issue. It's a million other choices and policies that made the US what it is today.
Singapore has a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people (with plenty of ethnic Europeans thrown in for good measure). They’re a mix of Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religions.
All that in a space smaller than many American cities. If that doesn’t qualify as a melting pot, I don’t know what does.
As a non-American, Hispanic, white, and black American people in the USA are all "American, American, American", and not really a melting pot if that's the only ethnic groups you're counting.
Wow. Doubling down eh? At this point I have to assume you’re trolling because I struggle to believe anyone could be this obviously racist and/or stupid.
The US is a mix of ethnic Europeans, Africans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, including ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people, and many others besides that.
That's a melting pot.
Singapore is described as "a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people".
That's not a melting pot.
Those are two different things. I don't care one bit if you think it is racist or stupid to point out the difference.
I know this goes against your deeply held beliefs but race is socially constructed. I've heard Americans refer to Italians, Turks and Slavic - and even Roma people - as "white" but tell a German that and they'll look at you with confusion. Tell them that Hispanics are more foreign to you, a white American, than Spaniards are to them, a white German and they'll just think you've lost the plot. Heck, go and tell a Japanese person they're interchangeable with Malaysians and Indians and see how they feel about it. Even throwing Indians and East Asians in one racial category seems frankly insane to me as a European for reasons that should be obvious if you've ever seen them let alone talked to them (and even superficial racism you can use to group all "black" people together doesn't explain it as a Punjab Indian person and a Han Chinese person share no obvious visual features).
China, Malaysia and India are culturally and ethnically extremely different. Heck, India and China alone span enough area to cover extremely distinct ethnic and cultural groups themselves. The reason "white" Americans think they're a distinct unified group from "Africans", "Hispanics", "Asians" and so on is that the US largely eroded the cultural differences over the centuries to the point "cultural origin" has become more of a costume than a meaningful identity - if you're an American descendent of German settlers, you're an American, not a German and Germans (except for the most ideologically driven völkisch nationalists) will humor you but never see you as "one of them" more than any other foreigner.
You know what Africans call a black American? American. You know what Asians call an Asian American? American. The US is a melting pot, alright, but it is a racially segregated one and that's what makes you think the races matter. The US dragged itself kicking and streaming to the point where it even acknowledged black people as actual people and abolished all the mandatory racial seggregation laws that were put in place by white Americans who felt icky about having to share space with former Untermenschen slaves. The Chinese specifically were the first group of people the US actively tried to prevent from immigrating (which was later expanded to all people from East Asia).
You're also ignoring that Singapore is only half the size of Texas while having a similar number of people living in it. The US has had a wide range of immigrants but they tended to cluster in different places. Comparing Singapore and the US is apples to oranges but not because you think Asian people are a coherent group outside of racial shenanigans. I know this isn't very "politically correct" for me to say but: Yes, your racism is intellectually insulting but it has also successfully impaired your comprehension of demographics, sociology and ethnic groups to that point that you're not even wrong[0].
If you're alluding to immigration, this cannot be blamed for vandalism and littering. Other kinds of crime, arguably, but not those, there are plenty of middle class shitheads who will happily do their part.
True, but one difference, is they allowed the culture and population to mature as they transformed from a fishing village to international port and commerce center.
And, while they do bring in foreigners, they tend to be domestic maids or medium to high earning foreigners with a decent education and culture.
It's worth adding, that Singapore being clean is not a magical culture thing, but a deliberate government policy. Lee Kuan Yew writes in his memories that is took a lot of effort to make Chinese drivers stop spitting out of the cars for example and make the river not smell of shit.
This is true, but given 60 years it now has become part of the culture there. Maybe if you go out to the poorer places with SEA laborers, you can find betelnut chewers --but those are imported manual labor immigrants and not natives --though maybe you see them in the small islands.
Sure; Singapore (and Japan) do a lot to actively instill and maintain these conditions, from harsh punishments for drug trafficking, penalties for graffiti, good public education, a social safety net, affordable housing, government jobs programs, and so on. Basically, there's no need to whisper about how you need ethnic homogeneity to have clean streets.
What this thread is about *is* culture, and the USA does not have the culture this way, and apparently Japan and Singapore do. Culture being the unchallenged basic assumptions of how people behave and how society works. It has nothing to do with whether culture changed or not, only how it is now.
Singapore may be racially diverse but it has an integrated culture at this point. (Which took a lot of deliberate effort to make happen, don't get me wrong).
Look how hard they're tiptoeing around the issue as if you can't just check and see who commits the who most crime per capita in the US and see that there are zero of those people in Japan. Gee, what could be the issue I wonder.
It's ironic that you talk about "tiptoeing around this issue" and then completely lack the spine to actually go full racist and spell out "black people".
Also, my country has very few black people and still a lot of vandalism, dirtyness, rudeness, so maybe it's something else that explains the special situation of Japan and not just "black people bad".
Lingering colonial attitudes. America, for the longest time was the "exploited space" for Europe and much like India, carries this beaten in attitude that "this is not the nice place". You can find nice places like this but you have to go to the richest enclaves to find it. Japan is its own "nice place".
In the 90’s I was walking down a back street in the Tokyo burbs at almost 3 am realizing something felt wrong and I couldn’t figure out what.
There was woman half a block in front of me, by herself, not even worried there was a random white guy walking behind her. I am definitely not in Kansas anymore.
The other weird late night encounter was a road crew working at O-dark thirty on Sunday night/Monday morning when it was a national holiday. I understand late night crews but on a three day weekend?
Yes. However there are downsides to Japan’s intensely high trust (and high shame) culture as well. Death by overwork is the one that’s most known in the west, although there are plenty of others that outsiders would never usually learn about
"- The complete absence of vandalism"
There are plenty of places in Japan that have graffiti. Additionally vandalism, name etching and such occasionally occurs at shrines. Vandals are primarily tourists but sometimes a drunk Japanese citizen
A better statement would be a general absence of vandalism.
"- Accessibility strip for blind people (bumpy yellow stripe in train stations and sidewalks)"
This is very well done in the major cities, however I've seen many incomplete implementations especially in parks where I suppose funding simply ran out.
I do believe their situation is much better than the average.
Too bad the west has lost similar conditions by being caught up in politics. Japan will probably also degrade in less than a decade thanks to the same imports.
Good read as I catch a train home close to midnight. I've often wondered what I would do if I fell asleep on the train and missed my stop. Peterborough isn't the most exciting town during the day; being there after midnight would rather unfortuanate. Thankfully it hasn't happened yet!
I had a friend who used to fall asleep regularly on the first train after a night out and would wake up in the farthest reaches of the opposite direction of his home.
I had a weird sixth sense about sleeping too long on the bus/train and rarely went more than a couple stops too far. I think my record was an extra half mile on a quiet night with nowhere to be but bed.
I used to have a really long commute when I lived in Tokyo and would regularly nap on the train. I was always amazed (and grateful) when I would wake up just as the train pulled into my station.
There's more despair when you miss the last train/bus in a US city, in an unfamiliar area, you don't have a phone, nothing is open, and the only other people you've seen seem to be deciding whether to mug you.
I always wondered why they didn't just keep the trains running, even if only for a handful of runs overnight. Seems worth it to keep drunk salarymen from wandering around the streets until morning only to have to go back to work.
My understanding is they do a _lot_ of maintenance at night.
I have to imagine it might not be worth it though. The whole "city that never sleeps" vibe is relatively localized to a couple neighborhoods and having all lines run through the night would be a bit of an extravagance (all that for, what, the 5 hours they're not running?). Train drivers aren't cheap! And we invented technology for getting small groups of people home already, it's called taxis.
Post COVID I think there's been a huge push to just chill out even with the 24 hour stuff. Lots of places close earlier than they used to, and some places that used to be 24 hours just go until midnight now.
There was a bus that would go between a couple of the nightclub spots throughout the night, never took it though. Maybe there would be a decent business in running "commuter"-y buses throughout the night between certain areas, at least to try and get closer home.
Other's have said maintenance, which is right. But the context is also important in that if the trains are delayed by 5 minutes in Tokyo at peak hours, the congestion can be so bad that many people won't even fit in the next train. This can have a cascading effect, and since so many use the public transport, opting for car is not a workable solution in such density.
So it actually makes sense to focus on efficiency and reliability at peak hours, at the cost of running it 24hours. Tokyos rail line are one of the few trains in the world that actually make profit (although not all of it from trains) and reliability is kinda key to this profit margin, especially at prime time. (Most major stations have malls and commercial activities in Japan. And those are run by the train companies, and surprisingly the majority of the profit for Train companies are not the trains but those activities. Those are not open past 22:00 in most places, so that's another reason)
Maintenance, perhaps? For the London Underground at least, the power is switched off after the trains stop running (4th rail) so workers can safely go onto the tracks.
Also, it would almost definitely run at a loss (excluding externalities)... same reason why many Chinese cities' subsidised metros close quite early. Agreed that it's probably beneficial in the big picture but maybe hard to justify to superiors?
As others have suggested, running trains overnight hugely complicates routine maintenance. When people are working on the line, any train movements will hugely increase the risk profile.
The more sensible option is generally night buses, which are considerably less expensive. The London Underground runs a limited night service on some lines on Friday and Saturday nights, but London has a fairly extensive night bus service.
I've heard the theory floated that this is at least in part due to furious lobbying against it by taxi companies, who currently have a de facto monopoly on transport at night.
More likely it's just for train maintenance, and indeed, 24-hour train operation is vanishingly rare, with NYC and Chicago the only well-known major cities with it. Tokyo does stand out by not even having night buses though. (It used to have a skeletal network, but even that was killed off by COVID.)
> More likely it's just for train maintenance, and indeed, 24-hour train operation is vanishingly rare, with NYC and Chicago the only well-known major cities with it.
Yes, and at least NYC is notorious for how poorly it's train network is maintained, which I suspect is no coincidence.
They could get rid of this phenomena if they had the train schedule end in a lively area. Meaning the last train arriving an endpoint is followed by a single last train that only goes halfway. I imagine that extra half-route is opposite that most passengers are traveling though.
Like others said, it's probably maintenance. But presumably they could run late night bus service along essentially the same routes as the trains.
Trains are good at bypassing traffic and carrying large numbers of people, but you don't need to worry about those things in the middle of the night, so a bus should work fine as substitute.
Many European cities do run buses at night, often replacing rail services. The largest ones run the metro/trains, sometimes only on Friday and Saturday night.
It's not only useful for people leaving a party, but workers on early or late shifts like cleaning out working in restaurants.
In addition to the maintenance comments. There are many residential areas and hotels that are very close to the tracks. Having a few hours of no trains running is important for those wishing to sleep.
Example: Tokyo City View Hotel (Tabita station), rooms approximately 13 meters from tracks.
I used to live beside a commuter train elevated line (in Ireland, not Japan). Many nights after the line shut down, there’d be at least some maintenance going on, sometimes extensive maintenance. And that was just on the short stretch I could see. Heavy rail takes a fair bit of maintenance, and 24 hour buses can _mostly_ plug the gap in places that have them (volumes are way lower at night).
Irish Rail sometimes runs late services around Christmas and New Year, but have been fairly clear that it’s not sustainable, and even then there’s an hour or so gap where the tracks are cleared before normal service starts up around 05:30.
This is honestly a super delightful article. It has personality and charm, and actually provides some useful information, despite said information having literally no bearing whatsoever on my life.
I’ve never ended up in this situation myself, but I have many times lived on similar commuter lines. Hearing the names of those end of lines stations becomes a big part of your every day routine. In most cases I never even visited them, which looking back feels like a pity, and even disrespectful of their incidental importance
I could have sworn I saw a Youtube video version of this article, but I can't find it in my history. I was reminded of another unusual end of line station, though: One you can't leave, because it's inside the campus of Toshiba.
I love stuff like this so much. Part of me wants to go to a Station of Despair and survive the night now.
I live in NYC and I've thought about doing the "take every train to the end of the line" thing before. It would, of course, be a much different experience.
I attempted visit all 270 tube stations in London in 24 hours with some friends when we were younger
It involves a lot of going to the end of one line then finding a way to the terminus of a another line and go back into town without going back on yourself.
The depots for this train seem to be in areas that are much more populated (Wikipedia says Mitaka and Toyoda [0]). If Otsuki Station is the station of despair, this would suggest the trains ride empty from Otsuki to the depot. Why couldn’t they allow passengers on that final ride to the depot, requiring them to disembark at Mitaka/Toyoda at the latest?
Otsuki might still be an booking-on/-off point for train drivers, with a number of drivers based there and regularly starting and ending their turns at that station and presumably living nearby. Or alternatively the train company finds it more convenient ferrying the driver with a taxi or company car to from the regular booking-on/-off point.
If you get stuck there between ~10PM (the last train back to Hachioji that could connect to Shinjuku) and 11PM (or midnight if you can spare the change for the limited express), you can also consider going west to Yamanashi and Kofu. Let's just say that I was almost in this exact scenario from a long day in Kawaguchiko, but I ended up making it back to central Tokyo.
There is something strangely magical about the pictures of the city streets at night. Lack of trash? How clean the roads are? The lighting? I have been out at night in plenty of places (not Japan), but it never looks like this. At first I thought it was their camera, but I think it is just Japan at night?
I really don't understand what this article is about: every bus/train/subway line from a city center usually ends up in an small-town place and if you are on the last bus/train/subway in the night, it will be the same emptiness everywhere, whether it is Tokyo or any place with public transport. And people miss their stop sometimes, literally happening everywhere.
Im so intrigued by Japan. It seems truly like a dream. As an avid love for Haruki Murakami, I feel he captures the essence of Japan more than any other writer.
Ride shares aren’t a thing in Japan and most people can’t afford blowing hundreds of dollars on a super long taxi ride - for reference from where I live to there, the dominant taxi app here estimates 40,000 yen in the day time, which is more expensive at night due to increased late night rates. Plus Otsuki is in the middle of nowhere - I presume there are taxi drivers looking to capitalize on this, but there may not be many of them so far from a major area.
These train lines are very long, so you might be quite far away from where you were actually intending to go.
A taxi from Otsuki (the station mentioned in the article) to even Hachioji (another station that's famous for being "the last stop") would take over an hour and cost >20,000JPY. At that point it's cheaper to get a hotel. Even if you have the money, the possibility of taxis just not being available at that time in a place like Otsuki is pretty high.
It's pretty nice actually. With a Big Echo and Lawson's within just a few minutes walk from the station, you're all set for a reasonably comfortable night on the cheap, with a toothbrush, hot chocolate, snacks, and a private space. Probably still best opting for the hotel though.
It's not that sad. The secret is to do the opposite of American development; don't build parking lots and giant streets everywhere and let people open late night businesses in walking distance of the station.
I would be totally happy with a big place like that as end station. Here you are lucky if it's two houses next to eachothers. Probably noone home anyway. I have fond memories of people falling asleep and then back in school next day talking about how their parents had to drive two hours to pick them up in the nowherelands. This ofcourse before mobile phones was in the hands of schoolkids. Most of the time the busdriver stopped where you usually got off. Looking back and noticing you are asleep they get up and prods you to get off the bus :-) Such nice drivers we had then.
Otsuki is actually not the most common final destination along Chuo Rapid Line, but Takao is. Takao is close to a popular hiking spot Takao mountain so there's definitely more stuff there compared to Otsuki.
Probably the WORST "getting stuck at Chuo Rapid Line" is Actually mistakenly taking Chuo Line that transfer to Ome Line that could sometime go all the way to Okutama. There's literally nothing there, and you're deep in the mountain. There's so little light pollution there, that my sisters friend that live there told me that at night you can actually see the light pollution from Tokyo inner city from the east, and locals call it 煩悩の光 (The light of lust/carnal desires).
PS: I include my self here. Just spent looking at pictures of around Okutama. Very beautiful.
I think there are a few things that make Japan fascinating to anyone who lives in a car-oriented culture, and a very important aspect is that even the small, out of the way, rural towns are still connected via passenger train, which changes the relationship of the small town to the central hub in important ways like what's described in the article here. Getting off the train in a small town is very different than getting out of your car in a small town.
You can find this same dynamic in the US, btw. You'll find that old rural towns, that grow up connected to the central hubs by either boat or by passenger train, have a lot of the same charm and feel. But if things are developed along roads, there's no presumption about walkability: they are designed for people to get in their cars and go from one parking lot to another.
Anyway, I'm actually totally clueless about this and speculating with very little informed knowledge outside my lived experience. I should probably delete this comment.
As someone who lives in one such place: no, they are not connected by train. Here in Aomori you can't go anywhere without a car. The whole prefecture is how you describe the US.
I’ve been to Japan 4 times and have driven in 25 US states. Rural areas just tend to be car dominated. A few towns have charm but most are just where regular people work and live.
Certainly there are a few to be had but (my impression) pretty much none in North America. Probably some places in Switzerland and Austria that tick most of those boxes which people seem to find similarly fascinating.
I live in a small decaying Japanese city and there is nothing fascinating about it. With a few exceptions, most Japanese cities and towns are really ugly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR_Y0XOin8Y
It’s more so that US small towns are deeply uninteresting since many have been hollowed out to have the same chains. Japan has followed the opposite model and promotes obscure regional specialties like an obsession.
Here in Washington state a lot of the small towns don't have a whole lot of small businesses outside of super tourist oriented towns.
I am an European guy living in the inaka (Japanese countryside), and to me small Japanese cities and towns look like small US towns: a few big box stores here and there, a bunch of konbinis around the corner, and a million houses scattered around in awful urban sprawl.
Also, michinoeki are cool the first few times, but afterwards they are all the same: a bit of local produce, and the usual assortment of locally-branded senbei / ramen / printed cookies.
I eventually ended up at the "loop", AKA the last stop where buses turn around, and waited around an hour for a night bus that could get me back to where I wanted to be. Doing this as a blind person, with nobody else around to help just in case, was quite scary.
Pre-smartphone, or if you don't have a signal, you check the posted timetable. In any decent good transit system, every stop, even the tiny bus stops in the middle of nowhere, has an up-to-date timetable on display. In a complicated area with several lines, they may also have a map showing all the different lines.
Or - ask a human! A bus is driven by a driver, and they aren't omniscient, but they do know stuff because they have to drive buses every day. Worst case, they could point you to the right place to find routes and timetables. If they've got an hour to kill before they drive the next bus back, they know that.
Post-smartphone, you get out your smartphone and check the transit operator's website or app. Transit apps are pretty useful: input where you want to go, and it tells you the fastest route to get there, including where you need to change to a different vehicle. I normally use the app from my local transit company (BVG), or the nationwide one (Deutsche Bahn) for long-distance trips; aggregators like Google don't always have the latest information. In Germany there is some kind of data-sharing program run by the government so that any transit company can give you accurate information for any other company's services and plan a route involving multiple companies. This might not be the case where you live.
There was a line of at least 50 people at the taxi stand, and I didn't fancy staying for 4 hours until the trains would run again, didn't see any all-night restaurants either. So I walked.
Note that this was years before Google Maps, I didn't even have a cell phone. I just tried to follow the train lines, walking through unfamiliar, quiet, dark residential areas, occasionally passing the areas I knew, around the train stations, but seeing hardly any people even there.
Then the train line went underground - I think that must have been here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AhUkt1HcvquknHpK6
With nothing else to do, I just continued through the night into the same direction, until I recognized the area around the Aoba Ward Office, where I had been to get my residence permit. I knew how to get back to the train line, across the flood plains of the Tsurumi river, and there I came across the only place that was actually busy at this time of night: a distribution center for the morning newspaper where delivery drivers loaded stacks of newspapers onto their scooters. I'm pretty sure it was this building: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YgEAFMGvrkbPkPxR8
I continued following the train tracks for another half hour or so until I finally reached my dormitory to catch at least a few hours of sleep.
I cannot even explain why, maybe it it the Nintendo-like jiggles and atmosphere of comfort. We have similar markets where I am from any I know 24/7 chains from around the planet and it isn't really what this is about. The products are not super special either ... still it eminates magic for me and when I went to Taiwan a few years later I was EAGER to enter a Japan-style 7-11.
Interesting to hear they're from Ohio. Their logo is incongruousy milk-just-like.
Here's their Insta, it seems to be their main online presence:
https://www.instagram.com/lawson108thailand/
(not related to Lawsons: we discovered the "joy" of a bidet in our hotel room. Upon returning home we immediately ordered a Toto.)
I’m pretty sure this story is replicated by anybody who visits Japan. Once you use a bidet you can’t go back.
Well, how to decribe it... Simply put: you don't end up in a clean and cozy Japaneese town, there are few shady taxis who will be ready to propose you a comfortable trip back for around 200-300$. There is no convenience store open 24/7. If you're unlucky to end up there in the winter, then it's probably -20C outside. There is one 24/7 ATM corner which is mostly occupied by the local homeless people – so the ONLY warm option left is to go for a shining 24/7 slots machines/gambling place and try to gamble what you have for a taxi money or just to kill time. I once spent a night like this in Tver, gambling ~10$ what was left in my pockets all night with minimal bets.
Cockfosters was proper despair, and Mordor (or Morden) well... don't.
What took the cake though was flying back and arriving at Stansted after midnight and waiting for the 5am escape back home in the depths of winter.
London offered many memorable evenings for those silly enough to party in the city a while back.
Not drinking so much is probably a way to avoid the despair, but where is the fun in that?
https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do...
My route home is via commuter rail so I don't have that luxury. I wouldn't possible know what it is like to wake up after a few beers and find myself on the last train of the night, four stations past my stop, but rumour has it that the night bus network is pretty good at getting me^H^Hpeople home, even if the wait can be cold, so long as you've not actually left London. Or Uber.
https://sucs.org/~cmckenna/maps/busspider/2012-14/west-londo...
But if you don't wake up til the end of the line, it's probably pretty much like in Japan, except less clean.
That said, France is the same regarding commuting trains, oversleeping in Paris's RER will lead you to pleasing but pretty far away towns.
Did it once, and spent about 5h visiting the sleeping town by foot to mark the occasion. Did it again in the midst of winter, and the staff allowed me and the two other blokes to stay for the night in the next departing train with the heating on.
Spain had trains going well into the mountains as well. I can't imagine how it goes for Russia, China and India.
That’s a notably kind and humane gesture in the midst of winter.
You could definitely take a regional train passing through the city, for two hours to somewhere like Magdeburg, but you don't get on those by mistake as they run infrequently, only stop at the bigger stations, and have separate platforms.
Høje Taastrup is a large suburb at the edge of Copenhagen, and the end of an S-train line, but anyone who lives there will know an intercity train is faster. Trains to Aalborg stopping at Høje Taastrup leave at 00:50 and at 02:50 tonight. The other suitable intercity and regional trains overnight are to nearer places, 150km or so.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnkSuyRV54
Daisy: [answering phone] Hello? Oh, hi, Mike. Yeah, he's here, I'll just get him.
[to Tim]
Daisy: It's your boyfriend.
Tim: He's not my boyfriend.
[picks up phone]
Tim: Hi babe.
Mike: Hello Timmy!
Tim: Where are you?
Mike: Err, Sheffield.
Tim: What are you doing in Sheffield?
Mike: Fell asleep on the tube.
Tim: The tube doesn't go to Sheffield, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, I know. I, uh, must have changed at King's Cross.
Also not a despair place. But the point is you can go far. Same must be true in Japan.
Or, if you're heading to Indiana, the NICTD South Shore Line can take you all the way from Chicago to South Bend.
The "AKIBA PC HOTLINE!" hasn't changed at all in 20 years either. Worth reading with auto-translate for news about weird PC stuff and electronic items for sale in Akihabara.
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/
Japan had its own domestic ecosystem of IP data to phones and web browsing 2006 and earlier, but page rendering features were very rudimentary, and you had to keep the total data transfer sizes down or nothing would load properly.
Uh, ma’am, if he’s enlisted he cannot just leave.
- The complete absence of vandalism
- How generally clean everything is
- Accessibility strip for blind people (bumpy yellow stripe in train stations and sidewalks)
- Nothing is broken or out of service
- How safe and welcoming the public transit system feels.
Japan is worth the journey if you ever want to step into a high-trust other dimension.
Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_. There are pockets of land that don't end up people's direct responsibility and end up getting very dirty very quickly. Little micro-pockets of trash that pile up (very quickly!). But lots of places you tend to have someone going around and just picking something up.
For like a year there was a guy consistently eating his cup noodles or lunch box near my building, and he would just drop it near the bike parking. But we had somebody come by the building twice a week to deal with trash and the like and he was picking it up (I'd throw it into a garbage bag if I saw it and had one in my hand). Still though, like if I'd go on a midnight walk I'd see it.
Turns out that the way super crowded places can be clean is by cleaning constantly (see also restrooms, which need to be constantly cleaned). "Nothing is broken" also definitely feels downstream of people fixing stuff promptly. Low latency when trying to deal with issues might be key.
And an aside for the public transit... while the transit feels clean, ask most any woman living in Tokyo how they feel about riding public transit. Many might still grade it above other ones but I have heard many nasty experiences that white guys just don't get exposed to at all. Groping, verbal harassment, the works.
EDIT: I mention lots of this to get to a bigger point: good things are possible! There is no magic entirely localized in the Japanese Isles.
Indeed, it’s the same in Singapore.
Despite the law and order reputation of Singapore, plenty of people regularly break laws there, including littering.
All you need to do is get off the tourist strips and you can walk down park paths with plenty of trash strewn everywhere.
What people don’t see is the army of foreign labor who is constantly picking this trash up.
The government is good at enforcement - if an area has problems with trash cameras get put up along with signs warning of the consequences, but if the cleaning staff were to disappear overnight it wouldn’t take more than 24 hours for Singapore to look quite untidy.
In terms of Western countries like the US, cleanliness does come down to an operations issue. Cleaners don’t come often enough, trash cans aren’t emptied enough and littering enforcement is weak. But it’s certainly possible to make the US as clean as Japan with surprisingly little increase in effort.
(And for anyone not aware, Tokyo is a place where the entrances to plenty of places are down these back alleys - it's not just the service entrance/back doors down there. )
Or (the one that's so odd to me given most stations have trash cans) random drinks and the like above the urinals in lots of stations. Plenty of posters asking the dudes to please please please please please please please not leave trash there. Like I get wanting to get rid of evidence or something but they have trash cans right there!
I am not going to comment much on Singapore because I had not seen much random trash, I just really dislike cultural essentialism about cleanliness, because there's still clearly a good amount of people who are just totally not aligned with that. The cleanliness is a result of society doing things despite there being bad actors in the system!
Just today I was walking home from Nakameguro station in Tokyo and saw an orphaned protein bar wrapper on the street. I was shocked, it was the first time I'd noticed obvious trash (most likely not intentionally littered) on this street in years.
While living in Manhattan last year, I grew accustomed to holding my nose when walking past actual piles of garbage strewn about the street. This is not figurative as most people have used this phrase throughout this thread—You simply leave your rotting garbage on the street for trucks to pick up (obviously stray trash would get picked up by the wind and tossed into the air, descending upon Manhattan en masse). Only starting last November did they start using actual trash bins.
There was even a day when I saw multiple public garbage cans lit on fire and kicked into the street (in Chelsea, a fairly nice Manhattan neighborhood). Could you possibly imagine that happening anywhere in Tokyo? It would be news coverage for a week.
For all the nuance and exceptions one has to go out of their way to find when talking about trash in places like Tokyo and Singapore, it's unbelievably ages ahead of New York City, the richest city in the world.
Some cities have the trash trucks drive around playing music, ice cream truck style, and you are required to bring your trash out to the truck. Logistically that would probably work in Manhattan. Politically I don't think you would ever be able to get it done.
Part of the problem in Manhattan has been that many buildings really do not have any place they could store those sorts of bins, or at least not in the quantity of them that they need for their trash output.
Though apparently there are about 50 trash truck fires a year? Mostly from batteries in the trash of course…
Umbrellas? Not so much. Stealing umbrellas is the official city pastime in Tokyo. Turn your back for one second and that thing will be gone. Report it to the cops and they'll just tell you to steal somebody else's.
I had the same thing with my umbrella when I left Japan after a year of studying there. “What should I do with this? It's still a good umbrella.”, “Oh, just leave it at the station, someone will take it.”
In 2024 I have visited Japan. It happened that when we changed quickly the subway train in some station, one of us has forgotten his expensive smartphone in the other train.
Someone from the old train has noticed this and she ran very quickly to our new train, returning the smartphone to the owner. She had to run very quickly between the 2 trains, otherwise her train could have departed, but she succeeded to go back.
A lot of the stations didn’t have shops, and a lot of those were outside the “turnstiles”, but there are some places where for lulls you could change trains to get a drink or a snack then backtrack to where you were “supposed” to get out.
So someone chasing you down is just lost time, not lost money.
It's just in the job description for most things honestly.
Well, in Japan, you still see that. Shop owners will go around their shop with a duster cleaning away any dust or cobwebs that might have sprung overnight. Awnings, signs, etc.
In my small city (~120k people at the time) they had a few thousand people on the payroll doing stuff like this.
If it was advertised as a handout, then many of the recipients would be asking for a broom; provided they were able.
End of the day, it’s cheaper to sell politics like toothpaste than to build relationships.
It's impressive how well kept the main areas are, but any metro area of 40m people is gonna generate plenty of trash.
Not saying this as whataboutism or to defend anything, just that men are probably not always aware of the problems women face even in the west so be vigilant when you ride public transport and don't think it's only a Japan problem.
However I do think it’s fair to point out the existence of women-only train cars in Japan, which I believe exist at least in part due to groping. Seems like YMMV depending on gender.
I felt so incredibly safe in Japan and I don't remember even seeing a cop. As an American, that felt crazy to me for how large those cities are. I had some expectation of that but it still surprised me, particularly in the touristy nightlife districts with the street drinking.
Obviously seems like there might be some downsides to the culture that leads to this.
You probably didn't realize what to look for. There are quite a lot of kobans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban), especially in busy locations. Seeing police patrolling around the area is rare sight from my experience though (disclaimer: Experience strictly as tourist).
Seemed more like obsession with being tidy than hygeinic.
Although even in toilets with hand dryers, I've seen many Japanese not dry their hands after washing!
What are you comparing it to that you see such a drastic difference?
Eastern europe in general less. Norther europe more.
Western and southern europe is mixed. Graffiti I have seen quite a bit, but broken glass or other types of vandalism are sadly common, too.
So, what you wrote stands true for smaller places, but large cities are now very clean. Not quite Japan-level, but close, and certainly much cleaner than anything in western Europe.
Dresden for example has always working elevators and the stations are looked after regulary.
The small towns? It can take weeks, before a broken elevator is fixed, or a public toilet reopened. (If there is one at all in the first place) Until then you have to step over pee and shit.
Europe is not one country, and even within the same country, there may be big differences between regions, and within the city itself. Naples and Geneva for example are like polar opposites.
Japan is very uniform by comparison, and about as clean and well maintained as the best European cities, I'd say the US is about average by European standards, but with less variation. The general, very rough idea with Europe is that the further north you go, the cleaner it is.
Way more than in NYC or Boston today, it reminded me of NYC when I was a kid in the 80s.
Sure, because there are worker rights and we do not keep people working at night unless there's a reason.
> Japan is notable because there’ll be people everywhere and things will still be clean
What do you mean people will be everywhere? There are people as well in regular European towns and it's clean as well.
Same for Sunday Closures. What's so special about Sunday apart from old religious concerns?
In countries with a high development index, the employment law usually prohibits 7 day long working weeks, and there is a provision of at least one day off (granted, since employment laws vary across jurisdictions, there is no universal rule).
The situation is different for small businesses and self-employed as they are the masters of their own fate (so to speak), e.g. if a cafe owner decides to run the cafe 7 days a week and work there in person themselves, that is their choice.
And then govt decided to stop for brownie points with church.
Sundays off are about workers rights, little to do with religion.
And you can still work on Sunday - in businesses that are allowed to be open (gastro, petrol stations, certain shops).
Why did they all happen to pick Sunday?
Weekend is only two days long, so it's not like you have a lot of options.
(Of course, my point is, Sunday is the day off, the last day of the week, and the "core" of the weekend, exactly because of the dominant religion.)
That's a ridiculous answer. People work at night in Japan because there is a market for that.
Part of this is low wages, but the population density also means you can easily find people who'll work the night shift. Or sometimes the store owner does it.
But no, they aren't like Europeans who think workers should have the right to work five hours a year.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEJPA065NRUG
China is probably the better example for long work hours right now.
Stop reading tabloids
It's much better than 0 outside benchmarking, so I've learned to just let these threads roll on.
Have you tried to find an elevator? There's one in every station, but they don't tell you where it is.
Also, they like making sidewalks out of the slipperiest substances you can find. It's a problem when it rains and can't be easy for anyone who walks unsteadily.
I would chalk up your experience to being generally overwhelmed and not used to it, mixed in with being illiterate in the local language (despite there being English and symbols to assist further).
It's fine once you've learned where they are of course.
Things can change if people will it into existence. My 2-bit belief is basically simplified "broken window theory", where stuff being broken leads to more stuff being broken, trash leads to more trash... so dealing with cleaning stuff up quickly is good.
Generating an environment where people have some pride in what's around them and are also benefiting from the thing themselves, on top of the thing not being busted probably helps a lot.
There's a lot of anti-littering campaigns and the like. I feel like the gov'ts as a whole are pretty responsive to new kinds of crime and try to build a public consciousness against it as soon as they realize what's up.
Plenty of hooliganism in Japan all over, and plenty of raging, but at the end of the day if there's a nice bench that someone is allowed to sit on in a chill way, people probably tend to not take their rage out on it.
Maybe everyone in Tokyo is just ground down from having to work all the time and is just subservient to authority. Who knows!
Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
Japanese culture has an exceedingly high focus on the appearance of cleanliness and politeness. The inside of someone's home might be a hoarder's dream, but the outside will be clean.
Someone might be an absolute jerk, but to act on that in most social spaces would have very real consequences. Rude behavior, like dancing and playing loud music on a train, will get you arrested here.
Misbehavior in Japan is dealt with, and quickly.
On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.
Do not break the law in Japan.
There is a de-facto truce between the Yakuza and the police, as the Yakuza deal with foreign gangs and other problems that would be... difficult to solve with normal police work.
Japanese gangs are fiercely nationalistic. If the police don't handle you, the Yakuza will, and although I don't have any data to back this up, I'd wager that the police are the better option.
Additionally, Japanese neighborhoods have social responsibilities. Every couple of months, I am responsible for cleaning our trash area for two weeks, and there's usually some kind of repair or cleanup event twice per year.
In Japan, many people have lived in the same place for multiple generations, and can trace their ancestry within Japan back for thousands of years.
Japan is, quite literally, their ancestral home, and they act like it.
In 2024, US police shot and killed 1,173 people [1]. That's 0.35 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
In 2022, Japan had 289 homicides, or 0.23 per 100,000 people [2].
I.e., an American is more likely to be shot by police than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
I don't speak Japanese, but if "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese, then maybe that's because such a thing is unthinkable in Japan.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
I love Japan, have spent a significant quantity of time there, and if I was a billionaire, it'd be the place where I bought the penthouse luxury apartment. So if anything, I am very favorably biased towards the country.
But it also has a 99% conviction rate, and not because their police are so stellar that they always get the perpetrator on the first try. They hold you for extended periods of time and the system is set up to extract confessions. We know that people are weak to being coerced into false confessions even in countries where there is significantly less pressure and attempts to get them out of you.
Also plenty of laws that have penalties that would be considered quite harsh compared to much of the western world - simple possession of pot can get you 5 years in prison, and intent to distribute/profit can get you 10 - and personal stash levels are plenty to bump you into that range.
Police aren't going to arrest you unless they're pretty sure the charges are going to stick, but once you're in custody, they are... well, let's just say "highly motivated" in getting you to sign a confession, and they have a great deal of leeway that is unavailable in the US.
Many parts of the US are stuck in a bad equilibrium where there is lots of police violence and lots of crime, because the police violence is targeted on the basis of ethnicity rather than whether someone's actually breaking the law or committing antisocial behavior.
This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.
The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.
Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.
Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.
Tokyo in particular has a lot of immigrants these days, and I think you'd only notice if you read their nametags at the convenience store.
In order to naturalize, you must present a compelling case to do so: you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education, must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially, must have no criminal record in Japan or elsewhere, and nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
It's not a lot more, but it's more than 2%.
Nope. You must give a reason statement but it doesn't need to be compelling.
> you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education
Technically true but misleading - yes it's permitted to leave school at 14 in Japan, but very few children do.
> must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially
Up to a point. It's more "must have a household income equivalent to a minimum-wage full-time job, or equivalent lump sum assets, and not be behind on your taxes".
> nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen
What? No.
> Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
Right, which is exactly what makes "less than 9,000 foreigners" a very misleading figure. Naturalisation gains you little compared to living as a foreign permanent resident, and requires renouncing citizenship, so most people don't.
But Japan is not a particularly difficult country to naturalize in if you so desire. The N1 can be studied for and passed without being fluent. Supporting yourself financially basically means having roughly full-time employment. No idea where you got the idea you need to be married to a Japanese citizen, not true at all.
> 98% ethically Japanese
In the million of these discussions I've seen, this is usually the first/only explanation people jump to. (moreso for people only superficially familiar with Japan).
Spoiler: The education and health systems in 1980 were _far_ worse than today. Like, really, there’s no comparison. They’re not exactly world leading now (in particular the health service has a constant staffing crisis) but they were really quite bad by European standards back then. When I started primary school in 1989 or so, there were more than 40 kids in my class; today there’s a cap of 30 and the average is 22 or so. Health, education, and social services were bad because we didn’t spend enough money on them.
Organisation and resourcing seem like more obvious causes of problems with US healthcare and education than _demographics_, tbh.
You know full well that's not what I said. Deliberately misconstruing someone's words to make them sound crazy is unfortunately common enough on HN.
One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo, to the point where people genuinely have begun to believe that they don't. There's a world in which we respect the effects of genes while still also respecting individuals as fellow humans. I hope some day we get to that world—many lives will be saved and improved if we can get past this politically-medicated denial of the science of genes.
If "genetics cause a real difference" here, what are they? If the difference is negligible in contrast to the influence parenting and society have, why not acknowledge that? To just ignore it is pseudo-science.
* Misconstrue what I said to be supportive of ideas of racial purity.
* Pretend that I didn't already build in culture into my original argument ("the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for")
Obviously culture plays a role, and culture can be adopted. I didn't respond to that part of their post because I already argued as much. I'm very much in agreement with them that culture is an enormous factor, and in many types of outcomes it's certainly the largest.
Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
What they're missing—and what too many people feel like they're not allowed to talk about—is that genetics also plays a large role in many types of outcomes, especially in the realm of healthcare. Ignoring that because it's politically inexpedient is a problem, and pointing it out doesn't make me an advocate for racial purity: we can talk about the role of genetics and the difficulty in treating a diverse population while still believing that diversity is, on the balance, a good thing!
FWIW I don't have that impression, that's not what I'm arguing against, I just think the cultural factors (speaking the same language fluidly) are really so much more important that I'd even say they're the only thing that "really" matters. For example, how much does healthcare have to do with social cohesion? If there were no people with myopia or only people with myopia in a country, would they get along better?
Also, consider how women were and are neglected in medicine.
https://www.aamc.org/news/why-we-know-so-little-about-women-...
Taking account of genetic differences seems mostly an issue of just actually doing it. If only women or men or Japanese people lived somewhere, the doctor could make a few, tiny, assumptions more. If people are mixed, they have to investigate what's in front of them, and while that may be a bit more work or more costly in a few instances, I think it would just make medicine more robust.
I think this hot take should be reconsidered! Surely the above consequence is not anywhere near the top 10. There were entire ethnic groups virtually wiped out, cities leveled, European society set back decades.
And: the cautionary tales for naive reliance on genetic explanations for "good" versus "bad" tendencies in society go way beyond Nazism -- historically, they didn't even start there.
I think Americans are a little more footloose in that respect.
They are much more united and much less diverse in various ways. While they have many subcultures, they mostly adhere to a greater social cohesion.
To make up for that a bit, they do allow people to get plastered and spray vomitus publicly, including public transit and no one bats an eye. That said, you don't get the public defecation that we get.
Even their bums tend to take care of themselves as best they can. They try to maintain a certain decorum despite their dire circumstances.
Americans, in a sense, lost quite a bit of their sense of shame.
For instance, many Japanese primary public schools have no janitor. This is normal. The children scrub the floors, bathrooms and do all the other cleaning tasks in a defined schedule.
some random reference examples: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=japanese+...
A relatively low income inequality may also be a big factor. Also, much less societal tolerance for drugs?
As in, none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Japan#Medic...
The main difference I can think of is we think it's cool if a celebrity does drugs, but they get insta-canceled so hard they disappear from society entirely.
https://youtu.be/jv4oNvxCY5k
They do sometimes litter, throw up in the sidewalk after drinking, and don't wash their hands after using the train station bathrooms.
I mean, Tokyo isn't even that clean. I was just there and saw a rat on the sidewalk every night. They're like NYC and just leave commercial trash bags on the sidewalk instead of using trash bins. (Also frequently saw aggressive "no dumping" signs on the pile of trash bags. Not very high trust!)
You might have mistaken it with the organised rubbish collection. It is common in New Zealand where business owners pack up rubbish at the close of business in dedicated, pre-paid rubbish bags that they leave in the front of the shop. A garbage truck comes by later and quickly collects rubbish. The cost of the service is included in the price of the rubbish bag, and the garbage truck won't collect a random or unrecognised bag but people do not do that.
It also seems cleaner as rubbish bins require cleaning on a regular basis, and the bags do not.
https://www.amazon.com/Pure-Invention-Japans-Culture-Conquer...
The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression, but if you need academic citations then here's some from even back in the '90s arguing that Japan is not less individualistic than the West, and even arguably is less collectivistic depending on how you measure that. [1][2]
Here's an example purely from a Japanese stereotype that shows a type of individuality that people could generally understand (just in a form what westerners tend to look down on)—the concept of an otaku [3], or in other words, someone who follows some interest much further than anyone thinks is socially "normal" or "reasonable." And yet these people are generally accepted by Japanese society, if not empowered in the form of a respected "craft" culture, in a way that would just make you a total loser in most of the West.
My personal experience actually living in Japan for 7 years now, matches a different common trope in Japanese culture, wherein what people outwardly say to people they don't trust is completely different than what they actually believe and say to people they do trust (honne/tatemae [4]).
And unfortunately for the Westerners parroting these stereotypes, they firmly fall into only hearing the tatemae.
To the original thread, there are plenty of rational, direct reasons for why Japanese cities can be clean and orderly, that aren't that "Everyone in Japan is some kind of brainless drone," but unfortunately people who justify things based on that excuse will never learn what those things are, doomed to make the same mistakes... very drone-like, in my view.
[1] https://sci-hub.ru/10.1111/1467-839X.00043 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-839X.00043)
[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... e5f
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae
It's not just a stereotype though, but a long held opinion and observation, literally the subject of study and research. To an extent more than other countries, this claim is objectively true - or at least I would have said that before seeing your links which reveal the idea to be one that is debated somewhat.
> The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression,
I was never denying individual expression can exist, but that doesn't mean most of society can't still be less individualistic than western countries.
Everything you have written is interesting, and I don't doubt that the stereotype can be exaggerated, over-repeated and misused, but it is a long-held observation about Japanese culture that has been intensely observed and studied. For that reason I think it is wrong to just dismiss it as an incorrect stereotype.
You can’t just lob a “you don’t know what you’re talking about” without some actual context like that - this forum is supposed to encourage more useful discussion.
People will trust someone more the more they think the other person is similar to them.
Japan has made choices that make it relatively homogeneous, the US has made choices that make it relatively diverse.
Hispanic population of Singapore is what?
Zero?
Not much of a melting pot.
Singapore has a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people (with plenty of ethnic Europeans thrown in for good measure). They’re a mix of Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religions.
All that in a space smaller than many American cities. If that doesn’t qualify as a melting pot, I don’t know what does.
A mix of Asians, Asians, and Asians.
The US ain't that.
That's a melting pot.
Singapore is described as "a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people".
That's not a melting pot.
Those are two different things. I don't care one bit if you think it is racist or stupid to point out the difference.
China, Malaysia and India are culturally and ethnically extremely different. Heck, India and China alone span enough area to cover extremely distinct ethnic and cultural groups themselves. The reason "white" Americans think they're a distinct unified group from "Africans", "Hispanics", "Asians" and so on is that the US largely eroded the cultural differences over the centuries to the point "cultural origin" has become more of a costume than a meaningful identity - if you're an American descendent of German settlers, you're an American, not a German and Germans (except for the most ideologically driven völkisch nationalists) will humor you but never see you as "one of them" more than any other foreigner.
You know what Africans call a black American? American. You know what Asians call an Asian American? American. The US is a melting pot, alright, but it is a racially segregated one and that's what makes you think the races matter. The US dragged itself kicking and streaming to the point where it even acknowledged black people as actual people and abolished all the mandatory racial seggregation laws that were put in place by white Americans who felt icky about having to share space with former Untermenschen slaves. The Chinese specifically were the first group of people the US actively tried to prevent from immigrating (which was later expanded to all people from East Asia).
You're also ignoring that Singapore is only half the size of Texas while having a similar number of people living in it. The US has had a wide range of immigrants but they tended to cluster in different places. Comparing Singapore and the US is apples to oranges but not because you think Asian people are a coherent group outside of racial shenanigans. I know this isn't very "politically correct" for me to say but: Yes, your racism is intellectually insulting but it has also successfully impaired your comprehension of demographics, sociology and ethnic groups to that point that you're not even wrong[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Try again, Texas is roughly _1000x_ larger than Singapore with 5x the population.
And, while they do bring in foreigners, they tend to be domestic maids or medium to high earning foreigners with a decent education and culture.
There were many things at play, deindustrialization began, immigration changed, youth and media depictions changed.
Before that There was Kilroy and other banal stuff, some tramp stuff, etc.
Also, my country has very few black people and still a lot of vandalism, dirtyness, rudeness, so maybe it's something else that explains the special situation of Japan and not just "black people bad".
This is HN, not 4chan, do better.
There was woman half a block in front of me, by herself, not even worried there was a random white guy walking behind her. I am definitely not in Kansas anymore.
The other weird late night encounter was a road crew working at O-dark thirty on Sunday night/Monday morning when it was a national holiday. I understand late night crews but on a three day weekend?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tokyo+graffiti&iax=images&ia=image...
A better statement would be a general absence of vandalism.
"- Accessibility strip for blind people (bumpy yellow stripe in train stations and sidewalks)" This is very well done in the major cities, however I've seen many incomplete implementations especially in parks where I suppose funding simply ran out.
I do believe their situation is much better than the average.
(I've done this more than once, accidentally.)
You’re a young person with a car, and insomnia. Good time to make some extra cash.
I have to imagine it might not be worth it though. The whole "city that never sleeps" vibe is relatively localized to a couple neighborhoods and having all lines run through the night would be a bit of an extravagance (all that for, what, the 5 hours they're not running?). Train drivers aren't cheap! And we invented technology for getting small groups of people home already, it's called taxis.
Post COVID I think there's been a huge push to just chill out even with the 24 hour stuff. Lots of places close earlier than they used to, and some places that used to be 24 hours just go until midnight now.
There was a bus that would go between a couple of the nightclub spots throughout the night, never took it though. Maybe there would be a decent business in running "commuter"-y buses throughout the night between certain areas, at least to try and get closer home.
So it actually makes sense to focus on efficiency and reliability at peak hours, at the cost of running it 24hours. Tokyos rail line are one of the few trains in the world that actually make profit (although not all of it from trains) and reliability is kinda key to this profit margin, especially at prime time. (Most major stations have malls and commercial activities in Japan. And those are run by the train companies, and surprisingly the majority of the profit for Train companies are not the trains but those activities. Those are not open past 22:00 in most places, so that's another reason)
Edit: Not just bike mentioned it on this video (timestamp) https://youtu.be/6dKiEY0UOtA?t=887
Also, it would almost definitely run at a loss (excluding externalities)... same reason why many Chinese cities' subsidised metros close quite early. Agreed that it's probably beneficial in the big picture but maybe hard to justify to superiors?
The more sensible option is generally night buses, which are considerably less expensive. The London Underground runs a limited night service on some lines on Friday and Saturday nights, but London has a fairly extensive night bus service.
More likely it's just for train maintenance, and indeed, 24-hour train operation is vanishingly rare, with NYC and Chicago the only well-known major cities with it. Tokyo does stand out by not even having night buses though. (It used to have a skeletal network, but even that was killed off by COVID.)
Yes, and at least NYC is notorious for how poorly it's train network is maintained, which I suspect is no coincidence.
Trains are good at bypassing traffic and carrying large numbers of people, but you don't need to worry about those things in the middle of the night, so a bus should work fine as substitute.
It's not only useful for people leaving a party, but workers on early or late shifts like cleaning out working in restaurants.
Example: Tokyo City View Hotel (Tabita station), rooms approximately 13 meters from tracks.
Irish Rail sometimes runs late services around Christmas and New Year, but have been fairly clear that it’s not sustainable, and even then there’s an hour or so gap where the tracks are cleared before normal service starts up around 05:30.
They literally have switches from the 1930s that are impossible to replace - they have machine shops that fabricate spare parts.
https://youtu.be/zVpLuZxsHq0
I live in NYC and I've thought about doing the "take every train to the end of the line" thing before. It would, of course, be a much different experience.
It involves a lot of going to the end of one line then finding a way to the terminus of a another line and go back into town without going back on yourself.
https://bensol.medium.com/i-visited-all-472-subway-stations-...
photos here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19dangAIVe2l6nQNW2HKV...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Line_(Rapid)
Other than that, there's an intriguing Clive Barker short story on how lonely passengers on those late-night trains actually end up ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6yg4ImnYwA&t=8s
Well that's a lie. There is uber, but it only calls regular taxis. Taxis are very expensive in Japan.
I was expecting the article to cover this possibility, but it didn't mention it.
These train lines are very long, so you might be quite far away from where you were actually intending to go.