Why Japan’s ‘shūkatsu’ job-seeking system is changing

Interestingly, perhaps bouyed by the success of the cigarette sign, on the train they had signs of "Do it at home" with pictures of people doing makeup, or whatever. Everybody ignored it :-).

More generally, apparently sexual harassment used to be common in the workplace. I never actually saw anything extreme, but I did see a massive change in attitude. One day guys would be talking about inappropriate things at work without anyone ever saying anything and the next day when the same thing happened the section chief would be yelling at them about sexual harassment. It was literally night and day and it wasn't like there was an announcement or anything. It just went from being tolerated to not being tolerated.

I often see things on TV that makes me wonder if the government is kind of sounding people out on stuff. For example, one day they had a piece on Korean schools for ethnic Koreans whose family members were essentially abducted to Japan during WWII. The children and grandchildren (and probably great grand children now) for many of these people are still in Japan. Because the Japanese law doesn't allow dual citizenship, these people have to choose between Korean and Japanese citizenship. If they decided to choose Korean citizenship, they get permanent resident status, but not citizenship. This is considered a pretty big problem with a lot of people and so it's been a question for literally generations about what to do: should these people be granted dual citizenship? What about school systems that include Korean culture? How much should be paid by the government etc? It's a horrible mess and, of course, in Japanese style virtually nothing has been done about it (very weird to be born in a country and not have citizenship of that country)! But this NHK program was very sympathetic to the plight of these people, so it made me think that maybe a move was afoot (the NHK is not as arms length from the government as the BBC is from the UK government...). But not so far anyway.

And the banking system is ass backwards compared to the rest of the world.

Japan is firmly stuck in the 80s. The only major change is now most people here have smartphones.

Japan does some things very right, and some things horribly wrong. Not too different from most other developed countries.

I sincerely hope we're learning not to repeat many mistakes that have been made there regards work culture, xenophobia and racism and crippling pressure to conform.

I'd say several things contribute to that reputation. It's historically remote (hence exotic and alien), it was never so consistently powerful as to be a great power and share in what is considered normal (like China is), yet not weak neither and experienced modernization very early, hence contributing to its influence and thus reputation.