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Comment by thkim | Hacker News Reader

It's not politically correct nor polite to say this, but Japan's problem is their education and cultural system ingrains subservience to the point that Japanese people are subservient even to injustice. It's not just inefficiency Japanese people put up with, they don't do anything about corrupt and ridiculous politicians having their way through generations. They call it a tradition, but they are just afraid of speaking out because of peer pressure. It's like a mafia system. I know that I sound very broad and generalizing, but those who have lived in Japan for long enough would probably agree with this.

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It's the elephant in the room, it's absolutely true.

It's like a hidden autocracy, people in the west probably think it's a democracy here. I mean, people can vote, but there's really only a single party with the same old ideas.

I once read that the reason Buddhism became popular in Japan so quickly is because it gave people a break from the rigid hierarchy everyone was used too. I often wonder why it's less popular now and whether that's an accident.

One of the main reason there is one party in power is because of the American occupation. While the American wanted to get rid of the the most "rightist" factions of the elite for obvious reasons, they quickly change to fight communism (see the book "embracing defeat"). I don't think it is an especially inherent Japanese thing.

People can be very individualistic in Japan as well, it just expresses itself in a different way than more Western cultures. It is very broad generalization, but in the west we like to show ourselves as more individual than we really are, while it tends to be the opposite in Japan. Open conflict avoidance is certainly more common in e.g. corporations in Japan, at least in my experience. But that's a very narrow definition of collectivism.

Here in Europe we have multiple parties, all of them full of liars who eventually implement the same old ideas anyway when in power. Our politicians and multi-party systems are there just to give an illusion of choice.

As far as I can see we're not so different from Japan, other than the fact we have more crime and our cities are dirtier because individualistic Westerners are too lazy to use rubbish bins.

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