Hacker News Reader

Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

Japan's well oiled and peaceful machine comes from a thousand little things that everyone cooperates on. Only areas with large numbers of foreigners have trash cans in public (and still have litter issues). When you walk into a grocery store during a downpour, you do your best to dry off and leave your wet umbrella at the fire. If young people are whispering too loudly, someone will ask them to quiet down and they will listen. Mutual trust and respect that comes with a tightly knit and homogenous society.

View on HN

I don’t mean to bust your bubble, but I live in a town in Japan with basically no foreigners, but there’s plenty of litter and it’s gotten substantially worse since COVID started and the few foreigners that were here all left.

Beaches are also getting dirtier and dirtier with people having parties and just throwing plastic bottles, alcohol cans, food packets, etc wherever they please. Quiet places far from town I used to visit 2 years ago turned into absolute dumps this past year.

This was not my experience in Nagoya, Bizen, Takayama, Miyoshi, Osaka, Kyoto, Miyoshi, Fuji or Tokyo two years ago.

Those are tourist-heavy towns. They're actively cleaned up to keep tourists wanting to come.

It's very different in locations where tourists aren't common, especially post-covid.

They are not all tourist heavy towns by any means.

Takayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Fuji, Tokyo, and Nagoya were most definitely full of tourists.

Kyoto and Takayama in particular were probably half tourists by population 2 years ago. Those towns are virtually ghost towns now that Chinese tourists are gone.

Visiting places with no foreign tourism and driven just by local industry, like Toyohashi or Yokkaichi or small islands, and you'll see considerably less cleanup efforts. Even going through Tokyo at 4 AM looks very different from Tokyo at 8 AM after some cleanup is done.

They must be, because you're a white liberal living in rural Japan and you know everything about the country. Those major cleanup efforts in small village like Bizen and Miyoshi are definitely just to impress the tourists. Crazy to learn that Nagoya is actually a tourism city, too. You're definitely not a jackass.

Sorry, whispering too loudly? Where, the library? Perhaps you mean shouting?

This happened on a bus when two middle / high school aged girls were speaking no louder than a murmur to each other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com