Just avoid the train during peak hours, and you'll enjoy every moment staying there.
Just avoid the train during peak hours, and you'll enjoy every moment staying there.
I lived there and I saw the bad sides, too. To keep this amazing tidyness, order, extremely high quality of service, people go to their limits - with low pay and low perspectives. We have these "bad" jobs also here, people in those jobs are half-assing them, are rude or just quit. In Japan, at least from my experience, it's the conservative conformity, the anti-individualism, the meat grinding discipline that keep people doing bad jobs at high pace and quality.
It's paradox to me why many individualism loving Westerner are going to Japan and are loving it so much. It's a hell for many many people.
Many Japanese are racist, sexist, pedophilia was normalized for a very long time. Women are supposed to be housewifes in middle class families, gender is clearly defined.
All this is clearly against the western values that i often hear quoted when I hear the same people talking about "China". But Japan seems to be ok for them.
Paradox.
Just wished people would start thinking about their attitude towards other nations and would develop norms and values that they apply without bias to everyone in order to avoid double standards.
Overall, i enjoyed the positive racism in Japan, i was special and I felt it. I experienced racism, too, but i just ignored it. Working in Japan was bad. I also worked in China and felt that the overall package of racism/work/life/society was better for me.
To be fair, Japan isn’t perfect. But a lot of things make sense for us.
Are you a westerner? It seems that your way of thinking is just different than ours. We value things differently. For example, have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role?
The western world has a lot of problems too. And its a choice that the western world makes. We make our choice according to our values. This is what we prefer.
Harmony takes the first place. Harmony over diversity. We like diversity too but harmony always comes first. Harmony first, diversity later, when we need it. I can talk a lot about this.
Western people are often pro Japan but anti China. If people would apply the same norms, this wouldn't be possible as there is clearly a double standard.
My wish is that Western people (i am one of then) stop apply their world view, norms and values to everyone else on this planet. We believe that so many things that define us are universal and we expect that all people around the world start demanding that and thinking that.
I totally understand your pointed that harmony, order, hierarchy works for you and many other countries. I respect that - however I like many Western norms better because they work better for me. It doesn't mean that I want that Japan or China stop behaving the way they behave.
I am an advocate for your points.
On the other hand. I think Japan is trying to have a good balance between western style democracy with harmony, hence Japan is not as totalitarian as China. Due to bushido culture, Japanese individuals have more shame built-in so it is easier to have a homogeneous society compared to China, to the point that this bushido culture is sometimes frowned by westerners.
Each society makes their own laws and values, with its pros and cons, and it is reflected differently.
And YET, they have an opinion on China.
Great, good for them, everything should work out. It's not the women who want to be subservient to men that I'm worried about, it's the ones who don't. Japanese society doesn't leave a lot of room for them and I don't think that's OK.
To answer your question. Yes we have a lot of single women, doing careers instead of doing families just fine.
This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten.
And for those those single women - why not also married women? How many of them are CEOs? The numbers don't look good for women in Japan when it comes to representation in the higher levels of business https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915832...
What do you mean? No, it's not. With the exception of WW2, Japan has seen way less conflicts and very little wars in it's history compared to other countries.
As for your link, I cannot access the source, but your comment seems biased by the meaning of marriage in the first place.
Basically, in Japan getting married means starting a family. If you don't plan to have children, you usually don't get married. Because if you remove the cultural and sentimental value given to the act of being married in the west, there is not much practical advantage or benefit to it in the first place.
Except for the one time Japan teamed up with Hitler and tried to rape and pillage the world, and not giving up until someone invented and then used nuclear weapons to make them stop. That is a pretty huge asterisk on Japan's claim to being a peaceful nation. I think Japan's neighbors might have a list of other incidents they could bring to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Japan
> As for your link, I cannot access the source
Here you go: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%...
It has nothing to do with marriage or definitions. Here's the abstract:
This paper examines the effects of female chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm performance. Using data on nonfinancial listed firms in Japan, we show that only 0.8% of some 42,000 firm-year observations have female CEOs. There is also little evidence that firms appoint more females as CEOs during our sample period. While the stock market reacts positively to the introduction of a firm's first female CEO, the relationship between CEO gender and firm accounting performance is generally not strong. However, when we classify the type of female CEO, the estimated coefficient for a founder female CEO and Tobin's Q is positive and significant.
I guess this just serves an example how western mindset and our mindset in Asian countries are just different. Even the questions seem weird to us.
Your comment here is 100% the problem we're talking about. In your mind, women get married for the sole reason of having kids, and further, it's their job to do so. It's incredibly sexist and that's not because of Western ideals.
how can you know this for certain?
if Japanese culture writ large is "woman should be homemakers", and most Japanese women become homemakers due to societal pressures of cultural conformity - not ever having the opportunity to freely consider alternatives - is that really a "preference"?
This obviously can’t be true for all Japanese women, so what’s your solution to that? At least in Western countries there is progress being put towards letting women chose if they’d rather be a housewife or an independent person. In Japan there is no such option.
Reading between the lines, your answer so far is "Sucks to be them".
Do you seem to know what’s best for our country?
And I know you weren't taking the counter position to this, but there are also many intangible benefits from the values you mentioned being preeminent in Japan.
More traditional families means fewer children raised in single-parent households, and thus lower incarceration rates, and fewer anti-social types leaving paths of destruction through society.
More aggressive policing means less drug use and no opioid epidemic claiming tens of thousands of lives each year. It also means far less violence on the streets. See how many people are knifed and bottled in the UK for contrast. Not having to worry about random outbursts of terrifying violence makes for a significantly higher quality of life, with people feeling like they have more genuine freedom.
More discipline means no riots with hundreds of millions of dollars in businesses going up in flames.
And a more conservative culture allows the laws that make all of the above possible to remain in place instead of being swept away in counter-culture social movements that rail against traditional values.
I think you're jumping to conclusions here.
Are people in Japan disappeared for criticizing the government? Do they have their organs harvested / altered for believing the wrong religion?
I'm OK with a society with very different defaults than my own. In fact, I prefer it - real diversity doesn't come from mixing (like we do in the West - the mix of all colors is shitty brown), it comes from people being strongly different, yet managing to coexist.
So Japan is OK. It works as a society. Also for the "different" (well... somewhat - there are problems with overworking, herbivore men, low natality etc. but the West has analogous problems). China doesn't work; people aren't free; it's a repressive regime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_of_Japa...
Care to explain more to a foreigner? How/when did it stop being normalized?
Until 2014 child pornography was legal to own in Japan. The law has changed, but the sexualisation of minors continues. "Chaku Ero", which means "erotically clothed" is a kind of soft porn - it doesn’t involve nudity, but it can get very, very close and is often overtly sexual.
Questions?