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Comment by mrkentutbabi | Hacker News Reader

Most of the things you mentioned here is why I like Japan more han the Western world.

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.

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> maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role?

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.

You can’t please everyone. That’s the whole point of diversity vs harmony. Besides, Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society. Please think about this hard as lonng, philosophically.

To answer your question. Yes we have a lot of single women, doing careers instead of doing families just fine.

> Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society.

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...

> This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten.

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.

> With the exception of WW2

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.

Because married women takes care of kids? I genuinely don’t understand this question…

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.

You're incredibly sexist and yet completely oblivious to it. Men like you are the reason more and more women are choosing not to get married.

> Because married women takes care of kids? I genuinely don’t understand this question…

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.

>For example, have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role?

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"?

I already know the repliers will answer like this. See my other comments.

Please don't misunderstand me. Maybe I wasn't precise enough with my thoughts. My main point was:

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.

Fair enough. I agree with that. The westerners like to idolize Japan compared to China. I do think sometimes it is unfair.

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.

I’m one of those people. Japan and China are quite different. I really liked visiting Japan. I really did not enjoy visiting China at all. The two cultures are not as similar as you imply, and the differences matter, at least to me.

If you are just visiting, you won’t see much similaries. Japanese also consider non Japanese (or more precisely, non Asian looking), to have different norms than us so we treat them differently. Its an internal barrier that homogeneous society make. We will be polite about it but forever we will consider you a foreigner.

My experience is that Western people are generally against the Chinese government, not the Chinese culture. The Chinese government is currently authoritarian, expansionist, and genocidal. Japan's government is none of these things (it was all of them back in WW2, and then it received the same hostility that China's does now).

Well, Western people generally dont know ANYTHING about Chinese culture. Ask them to name 3 pop stars, 3 polititians, 3 Chinese brands, 3 cities (excpet Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong), 3 rivers, 3 philosophers and 3 Chinese concepts.

And YET, they have an opinion on China.

> consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role?

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.

Please see my other comments. Diversity vs harmony.

That's not an answer, nor do your other comments answer on the happiness of those who don't want to be a housewife.

Reading between the lines, your answer so far is "Sucks to be them".

I answered, in Japan there are plenty of single women doing career and they do just fine. Is that not the answer you’re looking for?

Do you seem to know what’s best for our country?

I wanted to comment, but deleted them since you've described my thoughts seeing the parent comment. All I'm going to say is I'm not a "Westerner" so I don't view things in the western perspective.

ehhh if you are spending time commenting on hacker news you are a westerner

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