Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe won't let writers leave until they are finished
grapee.jp
grapee.jp
> 2. The manager asks you every hour how your manuscript is coming along.
> 3. You are not allowed to leave the store until you have finished writing your manuscript or writing project.
Sounds like a cute idea. I wonder what would happen if you decided you wanted to leave before finishing. Do they berate you? Do you lose a deposit? I imagine you can't hold customers hostage or trap them in your cafe if they actually want to go.
In real life that should count as kidnapping
Would love to know the interview/training/standard operating procedure for this position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_device
I like the idea of losing a deposit.
As others have said, it's about the social pressure. I doubt the question of "can we legally enforce this rule" was a major concern.
There's something desperately aspirational about certain parts of their culture.
Post-modernist views that all cultures make people who are equally bad and good and that it has little effect simply don't hold up to even a cursory analysis of available statistics on the regional rates of crime/violence/exploitation worldwide.
Humans are humans are humans. Get any large enough group of them and some percent will be law breakers. This isn't post-modernist, it's common sense.
Culture has an impact, obviously, but police corruption, underreporting, and maintaining reputation play a significant factor in Japan's low crime rates.
All places and people and cultures are not the same. There are objective measures one can use to see this is true. Take a walk around Manhattan (~11 million) or any other city in the world and try to replicate my results.
Culture matters and has an effect on making better citizens and therefore a better quality of life for everyone. It is not simply a matter of them pretending to have these virtues, they have them and the evidence is reflected both in numbers and ones personal experience if they visit.
Yelling or mental health issues, sure, there's a different culture there in America, but "loud vs quiet" as a cultural different doesn't seem like a major moral issue, and it's well known that the US is handling mental health poorly, so sure, I'll give you that.
But then on the flip side, Tokyo is also notorious for public-but-sneaky sexual assault, no?
- A delinquent student I had who dropped out in junior high caught up with me and told me how he went to jail and was a low level gangster.
- I also knew an Australian older guy who got jumped by some teenagers when he was drunk.
- Also a drunk guy tried to hit on a girl I knew while we were walking to the train station and literally tried to physically drag her somewhere and hit my other friend who wanted to talk to him peacefully.
- A creepy old guy showed two junior high girls a binder full of pictures of underage girls in a supermarket food court and was trying to proposition them or something. My friend used to be their English teacher and confronted him in Japanese. When I turned to look at the supermarket, everyone was dead silent mouth agape. The old security guard lady who worked there was crying.
- I believe I also spoke to a cop or an older person who said during the earthquake their was concern of people stealing or commiting crimes and they'd do it quietly.
- There's also the women's only train in place because of chikan or train perverts who try to grope women during rush hour. I don't know of many other countries that have it.
I definitely think Japan is one of the safest countries in the world. I left my phone on a bike and found it still there hours later, but there's definitely crime. I also don't know if it's great to conflate yelling, littering, etc. with crime, but there's definitely a correlation.
This is one part of Japanese society I know very little about. My wife always talks about yakuza being bad but can’t provide an details other than “they are bad.”
She hates going to Kabukicho but it never feels particularly unsafe to me where as in the US there’s definitely places I would avoid at all cost.
I don't know much about gangster's in Japan, but I'd say from my limited experience that they manage basically gray-market and black-market businesses. E.g. hostess clubs and adult entertainment, some of the general entertainment industry, maybe drugs to a small extent, loan sharking, gambling and other related things.
I would say that the violence typically doesn't bleed out to the general population unless you get invovled in some way, but you will get ripped off if you do business with them (again, I have very limited experience with this).
As a low-level gangster, he probably was trying to get people on the street to attend an adult entertainment location (or scouting new actresses) and do general gopher jobs for higher-ups.
Edit: Yeah, Kabuki-cho isn't that bad to be honest. To see the real dangerous Yakuza part of town, you have to go to Yoshiwara. I went there with a local and there was a dude walking around with no shirt and carrying a sword over his shoulder. He told me to not look anyone in the eye. There were police on each side of the street.
Of course, I naturally avoided any area/time where I expected crime to occur… but I didn’t have to exert any real efforts to do so (at least partly because I had nothing drawing me to shitty areas; Devon St and chinatown were the worst areas with any draw… and they’re not too bad even at night).
Lots of ambulances passing by though. And lots of stories.
But easy enough to replicate. Cities are big places. There’s a lot of ways to experience them.
I have lived almost 7 years in Japan, and this was the first time I heard of such an incident happening somewhere around me, but "食い逃げ" ("kuinige", dine & dash) is a word you tend to encounter here and there.
Sounds like we have an expert here.
> there's almost no chance a Japanese person in Tokyo
So you’re saying there’s a chance?
GP did not say everyone does it, obviously Japan is very safe, but it’s far from perfect. People just don’t report everything and just don’t talk about it. Hang out around a pachinko to find out more about Japanese people.
However, I have seen crime in Japan, a close Japanese friend of my non-japanese ex-wife stole her bankbook and proceeded to withdraw money (my ex-wife used the same pin for her phone and her bankbook and so her friend most likely saw the pin from the phone). My ex-wife reported it to the police, the "friend" gave the money back and got a slap on the wrist but no real consequences.
My female roommate also had a lot of experiences of various sexual crimes, over the 7 years she lived in Japan, her underwear were stolen once, she saw a flasher who was completely naked under his coat and opened it when she passed by and she was concerned enough by someone following her over multiple blocks that she went to the koban.
And finally, as a male, I once went to the urinals in the toilet in osaka and noticed the guy to my right making noises, he was looking at me and touching himself... Kind of turned me off for years of public toilets.
So, the myth of Japan being crimeless at least to me seems like a myth. Crime takes different form, sexual crimes are definitely in my anecdotal experience more common than in other countries, theft of belongings are definitely less of an issue than in Europe/US.
Also, I don't think any of the above crimes would show up in statistics. I'm pretty sure the first one which was straight theft would not have been reported at all.
However, as a counterpoint to reporting, my ex-wife knew of a foreign student at her university who stole for a bit more than 1,000 jpy of things from a combini, was deported and not allowed to enter Japan for 5 years. I'm pretty sure that any crime committed by foreigners in Japan will always be reported and treated harshly.
More seriously, yes umbrellas definitely disappear very quickly, I have however noticed that the more intricate an umbrella is, the less likely it is stolen.
https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/what-makes-people-do-what-t...
In any case, it’s not just a story, it is described in this paper:
https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...
I’ve read about the daycare fines before and didn’t have reason to doubt it any more or less than other anecdotes I’ve read. The paper you linked seems like pretty good evidence that it actually happened — assuming the rest of the paper supports the abstract.
My kids’ old preschool must have read Freakonomics and instead charged $5/min. My wife once fell asleep and was charged $90 for being 18 min late (I got a call at 6). At least it wasn’t $5/min/kid (2 kids).
Mostly, if parents were running late, they’d ask another parent to check out their kid and watch them for a few.
1. TFA doesn't say one way or the other, but the fact that they don't accept cash leaves the possibility open
I can simulate a lot of that with pairing though.
The website describes it as:
> Mild: they ask if you met your goal when you pay
> Normal: they ask about your progress once an hour or so
> Hard: like Normal, and staff will frequently stand behind you silently applying pressure.
The official FAQ is written quite informally, so I think it's safe to assume the cafe's "rules" are more "casual guidelines meant to help writers get their work done", and not "literal rules that will be rigidly enforced in some particular way".
1. Upon entering you must write and demonstrate one failing test
2. The manager asks you if you want someone to pair program with you
3. You are not allowed to leave until the test is passing
bool halts(function) { // todo: do not halt if function halts, halt otherwise. }
assert(halts(halts));
you would write down a task you want to accomplish and deposit it at the cashier. Upon completion, you would say so and would get a free drink (iirc).
Was nice, I think it's closed due to Covid atm.
Very good idea. Works like a charm.
That being said the most often place I have seen this is within manga itself, so this maybe the incidence rate is actually low and the authors who draw this into their series are either traumatised or just passing along a story!
I’ve written for several Japanese publishers, including, for a while, a regular essay for a monthly magazine. While I don’t think my essay was drawing a lot of readers, in my interactions with the editor I could feel the pressure he was under to get my manuscript on time each month. He had a fixed number of pages to fill, and he didn’t want to have to substitute something else for a regular feature.
The Hilltop Hotel in central Tokyo used to be famous as a place where publishers would have their popular writers stay while finishing up novels [3]. The hotel is near the headquarters of several major publishing houses, and there used to be a lot of typesetting shops in the neighborhood. Apparently the editors would more or less camp out in the lobby or hallways of the hotel to pressure the writers to stay in their rooms and keep writing—a process known as kanzume. When a writer had produced ten or twenty pages of manuscript, the editor would take it directly to the typesetter to start the process of getting it into print.
The writer Hisashi Inoue [4], while prolific, was famous for putting off writing and missing publishers’ deadlines. In 1997, he was commissioned to write the first play to be performed at the New National Theatre, Tokyo. I happened to attend the opening performance on October 22, and I was surprised that the actors, all experienced performers, flubbed their lines and exits several times. I later read in the news that Inoue had finished writing the play at the very last minute and the actors had not had enough time to memorize the script or rehearse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinchō
[2] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/新潮
Did almost none of that (other than the skiing, which ended with knee injury), but I've written a software VST synthesizer from scratch.
Someone needs to come here, take my computer, and stand over me with glaring looks while I clean the basement and organize all my hobby projects. My wife has given up.
I'm writing fiction so this tip isn't as useful to me, but for non-fiction you could try writing a series of blog posts, and then later stitching those together into your book. The posts (hopefully) give you some quick social likes to give you that dopamine hit.
Found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20220288 but they don't seem to have survived.
The goal is small for each (just one module of a textbook per day for mathematics, and a third to half of a chapter of a programming book per day), but it's doable in spare time, and I keep reminding myself that I can only make progress on these projects if I at least hit that goal each day.
Not finishing it is okay, but be honest!
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by" – Douglas Adams
I'm making a creative writing game. It's been a goal channel whatever techniques I can, even dark patterns, to help people be more prolific writers.
Glad to see the real world is getting weird with that goal in mind too.
200 words, about two sides of lined paper hand written, every single day for a year, is 70,000 words. The first draft of a short novel. Even if you spend another year polishing, that's a novel every two years.
One writing teacher said the main problem for most would-be writers is that they don't actually do any writing, not even what Anne Lamott calls a shitty first draft.
https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2022/03/21/this-that-and...