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Comment by DharmaPolice | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.

In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.

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This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.

So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.

The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.

An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.

I totally agree, but also wonder how to fight against this cancer. It seems to me like it’s a natural state of groups of people to devolve into this kind of group as the group grows in size. Are we simply doomed to failure?

Sure, I get your point. But there are lots of tiny things that we can do to make our lives a teeny, tiny bit better - these things are fully in our control.

Example - someone makes a large spreadsheet, but without locking the header row or adding filters. It would take 10 seconds to do, but people in my org don’t, even after I requested them, showed them how.

I understand fixing massive problems like money in politics etc are super hard. But it doesn’t cost anything to not play music in elevators without headphones (yes, it happens, I am not lying) or write a sensible bug report with useful details instead of “this ain’t working” etc. If we can’t even do small things well, how can we even begin to take on massive problems like wealth inequality, poverty, judicial reforms etc?

None of the corporations I’ve been part of have been doing “abhorrent” things. You’re projecting your socialist ideology.

if you care and you end up in a position where you don't have the ability to act on that feeling, you WILL burnout and get cynical and go into not-caring preservation mode.

I used to work at a big tech co that made a popular consumer app. New hires were always excited because not only was it a pretty cushy job, they got to work on a product that they loved. They cared until the bureaucracy and product decision making processes ground that enthusiasm into dust. Everybody ended up jaded.

Love the analogy and your explanation

Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need

- Functioning government

- Competency, skilled engineers

With:

- A declining population

- Rural collapse

- Stagnating economy

- Shut in problem for old people

Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.

Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.

Because we aren't bombarded with "Why don't we do things like they do in Italy" messages on every online forum like we are with Japan.

Not sure what you are driving at. This thread was about Japan and I responded about Japan. If we were talking about Italy or South Korea then my response would be different.

You are correct that Japan isn't the only nation with large problems, particularly around declining populations. The thrust of my initial comment is that no nation is perfect and thoughts of "why aren't we just like that nation" are a little silly.

It's very easy to come up with a few bullet points of the big problems of a nation. Just like it's easy to generate such bullet points about the positives of a nation.

Anime and 90s propaganda from people appealing to Japanese businessmen.

It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.

There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.

Businesses I've dealt with in the manufacturing world (so most American workers before the 'service economy' revolution) deal way more with Japanese companies than Italian. Also I think humans just need an ideal to aspire to. We don't respond well to 'it's all crap, always has been, always will be'. Foreign countries we like look better because we see what's better than where we are. There's a reason for the saying 'the grass is always greener (because from a distance you can't see it's full of dog crap)'.

> talking about "open kimono" leadership

That’s not a thing.

- Western media wants to focus on negatives of Japan because the idea of an alternative functioning system is narrative breaking. - now that UK is out of EU, negative EU messaging about Greece, Spain, and Italy is unlikely to reach US. - the media doesn’t want to promote a “declining white birth rate” narrative - there are a lot of nerds on the internet interested in Japanese culture. - neighboring Asian countries do not tend to love Japan

I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).

Faxing... So very convenient!

We have to personally take the paper orginals to various offices around the city, wait hours in a queue, get another paper document, go make copies, assemble another folder and go to yet another office/institution.

Don't forget when your coworker prints out a memo, asks you for edits on the paper, then you go in and edit the virtual document.

A couple of jobs ago one of my colleagues went to work with a Japanese partner for a few days to do an integration. Apparently they had to import a bunch of data and one of the Japanese employees, who seemed to have an axe to grind, printed out pages and pages of a spreadsheet and handed it to my colleague. Whenever my colleague asked him to just send the file, he pretended to not understand. In the end they had to OCR it but at least it was a story.

It's a surface level joke but if I remember there were reasons for it, both culturally and regulatory, something about Hankos? I think I read about it on a post here talking about them finally changing some of those requirements.

To be fair, while it’s antiquated and there is a lot of needless paperwork, the rules are always clear and if you follow them you more or less always get the result you’re looking for. And they almost never make you wait on hold or in line for inordinate amounts of time; generally when I go to city hall, or a doctors office, or call a telephone line, or go to the post office, or whatever it is, I generally don’t need to wait more than 2-3 minutes and usually I get service immediately.

I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.

That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.

> I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.

We did this in Catholic grade school. Every week the assignments would rotate. The cleaning involved sweeping the class floor, washing the chalk board, beating the erasers of chalk dust, and pulling the trash bag from the can. The janitor took care of the rest like the hallways, offices and so on.

Would never happen in a NYC public school as the kids would be doing a union job.

> kids do most of the cleaning

We have that in my country, and it doesn't really affect the society overall: the streets are full of trash and it's considered normal to throw away cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. after you're done with them. From reading local internet forums, you get the idea that it's always the government fault that trash does not get picked up in time, it's never our own fault.

The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.

Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment

I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.

Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...

Yes, but the author doesn't care

I feel like the article is mostly focused on environments around us, so it makes sense to focus on Japan in this context. He’s not saying it’s an entirely flawless country

> Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.

I think that's the opposite. They care too much. That collective school cleanup example above has a similar extreme. If you literally live to work, you'll forget about caring for yourself and collapse.

Tokyo Government just introduced a 4 day work week for its workers. You'd be surprised how much friction there has been to this, by the workers.

They care about the wrong things. Ultimately everyone cares about something and then there is tons of things no one or that anybody doesn't care from simply because you have limited amount of possible care to give.

It's another country's culture. It's really hard to holistically judge what is right or wrong. If people want to be a workaholic, then I can't really judge their lifestyle.

That said, yes. If this is pressure from their society, they probably should revisit those mindsets. Especially when the birth rate right now really can't afford a higher mortality raet. Fortunately they are starting to in some sectors.

I can't find the link now but I read a post by an immigrant to Japan who attended one of these school cleanups at their child's school. They said basically that they seemed to be the only one really scrubbing / actually cleaning properly rather than just putting in a performative effort to wipe something down.

>Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.

aren't homes generally extremely cheap in most of Japan?

They are cheap because they are in disrepair, in an area with no jobs (or only subsistence farming) and limited services. In central Tokyo, they are cheap compared to cities in most of the West but too expensive to keep up a good drinking habit without working and on limited out-of-work benefits.

No; they’re cheap because Japan builds homes more than other countries do.

There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.

If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.

> There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s

This is misleading. Japan has the lowest homelessness rate in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan

They clearly had a problem and fixed it. I was in Japan a few years ago and I saw one homeless (I assumed?) person during my whole trip. He didn't look too bad (like the ones in the US) but he was probably having a rough time.

There are some homeless people living in camps in certain parks. Ueno Park has a bunch of them. Others have camps hidden away in flood-plain areas next to rivers. Some live on sidewalks, like under overpasses, and have a bunch of junk in front of their sleeping bag that they're trying to sell.

Generally, these homeless people want to be homeless. There's options for homeless people to get help, but some people simply don't want to be part of normal society for whatever reason (like mental illness).

Overall, in my experience living here, I very rarely see homeless people. It's nothing at all like the huge homeless camps in US cities these days.

Neither of you are wrong. As your link says, they have one of the lowest rates of homelessness in the world, but it also says that their low rate is roughly 1 in 34,000 people. There are 14 million people in Tokyo (city, or 41M in Tokyo greater area), so for 14M residents you would expect roughly 400 homeless people if the ratio is exactly the same as national average (and typically, big cities have higher than average). So simultaneously there are many homeless people still even if you only saw one of them, it's just a smaller % than in most countries.

Ultimately the stats are what matters more than how many people any one anecdote happened to see, and they show that Japan should be applauded for doing well but also acknowledging that sadly they haven't completely solved the problem and too many people there, as everywhere, are still homeless.

Which is reasonable? Within the millions of people there will be a few people that are completely helpless. I think Japan is as close to having no homeless as a country can reasonably get. Which is a completely different situation from the USA. Also living in a small shoebox hotel is orders of magnitudes better than living on the streets. I am not saying it is a good option but between having nothing (US) and having that, I'd definitively chose the shoebox.

I strongly disagree that 400 homeless people in a city of 14 million is a lot

One difference is that they’re concentrated in areas away from the public eye - if you enter Yoyogi park from the entrance nearest Yoyogi Koen station then before the hill starts go up the footpath to the right, you will find a homeless encampment with 20+ tents. It’s orderly but they are homeless.

I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.

There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.

This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.

https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

> I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo

Homelessness in Tokyo looks different than homelessness in a major US city. Often enough, it means freeters sleeping overnight in manga cafés.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_café_refugee

According to the article, living in an internet cafe can be as little as $420 per month. But where does someone who has no work that month get the $420? Does the government have a minimal support program?

lol that’s actually more expensive than a lot of small apartments in Tokyo.

That said there is no shortage of work in Tokyo. Far more work than the number of people available to do it.

FWIW there are definitely homeless people in Tokyo. Under a lot of overpasses in the affluent Shinjiku area, you'll find many homeless people living long-term. I was there as recent as last year and I wouldn't say it's nonexistent. :) Definitely an order of magnitude less than any major US city, however.

https://www.huckmag.com/article/yusuke-nagata-photographer-d...

https://metropolisjapan.com/tokyos-homeless/

Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.

- You cannot fire your staff (easily) - Rather than replace staff, you need to train them - You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry

I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but... Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.

Because it’s full of Japanese.

Japan has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).

High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.

If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.

Don't leave us hanging like that.

That doesn’t explain the doctor who doesn’t care that they are misdiagnosing their patients though… Or am I missing something?

I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity, etc.

Of course, I don't know the actual situation, but this seems more likely to me than a doctor who doesn't care about their patient's health enough to spend 10 seconds diagnosing them. At the very least, I expect they're investing enough effort in their job enough to avoid transparent malpractice.

I’ve personally been incorrectly diagnosed with a life altering condition. When it became more and more clear that the diagnosis was wrong the doctor just doubled down. When I said I thought he was wrong and refused to see him he sent a colleague after me to another hospital to try to persuade the medical staff there of the misdiagnosis. That thankfully failed, but the whole process very much left me with the impression that the only thing that mattered to him and his colleague was to be “right”. My health was completely irrelevant to them. And nobody put them in their place.

Sure, I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s razor. But there comes a point when you have to conclude that something is seriously wrong. My feeling is that it’s a complete lack of consequences that is the core problem. Nobody is ever “forced” to admit they were wrong. Some people can’t handle that, start believing they are always right.

(This was in Sweden and malpractice is a bit different here.)

1177 is the best, or not..

Living outside NYC, I’m reminded of both extremes with every visit to the city.

Government is definitely the worst here. Zero accountability means that after a while working there, even the most motivated best worker will have his desire to work destroyed by watching less competent people do nothing and move ahead. Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job. It grows and grows and drains more resources, just like cancer does.

> Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job.

Do they? The example given in the article is the DMV, and the only problem I've ever had at a DMV was long wait times caused by too FEW employees.

Yes, government can be overly bureaucratic, but I think people come up with a lot of weird narratives about it that go well beyond the actual inefficiencies at play.

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