What is it that makes this possible in Japan? And why doesn't it happen in the US?
Things can change if people will it into existence. My 2-bit belief is basically simplified "broken window theory", where stuff being broken leads to more stuff being broken, trash leads to more trash... so dealing with cleaning stuff up quickly is good.
Generating an environment where people have some pride in what's around them and are also benefiting from the thing themselves, on top of the thing not being busted probably helps a lot.
There's a lot of anti-littering campaigns and the like. I feel like the gov'ts as a whole are pretty responsive to new kinds of crime and try to build a public consciousness against it as soon as they realize what's up.
Plenty of hooliganism in Japan all over, and plenty of raging, but at the end of the day if there's a nice bench that someone is allowed to sit on in a chill way, people probably tend to not take their rage out on it.
Maybe everyone in Tokyo is just ground down from having to work all the time and is just subservient to authority. Who knows!
Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
Japanese culture has an exceedingly high focus on the appearance of cleanliness and politeness. The inside of someone's home might be a hoarder's dream, but the outside will be clean.
Someone might be an absolute jerk, but to act on that in most social spaces would have very real consequences. Rude behavior, like dancing and playing loud music on a train, will get you arrested here.
Misbehavior in Japan is dealt with, and quickly.
On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.
Do not break the law in Japan.
There is a de-facto truce between the Yakuza and the police, as the Yakuza deal with foreign gangs and other problems that would be... difficult to solve with normal police work.
Japanese gangs are fiercely nationalistic. If the police don't handle you, the Yakuza will, and although I don't have any data to back this up, I'd wager that the police are the better option.
Additionally, Japanese neighborhoods have social responsibilities. Every couple of months, I am responsible for cleaning our trash area for two weeks, and there's usually some kind of repair or cleanup event twice per year.
In Japan, many people have lived in the same place for multiple generations, and can trace their ancestry within Japan back for thousands of years.
Japan is, quite literally, their ancestral home, and they act like it.
This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.
The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.
Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.
Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.
Tokyo in particular has a lot of immigrants these days, and I think you'd only notice if you read their nametags at the convenience store.
In order to naturalize, you must present a compelling case to do so: you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education, must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially, must have no criminal record in Japan or elsewhere, and nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
It's not a lot more, but it's more than 2%.
Nope. You must give a reason statement but it doesn't need to be compelling.
> you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education
Technically true but misleading - yes it's permitted to leave school at 14 in Japan, but very few children do.
> must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially
Up to a point. It's more "must have a household income equivalent to a minimum-wage full-time job, or equivalent lump sum assets, and not be behind on your taxes".
> nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen
What? No.
> Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
Right, which is exactly what makes "less than 9,000 foreigners" a very misleading figure. Naturalisation gains you little compared to living as a foreign permanent resident, and requires renouncing citizenship, so most people don't.
But Japan is not a particularly difficult country to naturalize in if you so desire. The N1 can be studied for and passed without being fluent. Supporting yourself financially basically means having roughly full-time employment. No idea where you got the idea you need to be married to a Japanese citizen, not true at all.
> 98% ethically Japanese
In the million of these discussions I've seen, this is usually the first/only explanation people jump to. (moreso for people only superficially familiar with Japan).
Spoiler: The education and health systems in 1980 were _far_ worse than today. Like, really, there’s no comparison. They’re not exactly world leading now (in particular the health service has a constant staffing crisis) but they were really quite bad by European standards back then. When I started primary school in 1989 or so, there were more than 40 kids in my class; today there’s a cap of 30 and the average is 22 or so. Health, education, and social services were bad because we didn’t spend enough money on them.
Organisation and resourcing seem like more obvious causes of problems with US healthcare and education than _demographics_, tbh.
I think Americans are a little more footloose in that respect.
In 2024, US police shot and killed 1,173 people [1]. That's 0.35 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
In 2022, Japan had 289 homicides, or 0.23 per 100,000 people [2].
I.e., an American is more likely to be shot by police than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
I don't speak Japanese, but if "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese, then maybe that's because such a thing is unthinkable in Japan.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
I love Japan, have spent a significant quantity of time there, and if I was a billionaire, it'd be the place where I bought the penthouse luxury apartment. So if anything, I am very favorably biased towards the country.
But it also has a 99% conviction rate, and not because their police are so stellar that they always get the perpetrator on the first try. They hold you for extended periods of time and the system is set up to extract confessions. We know that people are weak to being coerced into false confessions even in countries where there is significantly less pressure and attempts to get them out of you.
Also plenty of laws that have penalties that would be considered quite harsh compared to much of the western world - simple possession of pot can get you 5 years in prison, and intent to distribute/profit can get you 10 - and personal stash levels are plenty to bump you into that range.
Police aren't going to arrest you unless they're pretty sure the charges are going to stick, but once you're in custody, they are... well, let's just say "highly motivated" in getting you to sign a confession, and they have a great deal of leeway that is unavailable in the US.
Many parts of the US are stuck in a bad equilibrium where there is lots of police violence and lots of crime, because the police violence is targeted on the basis of ethnicity rather than whether someone's actually breaking the law or committing antisocial behavior.
They are much more united and much less diverse in various ways. While they have many subcultures, they mostly adhere to a greater social cohesion.
To make up for that a bit, they do allow people to get plastered and spray vomitus publicly, including public transit and no one bats an eye. That said, you don't get the public defecation that we get.
Even their bums tend to take care of themselves as best they can. They try to maintain a certain decorum despite their dire circumstances.
Americans, in a sense, lost quite a bit of their sense of shame.
For instance, many Japanese primary public schools have no janitor. This is normal. The children scrub the floors, bathrooms and do all the other cleaning tasks in a defined schedule.
some random reference examples: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=japanese+...
A relatively low income inequality may also be a big factor. Also, much less societal tolerance for drugs?
As in, none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Japan#Medic...
The main difference I can think of is we think it's cool if a celebrity does drugs, but they get insta-canceled so hard they disappear from society entirely.
They do sometimes litter, throw up in the sidewalk after drinking, and don't wash their hands after using the train station bathrooms.
I mean, Tokyo isn't even that clean. I was just there and saw a rat on the sidewalk every night. They're like NYC and just leave commercial trash bags on the sidewalk instead of using trash bins. (Also frequently saw aggressive "no dumping" signs on the pile of trash bags. Not very high trust!)
You might have mistaken it with the organised rubbish collection. It is common in New Zealand where business owners pack up rubbish at the close of business in dedicated, pre-paid rubbish bags that they leave in the front of the shop. A garbage truck comes by later and quickly collects rubbish. The cost of the service is included in the price of the rubbish bag, and the garbage truck won't collect a random or unrecognised bag but people do not do that.
It also seems cleaner as rubbish bins require cleaning on a regular basis, and the bags do not.
https://www.amazon.com/Pure-Invention-Japans-Culture-Conquer...
The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression, but if you need academic citations then here's some from even back in the '90s arguing that Japan is not less individualistic than the West, and even arguably is less collectivistic depending on how you measure that. [1][2]
Here's an example purely from a Japanese stereotype that shows a type of individuality that people could generally understand (just in a form what westerners tend to look down on)—the concept of an otaku [3], or in other words, someone who follows some interest much further than anyone thinks is socially "normal" or "reasonable." And yet these people are generally accepted by Japanese society, if not empowered in the form of a respected "craft" culture, in a way that would just make you a total loser in most of the West.
My personal experience actually living in Japan for 7 years now, matches a different common trope in Japanese culture, wherein what people outwardly say to people they don't trust is completely different than what they actually believe and say to people they do trust (honne/tatemae [4]).
And unfortunately for the Westerners parroting these stereotypes, they firmly fall into only hearing the tatemae.
To the original thread, there are plenty of rational, direct reasons for why Japanese cities can be clean and orderly, that aren't that "Everyone in Japan is some kind of brainless drone," but unfortunately people who justify things based on that excuse will never learn what those things are, doomed to make the same mistakes... very drone-like, in my view.
[1] https://sci-hub.ru/10.1111/1467-839X.00043 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-839X.00043)
[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... e5f
It's not just a stereotype though, but a long held opinion and observation, literally the subject of study and research. To an extent more than other countries, this claim is objectively true - or at least I would have said that before seeing your links which reveal the idea to be one that is debated somewhat.
> The other commenter mentions the huge impact of Japanese pop culture and technical innovation, which somehow isn't legitimate proof of individual expression,
I was never denying individual expression can exist, but that doesn't mean most of society can't still be less individualistic than western countries.
Everything you have written is interesting, and I don't doubt that the stereotype can be exaggerated, over-repeated and misused, but it is a long-held observation about Japanese culture that has been intensely observed and studied. For that reason I think it is wrong to just dismiss it as an incorrect stereotype.
You can’t just lob a “you don’t know what you’re talking about” without some actual context like that - this forum is supposed to encourage more useful discussion.
People will trust someone more the more they think the other person is similar to them.
Japan has made choices that make it relatively homogeneous, the US has made choices that make it relatively diverse.
Hispanic population of Singapore is what?
Zero?
Not much of a melting pot.
Singapore has a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people (with plenty of ethnic Europeans thrown in for good measure). They’re a mix of Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Hindu religions.
All that in a space smaller than many American cities. If that doesn’t qualify as a melting pot, I don’t know what does.
A mix of Asians, Asians, and Asians.
The US ain't that.
That's a melting pot.
Singapore is described as "a mix of ethnic Chinese, Malay and Indian people".
That's not a melting pot.
Those are two different things. I don't care one bit if you think it is racist or stupid to point out the difference.
China, Malaysia and India are culturally and ethnically extremely different. Heck, India and China alone span enough area to cover extremely distinct ethnic and cultural groups themselves. The reason "white" Americans think they're a distinct unified group from "Africans", "Hispanics", "Asians" and so on is that the US largely eroded the cultural differences over the centuries to the point "cultural origin" has become more of a costume than a meaningful identity - if you're an American descendent of German settlers, you're an American, not a German and Germans (except for the most ideologically driven völkisch nationalists) will humor you but never see you as "one of them" more than any other foreigner.
You know what Africans call a black American? American. You know what Asians call an Asian American? American. The US is a melting pot, alright, but it is a racially segregated one and that's what makes you think the races matter. The US dragged itself kicking and streaming to the point where it even acknowledged black people as actual people and abolished all the mandatory racial seggregation laws that were put in place by white Americans who felt icky about having to share space with former Untermenschen slaves. The Chinese specifically were the first group of people the US actively tried to prevent from immigrating (which was later expanded to all people from East Asia).
You're also ignoring that Singapore is only half the size of Texas while having a similar number of people living in it. The US has had a wide range of immigrants but they tended to cluster in different places. Comparing Singapore and the US is apples to oranges but not because you think Asian people are a coherent group outside of racial shenanigans. I know this isn't very "politically correct" for me to say but: Yes, your racism is intellectually insulting but it has also successfully impaired your comprehension of demographics, sociology and ethnic groups to that point that you're not even wrong[0].
Try again, Texas is roughly _1000x_ larger than Singapore with 5x the population.
Also, my country has very few black people and still a lot of vandalism, dirtyness, rudeness, so maybe it's something else that explains the special situation of Japan and not just "black people bad".
This is HN, not 4chan, do better.