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Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_.

Indeed, it’s the same in Singapore.

Despite the law and order reputation of Singapore, plenty of people regularly break laws there, including littering.

All you need to do is get off the tourist strips and you can walk down park paths with plenty of trash strewn everywhere.

What people don’t see is the army of foreign labor who is constantly picking this trash up.

The government is good at enforcement - if an area has problems with trash cameras get put up along with signs warning of the consequences, but if the cleaning staff were to disappear overnight it wouldn’t take more than 24 hours for Singapore to look quite untidy.

In terms of Western countries like the US, cleanliness does come down to an operations issue. Cleaners don’t come often enough, trash cans aren’t emptied enough and littering enforcement is weak. But it’s certainly possible to make the US as clean as Japan with surprisingly little increase in effort.

I lived in Singapore previously and currently living in Japan for the past 5 years. Japan is not like Singapore - yes you're right Singapore is a mostly government enforced society including the artificial cleanliness but Japan is not. Cleanliness in Japan is cultural, people in Japan truly care about cleanliness and it's "common sense" to them and you do not see "plenty of trash strewn about" in non-touristy areas of Japan. (Of course Japan is not some perfect society and there are places that are dirty)

I mean you can just go to the streets in Shibuya at night, loads of people leave their cans wherever. Or if you head out to random small towns in Saitama and see residential spots with plenty of garbage. And you can get into the pathological stuff like gomi-yashiki but that gets into a whole other thing.

Or (the one that's so odd to me given most stations have trash cans) random drinks and the like above the urinals in lots of stations. Plenty of posters asking the dudes to please please please please please please please not leave trash there. Like I get wanting to get rid of evidence or something but they have trash cans right there!

I am not going to comment much on Singapore because I had not seen much random trash, I just really dislike cultural essentialism about cleanliness, because there's still clearly a good amount of people who are just totally not aligned with that. The cleanliness is a result of society doing things despite there being bad actors in the system!

Seems most people in this thread are on roughly the same page, but here's an anecdote to give you an idea of why people are specifically comparing to the west:

Just today I was walking home from Nakameguro station in Tokyo and saw an orphaned protein bar wrapper on the street. I was shocked, it was the first time I'd noticed obvious trash (most likely not intentionally littered) on this street in years.

While living in Manhattan last year, I grew accustomed to holding my nose when walking past actual piles of garbage strewn about the street. This is not figurative as most people have used this phrase throughout this thread—You simply leave your rotting garbage on the street for trucks to pick up (obviously stray trash would get picked up by the wind and tossed into the air, descending upon Manhattan en masse). Only starting last November did they start using actual trash bins.

There was even a day when I saw multiple public garbage cans lit on fire and kicked into the street (in Chelsea, a fairly nice Manhattan neighborhood). Could you possibly imagine that happening anywhere in Tokyo? It would be news coverage for a week.

For all the nuance and exceptions one has to go out of their way to find when talking about trash in places like Tokyo and Singapore, it's unbelievably ages ahead of New York City, the richest city in the world.

A big part of the problem in Manhattan is that most places don't have alleys. There is nowhere for the trash to be left except on the sidewalk.

Some cities have the trash trucks drive around playing music, ice cream truck style, and you are required to bring your trash out to the truck. Logistically that would probably work in Manhattan. Politically I don't think you would ever be able to get it done.

Most places in the US don’t have alleys. The problem isn’t the alleys, it’s the trash cans. Most modern US cities have cans that can be lifted by the truck, and then emptied. NYC, on the other hand, insists on just leaving everything in flimsy bags, open to the rats.

Most places don't have a mostly continuous street wall with little/no setback from the public street/sidewalk.

Part of the problem in Manhattan has been that many buildings really do not have any place they could store those sorts of bins, or at least not in the quantity of them that they need for their trash output.

Manhattan isn't unique — and as far as I've heard, they've recently copied systems in use in Madrid (bins in parking spaces) and London (wheelie bins) to solve the problem.

I wonder if there's any free space underground? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYxaKw_CfeY

Trash fires are definitely a rare occurrence in Tokyo, the bigger chaos generation is some bird poking at a trash bag and causing stuff to fly all over.

Though apparently there are about 50 trash truck fires a year? Mostly from batteries in the trash of course…

If you think there's not plenty of trash strewn about, you need to spend more time out at night or down back alleys. Once the booze starts flowing or the kitchens get too busy, plenty of waste starts appearing. You're less likely to see a bunch somewhere like Meguro than you are Shibuya, but you don't exactly need to go hunting to find overfilled trashcans where people have given up and just leave stuff beside them, trash bags left out overnight besides the back door to the restaurant kitchen, etc.

(And for anyone not aware, Tokyo is a place where the entrances to plenty of places are down these back alleys - it's not just the service entrance/back doors down there. )

In most parts of Tokyo if you drop your wallet on the street somebody will chase you down to return it.

Umbrellas? Not so much. Stealing umbrellas is the official city pastime in Tokyo. Turn your back for one second and that thing will be gone. Report it to the cops and they'll just tell you to steal somebody else's.

I picked up a couple of abandoned umbrellas on my recent visit to Japan.

i recalls a standup routine that there are only 6 umbrellas in the world.

That is really true.

In 2024 I have visited Japan. It happened that when we changed quickly the subway train in some station, one of us has forgotten his expensive smartphone in the other train.

Someone from the old train has noticed this and she ran very quickly to our new train, returning the smartphone to the owner. She had to run very quickly between the 2 trains, otherwise her train could have departed, but she succeeded to go back.

The weird thing with the subways is you can ride around on them all day as long as you have a ticket that covers the fare from where you entered to where you leave.

A lot of the stations didn’t have shops, and a lot of those were outside the “turnstiles”, but there are some places where for lulls you could change trains to get a drink or a snack then backtrack to where you were “supposed” to get out.

So someone chasing you down is just lost time, not lost money.

This is actually a good thing from an environmental perspective. Japan has the type of downpour which can thoroughly drench you (in July for instance), but most of the time you don't need an umbrella. Obviously this means that umbrellas get lost, misplaced, or forgotten. If no one just took any seemingly lost umbrella out of politeness, you would end up with thousands of them going to a landfill.

I had the same thing with my umbrella when I left Japan after a year of studying there. “What should I do with this? It's still a good umbrella.”, “Oh, just leave it at the station, someone will take it.”

This is definitely part of government job programs. Paying people to keep your cities clean has a lot of advantages.

Near my building it was the building manager. Most shops it's just a shop member that cleans up the stuff by the shop. At the McDonalds there's a staff member _constantly_ roving around cleaning tables up and picking up trash people leave (and they tend to not be able to keep up with the patronage trash generation...)

It's just in the job description for most things honestly.

You know how there are pictures of certain immigrants to NYC and other places in the early part of the XX century and they would show those people sweeping their stoops and sidewalks and generally keeping their neighborhoods tidy?

Well, in Japan, you still see that. Shop owners will go around their shop with a duster cleaning away any dust or cobwebs that might have sprung overnight. Awnings, signs, etc.

That was a political machine thing. In the days before social security, destitute old people with connections to the local ward leader would be handed a broom and a modest wage.

In my small city (~120k people at the time) they had a few thousand people on the payroll doing stuff like this.

Why don’t we do that any more?

Social Security is advertised as an "insurance fund", rather than a transfer payment.

If it was advertised as a handout, then many of the recipients would be asking for a broom; provided they were able.

We moved that money upstream. That infrastructure of party committeemen and aldermen died with cities.

End of the day, it’s cheaper to sell politics like toothpaste than to build relationships.

100% this. Tokyo seems impossibly clean compared to NYC but Shirahama has a grunginess that feels almost like the rust belt of America.

Walk off the main thoroughfares of Tokyo and you end up with plenty of grunge and grime, too. I got invited to step outside for a cigarette at a craft beer joint down an alley in Shibuya and our 3rd companion was a rat as large as any I'd ever seen in NYC. Plenty of trash in the alleys, kitchens dumping buckets of waste water and not caring if plenty splash over the street or sidewalk instead of going down the drain, etc.

It's impressive how well kept the main areas are, but any metro area of 40m people is gonna generate plenty of trash.

When I play Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio games like "Lost Judgement" or "Like A Dragon" I always find myself wondering if groping is a big deal over there.

the problem is that complaining and making a fuss about things that bother you is frowned upon. especially for women. so they suffer in silence. and the games probably are mostly made by men, who of course don't think it is as much of a big deal. not much different from what it used to be in the west. if only samurai chivalry was more prevalent. but unfortunately keeping appearance (and not embarrassing others) is more important.

The RGG games are pretty open about widespread societal problems in Japan. Indeed, the game before the current one had a pretty humanistic depiction of sex work that was not at all glamorous or lecherous.

It's not common, but it's a notable widely publicized issue - so if you're writing a video game and you want a low-level antagonist for the hero to fight, it'd be one of the default options.

It’s common enough that there are women-only cars on the subway in Tokyo.

Germany has also tried women-only cars and there have been discussions of having them in the UK, but they were rejected not because they're not needed but due to the optics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-only_passenger_car#Europ...

Not saying this as whataboutism or to defend anything, just that men are probably not always aware of the problems women face even in the west so be vigilant when you ride public transport and don't think it's only a Japan problem.

As we all know though, low latency is often opposed to high throughput or efficiency. If the average person had to work one hour less each day but the toilets weren't spotless (but still clean enough), wouldn't that be a worthwhile trade?

Looks like many places in Europe to me