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.