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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that the relations to elder is really getting rocky, and people are rethinking them in both directions.

We can't hide from the influence the elder generations had on the current situation. Japan is a developed nation with a crazy low crime rate and incredible infrastructure thanks to them. It's also a social mess and the poster child of stagnation thanks to them.

This whole trading card game surfaces both sides of the coin, with what these people are bringing to the community and also why small kids shouldn't look to much upon them as it's a recipe for trouble.

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Japan always does the hard thing. If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves (they are not afraid). The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority. The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere . Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).

The rules are very open and clear. The deincentives for misconduct are strong.

The newspapers focus are different. More fun or actionable news.

People just think they are built different, that is not the case. They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.

> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other

This is the exact opposite of my experience (and all my Japanese friends). They will stare at the person misbehaving but will absolutely not challenge him. Their culture is "avoid the problem/confronting at all costs".

> The police acts swiftly

They are considered tax thieves, even by Japanese people. Also, talk to some foreign women that got sexually harassed or even raped how the police helped them. In fact, I don't have proof, but I sincerely believe that if the police was trained well, crime rate would increase because they would find more crimes.

> healthy food

Are we talking about deep-fried food? Or perhaps over-salted dishes? Oh, no, you meant the sugar they add in basically all their cooking? Time where they mostly ate fish and rice is over. They barely eat enough vegetables. And fruits are for the well-off only.

It's a country that I love and have spent quite some time there—and more to come—but your observations are exactly the opposite of what I saw.

What they do correctly is the low unemployment rate, though I think it's starting to rise with younger people. People don't need to commit violent crimes to feed themselves if any work lets them afford necessities.

I think they are opposite because when I say police acts swiftly, you turn around and say that they are tax thieves. They can both be true?

Healthy food. Yes they eat healthy and their BMI shows it. I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis. Proof is in the pudding (BMI). Yes it is getting worse and I hope American tariffs will help in this regard. Again, healthy living AND getting worse can both be true, especially with people that are friendly with cultures they want to know more about (many, but still a small subset).

Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids. But the narrative that is pushed heavily in media is the equal sign between poor and criminal, instead of the correlation, which again is reductive. Why? Is there anger? What food do trigger it? What mindset?

My grandparents where very poor (as in oat porridge for weeks poor). They would never hurt a fly. In certain minds that would have been a weakness, in certain minds it’s self sacrifice and equal strength.

Most want to be the wolf among the sheep. It is US greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.

I think it's more likely that social pressure to control people's weights is responsible for Japan's low BMI, not anything to do with the food. Japan is the land of vending machines and convenience stores. It's easy to eat junk food all day if you want to. But people will notice you getting fat, and unlike in Western countries they're likely to criticize you for it.

"Bring back shame again" increasingly feels like something that would actually be beneficial in the long run.

We tend to hit a Goodhart’s Law situation, where focusing on weight and BMI comes at the expense of actual health. That's how we get eating disorders and other mental health issues as well, so as usual it's complicated.

Assuming you are actually from the US, your point feels a lot like system justification[1] theory hard at work... If close to 50% (or even more) people around you have moderate to serious weight issues, I can imagine how you end up normalising the status quo, looking for explanations that rationalise it...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification

Just an anecdata but on my last stay in Japan I lost a couple kilos in a good month. Even though I did abuse kitkats.

FWIW if you're on a trip it might counter-balance: you might be more active with fewer idle time, and the local food might also be harder to fully process. I saw that on a Spain trip where it made absolutely no sense I didn't gain weight touring tapas places for a week.

It was a business trip matching my typical routine. I'd say I was even less active because apparently running in Tokyo sucks.

Also some anecdata, but I think it depends so much on the person: I gained 10 kilograms by living more than a year in Japan.

I ate healthily so I wasn't fat by any means (in fact, I'm really skinny), but I ate so much that I think this is the reason I gained some weight. I ate a lot of rice (my rice portion was usually more than a Japanese person's entire plate).

Every time I'm in japan I walk far more than I do while in the US. I also end up going up stairs a lot more than I ever need to in the US. Good public transportation makes a huge difference.

I'm euro and runner/cyclist so I doubt that was a factor. I also had my bicycle with me for some rides on off days, but it wasn't beyond my usual mileage. Maybe even less, because riding road bike in Tokyo was an experience that made me realise how good I've it back home. Surroundings hills are nice, but getting out of the city sucks big time.

BMI is mostly useless metric when comparing genetically diverse cohorts. Weight gain is mostly in fat and that is proportional to fat cell count. There is a saying "nerve cells are born and die, but fat - lives forever". The truth to it is that at an adult age fat cell count is mostly constant and mostly genetic. As you get fatter you don't produce more fat cells, they just get fatter, pun intended.

There is huge genetic diversity between geographic regions / ethnic lineages in this regard. On one end you have northern european / african lineages, on the other end you have far east lineages, with other lineages somewhere in between, with northern european / african lineages having the largest fat cell counts, east asians the lowest. Furthermore, north european / african lineages tend to have fat distribution much more biased towards subcutaneous fat, whereas east asian lineages are biased towards abdominal fat, so many of the problems associated with high body fat (not insulin resistance) are seen at lower body fat percentages in east asian lineages.

On top of that, body fat percentage does not map to BMI. BMI may roughly linearly scale with body fat percentage around the "healthy" region, however there will be huge offset between genetic cohorts, including sex.

You should expect east asian BMIs to be lower across the board given similarly "unhealthy" diets.

Not the person you responded to, but this is a topic that fascinates me; do you have any resource to learn more about that? One that explains in average human terms would be appreciated!

https://www.youtube.com/@benbikman This dude is awesome

> police acts swiftly

Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "swift".

> I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis

I have lived with 2 different Japanese family (one younger, one older) and I was referring to the younger one when writing my previous comment. You say that restaurant doesn't represent what they eat, but again this is not my observation; restaurants and prepared meal (bento) are socheap—price-to-purchasing-power compared to Western countries—that many people don't even cook for themselves. So yes, it's absolutely relevant.

> Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids

I never said it was. But hunger definitely makes you more violent and more irrational. I excluded non-violent crimes because people usually exclude those when thinking about a country's safety. There are a lot of scams in Japan, for example.

> They would never hurt a fly.

Most people would never hurt someone. Most people are lawful. But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy. Perhaps there is a causation, perhaps not.

> But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy.

Petty or to-some-extent violent criminals. White collar criminals, the worse kind of criminal, usually come from good/rich/powerful families (I'm generally speaking, not talking about Japan specifically)

Which is why I initially mentioned violent crime. The one people tend to care about the most.

nitpick: I'd argue the worse types of criminals are war criminals, like for example Hitler, who is, in my mind, worse than someone like Bernie Madoff.

If you think sugar added to everything is a Japan phenomenon oh boi, time to travel.

As someone that lived there, frankly your take come off as the typical "English teacher/exchange student that lived in Tokyo and spend too much time on r/japanlife" and think Tokyo represent the average.

Many Japanese recipes I’ve tried have 2 tablespoons of sugar, but that’s not much in a meal for four.

Then there is mirin, which is basically sugar.

I live in the inaka (Aomori) and my experience is the same.

> If you think sugar added to everything is a Japan phenomenon oh boi, time to travel.

You're not refuting my argument.

> As someone that lived there, frankly your take come off as the typical "English teacher/exchange student that lived in Tokyo and spend too much time on r/japanlife" and think Tokyo represent the average.

That's very condescending of you and again not refuting my claims at all. Do most of your colleagues eat their own dishes? Don't they add a helluva lot sugar and salt to everything? Hell, even Japanese-made Western desserts taste way too sweet.

I think you could be a bit kinder and not resort to personal attacks.

Edit: it's true that I lived in Tokyo, but unfortunately it's a country that contains 4 cities that get more dense by the day at the cost of unpopulated rural areas.

The poison is in the amount, not in the substance. Salty or sweet food is completely fine if you don’t eat a ton every day. You actually need salt, it is much more dangerous to not consume enough of it.

Don't you think we eat too much of those?

Most people are dying of heart diseases and guess their causes...

Japanese elderly don't even drink the broth of ramen otherwise they may literally die (not my words).

Edit: sugar we don't really need to survive (trace amounts found in fruits and vegetables is basically enough) and salt maximum daily recommended amount is around 3g. Do you know how much salt a tablespoon of soy sauce contains?

That may be the limit for sodium, the max RDA for salt is above 5 grams [1].

Now check what happens when you don’t consume enough sodium [2] (it happens relatively often among athletes and gym bros who drink too much water).

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...

[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hyponatremia/...

> who drink too much water

I totally understand what you mean, however the vast majority of the population isn't even close to being hydrated properly so you're just taking an extreme example to make your point.

You’re right, but the point of my first reply was that the Japanese (unlike Americans) don’t eat excessive amounts of food on average.

This is definitely true from my experience. They eat less than even Europeans (which themselves eat less than Americans on average).

Yeah, the us subsidy for violent crime aka "no money for the unemployed" is quiet counterproductive.

Japan is also full of Japanese people.

Reductive

So?

> Japan always does the hard thing

Talk about reductive, but also wrong. Not being racist, for example, is the harder option for most people, and not the one encouraged in Japan.

Another one: Japan still has children growing up in orphanages because it is considered weird to take in someone else’s child.

Office life is 50% time spent correctly pandering to your bosses feelings, and they have made so little effort to include women in the workforce and make parenting compatible with a good job that nobody wants to have kids.

This is about as deep of analysis of Japan as the Ghibli AI avatars are "art".

> If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves

This is just straight up fan-fiction, and absolutely not how the society here operates. You will get stared at. People will move aside, maybe. That's the extent of reaction from the public you can expect.

> The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere .

The "small offices"/kobans are more than useless for any actual "crime". They're quite useful in reporting that you lost a wallet/keys, but good luck when having any actual problems that need to be reported. Goes doubly so for areas where there's elevated chance of actual crimes happening — interacting with cops in Kabukicho has to be one of the least useful activities on the planet.

> The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority.

And this is... a good thing? We have wildly different moral systems if you think that.

> Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).

"Green tea and healthy food" is, frankly, an even stupider argument than "they're built different". Yes, it's the diet that makes the society more conformist, sure, why not.

There's many great, and many not-so-great things about Japan — why do these arguments online always just start with the most basic, surface level, inane pseudoanalysis?

1. Yes they won’t interact with the misbehaving person but they will loudly declare their feelings around it.

2. Police boxes are great when drunk people are causing ruckus. What are the details in your case?

3. Never said it was. You need to stop seeing things as being good or bad. What I said was strong incentives.

4. L-theanine has a calming effect, it is quite well known. Just as lead has the opposite effect.

To be productive, what actionable insights do you glean from countries such as Japan?

> L-theanine has a calming effect, it is quite well known.

The evidence for this in humans is very weak.

Here is a randomized, triple blind study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34562208/

”had significant positive effects on brainwaves, salivary cortisol, and self-reported state anxiety compared to the placebo in response to an acute stress challenge. These changes are indicative of relaxation in the brain and suggest a calming response in a moderately stressed but otherwise healthy population”

n=16. This isn't even worthy of classifying as a Phase I trial. Efficacy studies generally _start_ at n=100. Drawing any conclusions on efficacy from this kind of sample size is simply unscientific.

>They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.

Aren't rules part of the culture? The culture helps strengthening the rules while the rules help strengthening the culture.

Yes, but it is sometimes used to dismiss any actionable insights that can be used in politics.

”Would never work here, the culture is different!”

Maybe Im just ranting…

出る釘は打たれる。

The nail that sticks out gets hammered down (Google Translate.)

It is a way of dismissing clear rules.

Because it’s not that it is used to attack people that are different, but it is used to deincentive bad behaviour, but by conflating the two you end up in a bad place, where incentives are…misaligned.

It seems to me Japan does just fine by having rules and sticking to their culture.

Many people admire Japanese culture. But they wouldn't have anything to admire had Japanese people not conserving and caring greatly about their culture and sticking to their rules and ways of life.

I probably won't be integrating in the Japanese culture, but I admire and respect it and the fact they still have that culture.

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