15 ms·
This smells like a lot of post-hoc rationalization. Collectivism? What about China, which did terribly on this kind of test. Shintoism? Only 3-4% of the pop
by virtuous_signal 7y ago
This smells like a lot of post-hoc rationalization. Collectivism? What about China, which did terribly on this kind of test. Shintoism? Only 3-4% of the population follows that. See https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-people-are-honest-lost-wallets-experiment-20190620-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-people-are-honest-los... where the graphic in the middle of the page compares countries. It appears that Scandinavian countries fare best followed by Eastern European. I would be happy to hear what people at HN think are the real reasons.
For what it's worth, as a scatterbrained person, I think it would be great living in a country with so much trust that I could expect my lost things not to be stolen.
- nwienert 7y agoHomogenous, nationalistic, small country with high IQ, good education system, high GDP, low levels of immigration, and a culture that emphasizes community. Oh, and lower levels of inequality, relatively, and a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust.
- jessriedel 7y agoI mostly agree, but note that Japan has 126M people, so it's quite large.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y agoYeah, but when you compare 126m to 1.3b I feel like you'd expect to see drift between the results. That's 10x the amount of people. If only 1 in every 10 people in each country is willing to break the social norms and ignores social pressures, then China will have 10x the amount of these infractions compared to Japan. But yes, Japan is not a small country even if it is a relatively small landmass.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe infractions are per capita. If a country has ten times the population and the same percentage of honest people, then it will have ten times the number of people breaking the social norms.
- wisty 7y agoChina is rapidly developing. A lot of Chinese people would LOVE to see a move towards a lot of what Japan has, they just haven't been able to implement it yet (because of historical reasons that left the country screwed up).
- omegaworks 7y agoImmigration has been steadily increasing in Japan.[1] That homogeneity presupposes trust is a right-wing stereotype used to devalue immigrants in a society and justify harsh enforcement. You can find people of every ethnicity in Tokyo, including many half and full Brazilian people that you could mistake for latinos here in the US[2]. 1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/11/national/japan-sees-record-high-number-foreign-residents-justice-ministry/#.Xh9wNVNKiuV https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/11/national/japan-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan#Migration_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan#Migration_...
- nwienert 7y agoGo to Japan. Immigration is absolutely nothing like European or American countries.
- omegaworks 7y agoI have. I've been to Tokyo. When I said you can find people of every ethnicity, I meant I encountered people of every ethnicity. 1 in 10 residents of Tokyo are foreign nationals[1]. https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO32872510R10C18A7EA2000/ https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO32872510R10C18A7EA2000/
- yorwba 7y ago> 東京都では20歳代の10人に1人が外国人だった。 1 in 10 people in their twenties. (Still more than I expected.)
- m4rtink 7y agoThe situation is very very different outside of a few big cities. We spent a few days in Izumo and in the area around it and we hardly saw any non Japanese at the turrist spots, let alone any locals.
- swebs 7y ago>Ethnic groups: Japanese 98.1%, Chinese 0.5%, Korean 0.4%, other 1% (includes Filipino, Vietnamese, and Brazilian) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
- claudeganon 7y ago> a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust. Japan is essentially a right-wing, one-party “democracy” put in place by US intelligence services, postwar. The current prime minister is literally the grandson of a CIA-backed war criminal, who was famously known as the “Devil of the Showa Period”: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-to-support-japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi Freedom of the press is absolutely abysmal in Japan and has been further on the downslide since Abe came to power: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/13/japan-accused-of-eroding-press-freedom-by-un-special-rapporteur https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/13/japan-accused-... I speak Japanese, have spent a lot of time in the country, and have a great admiration for its people, but about the last thing I’d express any admiration for are its politics and media. And speaking anecdotally, very few people there seem to put much trust in them either.
- nwienert 7y agoI didn’t express admiration, I just pointed out the reasons the people have such high trust and cooperation.
- magduf 7y ago>I speak Japanese, have spent a lot of time in the country, and have a great admiration for its people, but about the last thing I’d express any admiration for are its politics and media. While the media might not be great, at least the politicians, right-wing as they may be, actually seem to be trying to do things to improve the country, and even pushing some relatively progressive ideas (for instance, they're pushing for more women in corporate leadership positions, something Japan is woefully behind on). I just can't say the same for America these days; our national government (and especially the executive branch) is moving things backwards and making things worse.
- claudeganon 7y agoAbe has a good PR team pushing this narrative abroad, but it doesn’t map to the material reality of most women. While female labor force participation rates are up, most women are locked into lower-level positions with bad wages and little hope of advancement. Likewise, women still face a level of misogyny in Japan that is truly unimaginable to most Americans. This has been led in no small part by Abe and the LDP, who insist on the enforcement of absolutely regressive social mores. Most recently, they vehemently opposed women being allowed to keep their own last names upon marriage.
- NalNezumi 7y ago>Homogenous, nationalistic, small country with high IQ, good education system, high GDP, low levels of immigration, and a culture that emphasizes community. I've lived in a Scandinavian country with similar quantities most of my life (well except low levels of immigration) but I can't recall a single time lost property came back, even at a local small town bakery. The experience is very different from my life living in Tokyo. >Oh, and lower levels of inequality, relatively, and a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust. Considering my homecountry having almost the lowest level of inequality in the world, and a highly aligned political/media system I don't think this is a factor either.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- matsemann 7y ago> I've lived in a Scandinavian country with similar quantities most of my life but I can't recall a single time lost property came back But my experience is the opposite: Managed to leave my backpack on a bench in the busiest part of Oslo S when taking the train with too much skis and stuff so I forgot it in the struggle. Anyone could have just snatched it walking by, but instead someone saw it was unattended and delivered it at some lost&found so I got it back a week later. Also in Oslo, I forgot my laptop at the table on an outside cafe. When I came back to fetch it a few hours later it was still where I left it. So while there probably can be differences between countries, I also think it's too easy to extract too much from one's own experiences, which may not be typical.
- factsaresacred 7y agoShame and the homogeneous makeup of the population likely play large roles. Comparing China to Japan won't do any good as the cultural revolution decimated its social capital.
- virtuous_signal 7y agoI don't know about that last part. Most Eastern European countries were part of the USSR and underwent massive revolutions. I've even seen them described as low-trust societies, but they seem to do well.
- factsaresacred 7y agoThe Cultural Revolution was unlike the political revolutions of Eastern Europe. It was a bloody orgy of violence and vandalism that attempted to tear traditional Chinese culture out from the roots, and in the process destroyed China's social fabric and trust, perhaps irreparably (or at least until the Party collapses and the country can confront its past - something the Eastern European nations have been allowed to do). An excerpt from the book 'Out of Mao's Shadow': > Families were torn apart as wives divorced husbands who had been accused of political crimes, children condemned parents, and siblings turned against one another. When the Cultural Revolution finally ended, it was easier for many people just to move on than talk about it... > ...Such violence has not been expunged from the country’s collective memory so much as repressed, and repressed memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly. There have always been voices in China calling on the nation to confront the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution. Only with an honest accounting and thoughtful examination of the era, they argue, can the country come to terms with the legacy of mistrust and moral decay that haunts it today.
- vkou 7y agoThe cultural revolution was not the cause of this. Chinese history did not start in 1966. 1966 was preceded by six decades of brutal military occupation, a complete breakdown of law and order, and civil war. I'm not sure you can point at any country that had gone through such a violent, unstable, and lengthy period of fragmentation and bloodshed, and came out on the other end as a cohesive, high-trust society.
- jdtang13 7y agoI completely agree. Foreign culture analyses like this are always tinged with bias and an incurable desire to find little small-picture justifications. I'm sick and tired of seeing every random quirk of Japanese people being explained as "Shinto this, Buddhism that"; it's such an oversimplification. The interior lives of human beings are built upon perhaps 1,000,000 variables, not just 3 variables. The writing is in English, published by someone who spent an entire life growing up in the West. And, as you mentioned, this "returning item phenomenon" seems not to be the case in modern China, even in the cities. If you want to even begin to describe Eastern culture in English, maybe take a look at how hard it was, and still is, to articulate the internal world of the Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_soul
- dtwest 7y agoI interpreted this particular article's main point as being: Don't assume Japanese people are more honest than people in other countries, there are many social and cultural factors at play that influence behavior. Generalizing a group of people is almost always inaccurate, and often frustrating to read, but I don't think this article is an egregious example of that. This is a fluff piece to get people interested in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, don't mistake it for serious cultural analysis.
- simmanian 7y agoI was born in one of the "safe" East Asian countries and I think it all comes down to their sense of ownership in the community. Koreans and Japanese have this deeply ingrained idea that the entire history of their country has been built and run by their "people" and they will have a hivemind-allergic reaction to anything they see as undesirable. There's very little crime in public in these countries because people equate a crime that happens in some back alley of a major city to a crime that happens in your cousin's backyard. It's simply abhorrent. Needless to say, this culture does have its drawbacks, but I think the key takeaway is to increase people's sense of ownership in our communities.
- nitwit005 7y agoClearly, it's a lasting side effect of the Meiji Restoration, because it's one of the few things I remember about Japanese history. While that was a joke, that does seem to be how people pick these explanations. Everything about Japan seems to be explainable by social homogeneity, WW2, or philosophy/religion, which is just the set of facts foreigners tend to know about Japan. I can't explain my own culture, and I've actually studied its history. I'm not even confident I can identify the differences it has with other cultures. We're often more similar than we think.
- CydeWeys 7y agoSyncretic Shintoism/Buddhism is pervasive in Japan. It's absolutely not true that only 3-4% believe in it. The real figure is way higher. The issue is it's not a religion that you believe in in the same sense as, say, Christianity; there's a lot of disparate practices that most people adhere to at least some of. Just walking around in Japanese cities, you see shrines everywhere. Way more than you see churches in US cities even (admittedly the typical shrine is a lot smaller).
- m4rtink 7y agoBTW, the japanese Shinto shrines and Budhist temples just seem so much more alive and part of the community, than western churches, which often seem like almost foreign and disconnected from actual current society.
- remarkEon 7y agoPart of this, imo, has to do with the architecture and it will really depend on the city (speaking from a US perspective) you're in. If you're in Philadelphia or an older city on the East Coast some of the old Catholic or Episcopalian Churches/Cathedrals do feel like they're integrated into the community because they were built around the same time as the rest of the buildings and housing. In the midwest this trend kind of wanes, as many of the Catholic Churches were built after Vatican II and ... don't have the same kind of aesthetic, to put it mildly, and weren't necessarily built the same time other housing was built. By the time you get to the West Coast you'll start finding examples again that feel like they belong there, like Spanish Missions. So it's mostly age and the timeframe in which everything was built. All that said, I've greatly enjoyed my trips to Japan and feel the same way about their Shrines.
- CydeWeys 7y agoYeah, and there's evidence everywhere that these shrines are active. They're taken care of, there's always offerings, old cemeteries centuries old are littered with recent wooden arches, ribbons, flowers, and other recent stuff, and bigger shrines with attendants have long lines to get red book stamps.
- namelosw 7y agoIn China, it's very common to leave your property out of sight for minutes and it would be stolen. Collectivism isn't really associated to this topic at all.