Thanks again for the questions! Regarding old-timers: I’m sure the people you met in Taiwan are, as you said, several decades behind in their perceptions of th

Thanks again for the questions! Regarding old-timers: I’m sure the people you met in Taiwan are, as you said, several decades behind in their perceptions of the country where they live, but I really don’t know how typical that is. Among the long-term foreign residents of Japan that I know, there are several broad categories: those who have completely assimilated into the country and language; those who have settled down here with an identity divided between Japan and their home country; and those whom I think of as typical expats—living and working here, but knowing little of the language, having a social life that revolves around embassies, foreigners’ clubs, and international schools, and definitely not expecting to stay for the rest of their lives. I fall somewhere between the first and second categories. But even the more expat types here are not likely to have the same out-of-date perceptions that you have noted in Taiwan: Japan, while having changed a lot over the decades I’ve been here, has not undergone a similar transformation in government or social conditions. As far as the tendency to overgeneralize based on one’s local experience—well, I am certainly guilty of that, and, as a sibling comment notes, most people are. Regarding government-led reforms in Japan, as several sibling commenters also noted, some have been quite successful. Most of my direct experience has been with government initiatives in education, and I have seen directly how those top-down programs can lead to waste and failure. Some prominent examples: The abandoned attempts to reform the main university entrance examination for English [1] and to reduce the number of classroom hours in primary education (“yutori education,” [2]), and the only partially successful G30 program aimed at “globalizing” university education [3]. I have heard complaints from scientist colleagues about similarly misguided government initiatives aimed at promoting specific areas of scientific research. The Fifth Generation Project would seem to be an example of that. Enjoy the rest of your stay in Japan. I was in Ueno yesterday to lead some students on an excursion around Ameyoko and then to Asakusa. I’m teaching a class this semester on 19th-century foreign descriptions of Japan, based on a book I edited a few years ago [4]. We will be contrasting those writings with tourists’ descriptions today in social media, and I wanted the students—who themselves come from more than a dozen different countries—to spend some time observing first-hand today’s tourists and the places they visit. It was fun. This afternoon, I will lead another short excursion to Shinjuku, Kabukichō, and Shin Ōkubo. [1] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210903/p2a/00m/0na/029000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210903/p2a/00m/0na/02... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education [3] https://kobe-cufs.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2523/files/nenpo59-06.pdf https://kobe-cufs.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2523/files/nenpo59-0... [4] https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html