6 ms·

Japan is definitely high trust and has a lot of advantages downstream of that. Though I think lots of that list is more of a "vibrant Japanese city" vibe (go up

by rtpg 2y ago

Japan is definitely high trust and has a lot of advantages downstream of that. Though I think lots of that list is more of a "vibrant Japanese city" vibe (go up to some dying onsen town and you'll see plenty of broken shit and TVs dropped on the side of the road). Cleanliness is... mostly downstream of storefronts and the like picking shit up _all the time_. There are pockets of land that don't end up people's direct responsibility and end up getting very dirty very quickly. Little micro-pockets of trash that pile up (very quickly!). But lots of places you tend to have someone going around and just picking something up. For like a year there was a guy consistently eating his cup noodles or lunch box near my building, and he would just drop it near the bike parking. But we had somebody come by the building twice a week to deal with trash and the like and he was picking it up (I'd throw it into a garbage bag if I saw it and had one in my hand). Still though, like if I'd go on a midnight walk I'd see it. Turns out that the way super crowded places can be clean is by cleaning constantly (see also restrooms, which need to be constantly cleaned). "Nothing is broken" also definitely feels downstream of people fixing stuff promptly. Low latency when trying to deal with issues might be key. And an aside for the public transit... while the transit feels clean, ask most any woman living in Tokyo how they feel about riding public transit. Many might still grade it above other ones but I have heard many nasty experiences that white guys just don't get exposed to at all. Groping, verbal harassment, the works. EDIT: I mention lots of this to get to a bigger point: good things are possible! There is no magic entirely localized in the Japanese Isles.

mc32 2y ago
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.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  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.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Why don’t we do that any more?
    - buddavis_ 2y ago
      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.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      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.
conception 2y ago
This is definitely part of government job programs. Paying people to keep your cities clean has a lot of advantages.
- rtpg 2y ago
  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.
jarsin 2y ago
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.
- em-bee 2y ago
  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.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    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.
- fenomas 2y ago
  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.
- foundart 2y ago
  It’s common enough that there are women-only cars on the subway in Tokyo.
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    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#Europe 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
refurb 2y ago
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.
- byteraccoon 2y ago
  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)
  - rtpg 2y ago
    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!
larodi 2y ago
Looks like many places in Europe to me
blackguardx 2y ago
100% this. Tokyo seems impossibly clean compared to NYC but Shirahama has a grunginess that feels almost like the rust belt of America.
- cthalupa 2y ago
  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.
dreamcompiler 2y ago
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.
- n1b0m 2y ago
  I picked up a couple of abandoned umbrellas on my recent visit to Japan.
  - uwagar 2y ago
    i recalls a standup routine that there are only 6 umbrellas in the world.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  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.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    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.
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  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.”
immibis 2y ago
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?

by rtpg 2y ago

mc32 2y ago

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.

Spooky23 2y ago
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.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Why don’t we do that any more?
  - buddavis_ 2y ago
    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.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    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.

conception 2y ago

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

rtpg 2y ago
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.

jarsin 2y ago

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.

em-bee 2y ago
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.
- TylerE 2y ago
  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.
fenomas 2y ago
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.
foundart 2y ago
It’s common enough that there are women-only cars on the subway in Tokyo.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  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#Europe 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

refurb 2y ago

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.

byteraccoon 2y ago
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)
- rtpg 2y ago
  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!

larodi 2y ago

Looks like many places in Europe to me

blackguardx 2y ago

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

cthalupa 2y ago
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.

dreamcompiler 2y ago

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.

n1b0m 2y ago
I picked up a couple of abandoned umbrellas on my recent visit to Japan.
- uwagar 2y ago
  i recalls a standup routine that there are only 6 umbrellas in the world.
adrian_b 2y ago
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.
- hinkley 2y ago
  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.
Freak_NL 2y ago
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.”

immibis 2y ago

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?