Comment by liontwist
Comment by liontwist 3 days ago
Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
Comment by liontwist 3 days ago
Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
> I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo
Homelessness in Tokyo looks different than homelessness in a major US city. Often enough, it means freeters sleeping overnight in manga cafés.
lol that’s actually more expensive than a lot of small apartments in Tokyo.
That said there is no shortage of work in Tokyo. Far more work than the number of people available to do it.
I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.
> I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
We did this in Catholic grade school. Every week the assignments would rotate. The cleaning involved sweeping the class floor, washing the chalk board, beating the erasers of chalk dust, and pulling the trash bag from the can. The janitor took care of the rest like the hallways, offices and so on.
Would never happen in a NYC public school as the kids would be doing a union job.
> kids do most of the cleaning
We have that in my country, and it doesn't really affect the society overall: the streets are full of trash and it's considered normal to throw away cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. after you're done with them. From reading local internet forums, you get the idea that it's always the government fault that trash does not get picked up in time, it's never our own fault.
There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.
If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.
> There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s
This is misleading. Japan has the lowest homelessness rate in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan
They clearly had a problem and fixed it. I was in Japan a few years ago and I saw one homeless (I assumed?) person during my whole trip. He didn't look too bad (like the ones in the US) but he was probably having a rough time.
Neither of you are wrong. As your link says, they have one of the lowest rates of homelessness in the world, but it also says that their low rate is roughly 1 in 34,000 people. There are 14 million people in Tokyo (city, or 41M in Tokyo greater area), so for 14M residents you would expect roughly 400 homeless people if the ratio is exactly the same as national average (and typically, big cities have higher than average). So simultaneously there are many homeless people still even if you only saw one of them, it's just a smaller % than in most countries.
Ultimately the stats are what matters more than how many people any one anecdote happened to see, and they show that Japan should be applauded for doing well but also acknowledging that sadly they haven't completely solved the problem and too many people there, as everywhere, are still homeless.
Which is reasonable? Within the millions of people there will be a few people that are completely helpless. I think Japan is as close to having no homeless as a country can reasonably get. Which is a completely different situation from the USA. Also living in a small shoebox hotel is orders of magnitudes better than living on the streets. I am not saying it is a good option but between having nothing (US) and having that, I'd definitively chose the shoebox.
One difference is that they’re concentrated in areas away from the public eye - if you enter Yoyogi park from the entrance nearest Yoyogi Koen station then before the hill starts go up the footpath to the right, you will find a homeless encampment with 20+ tents. It’s orderly but they are homeless.
I strongly disagree that 400 homeless people in a city of 14 million is a lot
There are some homeless people living in camps in certain parks. Ueno Park has a bunch of them. Others have camps hidden away in flood-plain areas next to rivers. Some live on sidewalks, like under overpasses, and have a bunch of junk in front of their sleeping bag that they're trying to sell.
Generally, these homeless people want to be homeless. There's options for homeless people to get help, but some people simply don't want to be part of normal society for whatever reason (like mental illness).
Overall, in my experience living here, I very rarely see homeless people. It's nothing at all like the huge homeless camps in US cities these days.
Don't forget when your coworker prints out a memo, asks you for edits on the paper, then you go in and edit the virtual document.
A couple of jobs ago one of my colleagues went to work with a Japanese partner for a few days to do an integration. Apparently they had to import a bunch of data and one of the Japanese employees, who seemed to have an axe to grind, printed out pages and pages of a spreadsheet and handed it to my colleague. Whenever my colleague asked him to just send the file, he pretended to not understand. In the end they had to OCR it but at least it was a story.
To be fair, while it’s antiquated and there is a lot of needless paperwork, the rules are always clear and if you follow them you more or less always get the result you’re looking for. And they almost never make you wait on hold or in line for inordinate amounts of time; generally when I go to city hall, or a doctors office, or call a telephone line, or go to the post office, or whatever it is, I generally don’t need to wait more than 2-3 minutes and usually I get service immediately.
It's a surface level joke but if I remember there were reasons for it, both culturally and regulatory, something about Hankos? I think I read about it on a post here talking about them finally changing some of those requirements.
Japan has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).
High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.
>Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.
aren't homes generally extremely cheap in most of Japan?
They are cheap because they are in disrepair, in an area with no jobs (or only subsistence farming) and limited services. In central Tokyo, they are cheap compared to cities in most of the West but too expensive to keep up a good drinking habit without working and on limited out-of-work benefits.
No; they’re cheap because Japan builds homes more than other countries do.
The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.
Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment
I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.
Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...
> Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
I think that's the opposite. They care too much. That collective school cleanup example above has a similar extreme. If you literally live to work, you'll forget about caring for yourself and collapse.
Tokyo Government just introduced a 4 day work week for its workers. You'd be surprised how much friction there has been to this, by the workers.
It's another country's culture. It's really hard to holistically judge what is right or wrong. If people want to be a workaholic, then I can't really judge their lifestyle.
That said, yes. If this is pressure from their society, they probably should revisit those mindsets. Especially when the birth rate right now really can't afford a higher mortality raet. Fortunately they are starting to in some sectors.
I can't find the link now but I read a post by an immigrant to Japan who attended one of these school cleanups at their child's school. They said basically that they seemed to be the only one really scrubbing / actually cleaning properly rather than just putting in a performative effort to wipe something down.
I feel like the article is mostly focused on environments around us, so it makes sense to focus on Japan in this context. He’s not saying it’s an entirely flawless country
Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.
- You cannot fire your staff (easily) - Rather than replace staff, you need to train them - You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry
I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but... Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.
If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.
- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need
- Functioning government
- Competency, skilled engineers
With:
- A declining population
- Rural collapse
- Stagnating economy
- Shut in problem for old people
Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.
Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.
Not sure what you are driving at. This thread was about Japan and I responded about Japan. If we were talking about Italy or South Korea then my response would be different.
You are correct that Japan isn't the only nation with large problems, particularly around declining populations. The thrust of my initial comment is that no nation is perfect and thoughts of "why aren't we just like that nation" are a little silly.
It's very easy to come up with a few bullet points of the big problems of a nation. Just like it's easy to generate such bullet points about the positives of a nation.
- Western media wants to focus on negatives of Japan because the idea of an alternative functioning system is narrative breaking. - now that UK is out of EU, negative EU messaging about Greece, Spain, and Italy is unlikely to reach US. - the media doesn’t want to promote a “declining white birth rate” narrative - there are a lot of nerds on the internet interested in Japanese culture. - neighboring Asian countries do not tend to love Japan
It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.
There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.
Anime and 90s propaganda from people appealing to Japanese businessmen.
I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.
There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.
This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.
https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation