Japan is awesome. I’m a brown guy and went to Japan and I had the mistaken thought that I would feel like an outsider.
I couldn’t be farther from the reality. Japanese people are so kind and welcoming, and their cities and towns are beautiful, safe, and clean. Just a simple hello led to some amazing conversations, and I felt as if I was living at the edge of the future because we talked by passing our phones to each other. Google translate enabled us to have real time conversations and get to know about each other.
I met an old man who gave me my Japanese name and dropped some wisdom. A businessman and I shared our thoughts on life and family over a late night off the map hole in the wall type of seafood ramen place. Ran into some people at a bar who happened to work in the same industry as me and we shared stories over beers. When I missed my bus in a remote town, a family reopened their restaurant and cooked a meal for me.
I was there for only a few weeks, and I wish I could move permanently to Japan. If any Japanese company or entrepreneur wants to hire me as a software engineer manager or as a co-founder, hit me up!
My immediate guess, based upon dealing with people not Japanese specifically: Japanese culture welcomes outsiders who respect the culture. But once you try to get deep into the fabric of the community (buy property, marry a local, etc.) there is a strong invisible wall of which you were not aware.
Most cultures seem to have different ideas of where and how boundaries are created to push away outsiders. The notoriously cold Germans are initially very cold, but once you're on the inside there is complete trust. Meanwhile, the flaky southern California "let's do lunch" thing is an endless series of weak onion-like translucent boundaries and you never can get to the core of things.
Japan is consistently very welcoming of visitors. It's a fantastic place to be a tourist - clean, safe, welcoming, and top-tier cheap transit in major cities. If you're a permanent resident though, you start grinding against the extremely strong culture of conformity, which you can never quite achieve simply due to biology.
I've lived here nearly a decade and never felt any kind of "visitors are fine but don't you try to think you can belong here" kind of vibe.
The only "you don't belong here" vibe is from the constant "microaggressions" from being a visible minority - people will see your face and assume you don't speak Japanese, can't use chopsticks, etc etc, but those don't come from malice but rather ignorance. Once I open my mouth and speak Japanese all that mostly goes away.
I'm married to a local, have plenty of friends who are married and own property or businesses, no problems of any sort. Get along well with neighbors, business partners, hobby circles.
The biggest barrier will be work and business culture, where Japanese will have strict requirements on cultural integration (can't be rude to a client or make them lose faith in your company) and have higher requirements on dedication to work (over health and family) than westerners and that's where I've seen all the friction.
edit: I want to clarify that this is the experience of a white westerner. I hear things are very different for people from other parts of Asia (SE Asia/China)
Riding the bullet train from Kyoto to Osaka, accidentally left my iPhone in the seatback pocket. Didn't realize it until way later, but was able to use find my phone to see that it was still powered on and had made its way all the way to the end of the line. Went to the local train station's lost and found, they called the other station where the phone had been turned in. They shipped it to where we were staying. I can't imagine ever getting my iphone back like that in the US.
I lost some clothes, sneakers in a duffel bag on my first ride with LIRR from NY Penn. Nothing valuable, but certainly essential. Was told off by the on-duty person to either show them a picture of the bag & items or get new ones lol.
Fwiw I live in Barcelona, pickpocket capital of Europe due to misguided laws, and I always turn in lost property to the authorities. Over time I've turned in at least 10 ID cards, phones and a bunch of bags. It does happen :)
Of course I'd return a wallet as-is as well without dipping in the cash (though I would count it and register the amount on the form when submitting it to the authorities to avoid any 'mislaying') but I've never found one with any in it. Most of the 'lost property' I find here is just discarded by the pickpockets.
Also, when there's identifiable information in the wallet I would contact the person on Facebook or LinkedIn if possible.
PS the misguided part is that pickpockets get only a fine for thefts below 400€. Even if it's the 5000th time.
I had a similar thing happen to me in Belize. I left a bag with my $2k DSLR on a park bench and didn’t realize it until hours later. I went back and talked to a couple of the groundskeepers, someone had turned it in and they had it waiting for me, nothing missing.
As someone who lived in Japan, most everyone is extremely friendly to your face, especially if you are a tourist and demonstrate some ability to speak Japanese or know about the culture. Out right rudeness is extremely rare, especially in the Kantou region.
But when you live there you learn about the underlying racism.
If you could pass as Japanese, because you are of east Asian descent, you will be fully expected to be completely fluent in the language and culture. If you aren't then you must be extremely dumb, because you are Asian after all. Any insight you might have coming from a western country is disregarded, because why would you know anything the collective society doesn't already know. When I was switching from teaching English to a tech job, I recommended a childhood friend I grew up with in America to take over my position. He was making far less teaching at a much worse eikaiwa school. In Japan, you include a picture with your resume, and when my boss saw that he was Filipino American, he outright said they would prefer someone who looks American and went with a previous coworker I had told him was awful.
If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.
But when it rears its ugly head the worse is when you try to do anything real in the country a tourists wouldn't normally do. Lots of people in Tokyo bike to various places, but when I studied there we were warned to either buy a bicycle and make sure its registered or just never ride. Borrowing a friends bicycle was outright forbidden. At some point you will be stopped by the police and if you can't prove you own the bike or have permission to ride it, you will be taken in until they figure out the owner. The few students who did get bikes were stopped atleast once every couple weeks.
Depending on perspective the racism can be considered light atleast. Black and brown friends usually would say the annoyances were atleast obvious and evenly applied. The racist landlord will tell you up front that hes going to increase the monthly rent on the apartment you're trying to rent because he "had problems with foreigners" before and you don't have a song and dance with a racist person that really doesn't want to rent to you finding constant issues with your application until you give up. You can quickly scout around to find someone who agrees not to do that or atleast less so. Certain banks will outright deny certain services to foreigners, but if you know the right banks you can get a credit card. The police will bother you, but if you have your gaijin papers they aren't going to beat you or make up charges. For white friends it was usually extremely shocking that such things existed at all and usually were the most vocal about the societal racism they were experiencing for the first time in their lives. But I think it made them more sympathetic generally to people from their home countries.
Despite all of that, I loved my years in Japan. A lot of the smaller annoyances usually go away once you actually get to know people and explain the issues you're having. One girlfriend even took it on herself to explain to new friends how condescending it was to say I can use chopsticks so well after living in the country for multiple years. Often times its ignorance not malice and people understand. But there are definitely issues you will have if you're a foreigner and you move to Japan.
> If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.
Americans find a lot of things like this incomprehensible and annoying, but if you're British you'll be right at home. Japanese people are just Asian English people.
(This also explains why they're train otakus, the way other countries only like their nerdier TV shows, and the occasional colonization.)
It's not the civilized world, but here in the south you'll wake up with a racoon in your pocket making off with your Dentyne Ice and a flock of mosquitos airlifting a liter of O-positive.
I don't usually actually laugh at HN comments, but when I read "audited" in this context, I did. I don't know why, but this kind of tongue-in-cheek use of a more "sophisticated" word to refer to something mundane like robbery is my kind of humor.
It's on my list of places to go. For now, all I have is PaoloFromTokyo, which is family friendly so there isn't much nightlife content. I had no idea there was this level of public good will.
that was one of the things that surprised me on an early saturday bike ride, also in regards to street crime in japan, at least in my experience it is so exceedingly rare that most people there are incredibly naive to it.
You don't have to fear getting mugged in the streets, but you can still get ripped off.
One example are the notoriously expensive bars in Roppongi, at night there will be touts in the streets trying to convince tourists to join them for a night of drinking. They'll then go to the bar that hired those touts where, after a night of drinking, the tourists will be presented with a bill that's the equivalent of getting robbed.
The line for "acceptable robbery" was "no physical violence" + "someone consensually gives me their money."
Which is still possible (and easily doable if that mark is drunk), but is substantially different from American (and European?) style physical robbery.
Just curious, how much are we talking here? Sometimes out here the bar tab can get up to 300-400 for 2, especially if you order bottle service, since the law states they can only sell per drink and not full bottles.
Thousands (USD) for a drink or two, tens of thousands for a bottle or two. It's a very well known scam in some parts of Tokyo, and similar forms exist in many parts of the world.
Long and short, don't let someone on the street talk you into going into a bar or tea shop or whatever, and especially don't follow them to a second location.
In that case, you might also be interested in Tokyo Lens, TAKASHii from Japan, That Japanese Man Yuta and Let's ask Shogo, all on YouTube. Dogen is also highly recommended.
For whatever reason we were in Ginza on a Tuesday at like 2pm, and already two salarymen were carrying their boss who was clearly incapable of walking back to the office
Oh yes, drunk businessmen sleeping around JR stations because they did not make it for the train to come home for the night are treated as holy cows in India. Full respect, including Police.
For all of the "freedom" we have as Americans, there are many areas much of the rest of the western world does things better. Not getting political, but just factually... check out gun violence statistics next.
Gun violence stats in the U.S. have little to do with easy legal access to guns itself. Other factors, especially demographic ones, influence. Note that many states with very light gun laws have little gun homicide, other states with strict gun laws have high gun homicide rates and sometimes it's completely vice versa. Furthermore, if you look at the FBI's uniform crime statistics, the picture gets a bit clearer still, showing that the vast majority of gun crime happens in very specific areas of certain cities and particularly occurs among the African American community. I'm simply stating the numbers as they appear here, not making any judgments on any ethnic group per se.
People love to point at the U.S and its gun crimes as a direct result of the country's gun laws in particular, but overall, when certain very specific factors, population areas and very specific geographic regions are excluded, much of the country where guns of all kinds are easily available is barely more violent than your typical Western European country. The school shootings that people refer to are awful things, but statistically, they don't move any needle so much as an iota. They do however get enormous amounts of media attention. Other countries with very strict gun laws also have mass shootings and mass killings, both with guns and without guns, but again, less media focus because it doesn't fit certain narratives about the U.S being violent as hell because of gun posession.
I don't know. That would depend on whatever number is necessary for it to register in a statistically significant way.
Tongue in cheek aside, it's incredibly stupid to make sweeping, broad, categorical judgments of certain things because of isolated, exceedingly rare incidents. It's even dumber to make broad, sweeping laws around emotional reactions such as yours to such events.
Every school shooting is a grotesque tragedy, but means of fighting them exist that don't require gun ownership to be banned for the millions of people who not only peacefully use guns but also in some cases need them for an assortment of reasons. "What about the children?" has rarely been a good or honest argument for anything, particularly for badly considered laws pushed forth by bouts of moral indignation and self-righteousness.
You can argue all you like, but American kids have been dying in much larger numbers than they should, in a way that happens only in America, and not a thing has been done about it. Saying it's not an issue because it doesn't kill a significant percentage of kids is monstrous.
Even among rabid USA fans like me, American prestige is currently falling like a brick.
I happen to live in a country where civilian ownership of guns is strictly controlled and mostly forbidden. Despite this, in this country, many kids die because of gun violence, more than in the U.S in both absolute numbers and proportionally. "In a way that happens only in America" is simply misleading and shows how the media narrative I mentioned in my original comment influences your thinking.. All things have tradeoffs, even those that can sometimes be tragic. You're basing extremely broad generalizations on emotional reactions to what really are isolated tragedies.
A cursory google pulled this wikipedia article up (linked below), and it makes it seem like mass knifings are generally rare and generally less destructive compared to north american shootings.
Do you have an article or graph (per capita or absolute) of deaths comparing the two countries you could point to for more info?
I'm told that in northern Europe you could leave your laptops or whatever in semi-public places (like, cafès I suppose), and if you come back after a few hours it would still be there.
From Sweden, Stockholm, can say a solid NO. my coworker lost his backpack (wallet, iPad and Mac) in the university computer room (card key required to get in) by just leaving it for 5min under summer HPC course. When we managed to track the mac down (through cloud & GPS) it was 40km away, moving in a car.
You can usually ask someone to keep an eye out while you go to the restroom/refill coffee and most people are happy to help, but you need your due diligence
I lived in Sweden for a little bit, traveling around and into Norway and I can confirm this, at least partly.
Where it is not true is in large cities. Small cities and rural areas are one of the safest places on Earth as long as you don't get nibbled by a moose or overrun by ants.
For hours? No way. I wouldn't do that, even if I sometimes leave stuff for a few minutes if I'm in a cafeteria I know well, plus etc. etc. But not for hours. At best your stuff would be taken care of by e.g. the cafeteria personnel, if not then with that much time the statistics won't be in your favour.
Having lived in Norway and Finland, I’d say it would be very likely that you would get your items back. And if there would be contact details, someone would have most likely tried to call you before the few hours would be up. Would more or less the same in actual public spaces as well.
Sex of what, the unattended item that is about to get stolen? Or thieves can typically tell the item owner's sex by just looking at the item they were thinking about stealing?
I can't fathom this. I cannot imagine a world in which passed out drunk guy doesn't get audited in his sleep.