I lived in Japan for just over a year and worked in an office. Japan is a great place to live but it can be a bad place to work. The issues of long hours, rigid hierarchical structures, work-related stress and the effects on family relationships are very real. But if you are not Japanese (and therefore not subject to the same expectations as Japanese people) living in Japan is absolutely the best of both worlds.
It looks like you have edged me out. I first stepped onto Japanese soil 40 years ago, this month, lived there for a total of 24 years and have been involved in things Japanese for pretty much all of my adult life.
I really can’t see how questions like this can be answered. Surveys designed by introverts are going to rank potential social situations much differently than ones designed by extroverts, for example. Many Japanese are not going to be looking at the same criterial for a quality of life than many Western people.
For me, Japan is not terrible or wonderful. It’s a place with things I like and don’t like, just like anywhere else.
I was involved in sales for much of my career, with clients that were name brands as well as mom and pop outfits as well. Some people are happy, some are not. I know Japanese who went to America and never looked back and others who turned around and when home because they liked it better.
Even the insane working hours that some Japanese do, not all of them hate it. My Japanese exwife’s sister was married to a guy who regularly worked past midnight but he was ok with it. I got the impression that it was the toughness of the work that bonded him with his colleagues. Not my cup of tea, but I’m not him. He was really a cool guy and we had a great time on many weekends.
This is one of the most absurd and uninformed statements I’ve read abut Japan in 40 years and I’ve read a lot.
There does seem to be something fascinating about Japan to many people, and more uninformed opinions than informed ones.
Japan is an insular society, and I haven’t met many people who can really understand it without speaking the language. I know people who have lived there for years but only had a shallow grasp of the culture.
Care to tell me what about this raises it to such a lofty level of misinformation? Because I seriously fail to see it.
When purchasing a use bicycle you will have to visit your local police koban with your bicycle and fill out an identical form as you would had you purchased your bicycle new from a bike store and you’ll have to pay the same registration fee. But as this is a used bicycle the beaurocratic fun doesn’t stop there. Both you and the previous owner of the bicycle will have to fill out an additional form confirming the transfer of ownership.
Transfer of ownership sounds complicated and time consuming, but it isn’t. When you go to purchase your second hand bicycle print out this change of ownership form and take it with you, once you’ve completed the deal, get the former owner to fill out their portion of the form. If you purchase a used bicycle in Japan and do not get the owner to fill out this form then it is unlikely that you will be able to transfer ownership into your name.
If you have suspicions that the person selling you a second hand bicycle is not the registered owner you should not purchase the bicycle. If you try to transfer ownership of a bicycle using a form with fake seller information the bicycle will be confiscated and returned to its rightful owner, and you may even be charged with stealing the bicycle even if you protest that you bought it second hand from someone who claimed to be the owner.
And from an official Japanese source:
I’ve only ever been to Japan twice, but it seems like a swell place to live - as long as you didn’t have to work there.
So if you could somehow retire there in the prime of your life with enough money and also spoke the language, you’d be all set.
But one thing I did not like was the …pessimism or negative vibe of the place. Japanese people seem to resign themselves too easily to bad situations.
I quoted two sentences. One of those is an easily googled fact. This other is a silly, unsupported supposition. I’ll leave it an an exercise to the reader to decide which is which.
This is the correct answer. I would add a couple of caveats though:
- As far as the work situation goes, I hated it, and I think most people do as well.
- The racism is pretty annoying especially on the west/northwest coast (once you learn to see it)
- Tokyo sucks like most big cities suck - crowded, expensive, but at least it’s clean and safe. Nice place to visit, etc.
- Other than that, I found everything pretty great. Japan is a very easy and pleasant place to live. Get yourself situated in a second-tier metro, and life is pretty good.
Some is correct. One has to be careful not to extrapolate from one harried class of office workers to all of society. The Japanese on average work fewer hours/year than workers in the USA.
someone told me a while back that the trend in japan among young people is to go to school there find a job then when around the time you get married and have kids you transfer to either the u.s and Canada or maybe the UK until the kids are raised and then move back to Japan to work until you retire
Maybe but I think you still know more about Japan than I do. I’m not much of a history or war buff. I’m here mostly for the (past) job prospects, then the wife and now the kid. But things are stagnating a bit here and might be time to move on. I’m over 50 now though so people aren’t tripping over themselves to hire me overseas.
Nope. People don’t usually have the chance to decide when and where or even if they are transferred overseas. Also it would be cruel to raise kids overseas then take them back to Japan to live. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but it usually doesn’t work out well for the kids.
You have two contrasting situations: one in which bicycles are a random object without standard identifiers and a system to connect them to proper owners, and one where bicycles have an official government database and bureaucracy in place to identify bicycles to owners and police who can and do check ownership of bicycles. One of those two systems is going to make casual theft less likely and useful. I’m honestly baffled by the lashing-out harsness of your response to that idea. You may disagree that such a system acts as a theft deterrent as it was designed to do, but to describe that concept as one of the worst pieces of misinformation you have heard in more than 40 years seems more than a little hyperbolic to me.
You’re missing the forest for the trees here. The overarching point is that Japan has strong cultural norms of selflessness and respect of property. I mean, do bicycle registration laws help? Perhaps, though many US states also have this policy with no perceptible impact on theft rates.
But how do we explain the fact that if you lose a wallet full of money in Japan, you’ll most likely get it back with all the cash intact, or that farmers often sell vegetables in honor-system stands with unattended cash boxes? Yes, you’ll find there are laws that support this behavior as well, but since that cash isn’t a licensed and registered commodity like a bicycle, a reasonable person would logically conclude that there are greater forces at work.
To repeat, I’ve no interest in debating how bicycle registration works. I’m merely saying that by drilling in on this hijack, you’re missing an opportunity to learn something about a country you’ve never lived in, by people who actually have lived there for extended periods of time.
Even better than that, I’ve routinely seen people in restaurants and coffee shops in Japan leave things like purses, wallets, cell phones unattended while they visit the bathroom, condiment bar, or service counter, fully expecting that their property will still be sitting there when they return to their table.
And if you do find a wallet in Japan, it WILL have cash in it. One of the great mysteries to me about Japan is how such a technologically advanced society still conducts so many of its transactions in cash.
I agree that Japan is great and probably the safest country I have ever visited and worked at. The people are polite and law abiding, they don’t litter and children can go just about everywhere unescorted from my observation. The society as a whole functions well and adheres to a values system.
The work ethic seems a bit strange compared to American workplaces. The thing that raised my fellow Americans eyebrows was how they did lunch, as soon as the lunch notice sounded the lights were turned off and just about everyone put there heads on there desk and took a quick map. Near the end of lunch they hurried down to the cafeteria and quickly ate and promptly went back to work (or at least it seemed to us). We Americans went straight to the cafeteria and then took a walk outside during lunch and enjoyed the beautiful campus and only encountered one single Japanese guy!
We found out from this guy that it is common for workers to nap at work and on the train to and from work in order to have more “at home awake” time. This was at a major Japanese car company just outside Tokyo so maybe smaller businesses operate differently.
And Japan is lovely, there parks are all well maintained and organized. I seriously doubt that you will find a park in Japan that is over run with drug users like you see here in the states.
And I have never claimed otherwise. All I was doing was pointing out the regulation as a factor. It was never meant as an attack on Japan. Although I will point out that rules are rarely made when there aren’t needs for those rules—you don’t get bureaucratic infrastructures to minimize bike theft unless there is bike theft that you are trying to minimize.
Here’s one more article from the site of a bike rider who has lived in Japan for an extended period of time:
So what exactly does that contribute to the discussion? If you are proposing that bicycle theft contributes to making Japan an undesirable place to live (the latter part of which is, after all, the topic of this thread), I think such a thesis is pretty silly.
FWIW, bicycle registration was required when I was a kid and it did nothing to deter theft; it just made it easier to locate the owner when the thief eventually abandoned it.
If you walk outside a Japanese office building and see 500 nearly identical bicycles parked in a row (or more likely in a heap), then you will understand the exact nature of the problem they are addressing. Not that Japanese people are a bunch of thieves, but that it’s easy to lose your stuff and cause the police a bunch of headaches with misunderstandings.