Japan, you are hell fuckin' sloppy.

The BBQ Pit
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Westerners come to wrong conclusions about Japan because of incorrect associations: politeless and social discipline goes with cleanliness and neatness.

Yes, the Japanese are polite, and society is orderly. Crime is low. Traffic flows in a reasonably sensible manner. But how many people who have never been here (or who have but have never stepped outside Ginza) have the following images of Japan?

Clean, neat home. The hostess is seiza-ing on the tatamiin front of the tokonoma (which contains a single elegant scroll), pouring a cup for you of frothy maccha. Grandma plays the shamisen in the corner. Ah, the tea ceremony–the true essence of Japanese culture!

Busy but neat, organized office. The desks are spotless–a single speck and a samurai comes to chop off your head. Opening random drawers reveals an advanced and disciplined system of item-placement and filing completely unknown in the primitive West. E-mail inboxes are nearly empty. Oh, the regimented Japanese corporation–source of limitless productivity!

Now let’s take a look at the realities:

House
In the city, cramped shitty construction. Cartoonish and gauche appearance for the exterior. Perhaps this can’t be helped. But inside, chaos reigns. Cheap furniture illy arranged–where is the high living and ample Japanese lifestyle so oft spoken of? No concept of neatness and storage exists. Daikon and cabbages lie on the floor–hell, they won’t rot before we use them. Bright cheap curtains. Vulgar kitsch serves as decoration–crap from Hawaii and countless omiyage from around the world (can’t toss it out–friends and family have given it too us). Chests block sliding doors. Windows are similarly violated. Opening closets and drawers reveals chaos.

If it’s an old person’s house, one is lucky to get basic clenliness. Dinge and soot reign. The wallpaper has not been changed in 25 years. Junk is scattered everywhere, and there are rooms now filled completely with crap, unusable. Bicycle rims and rotten wooden planks fill the “garden.”

Office
Imagine the sloppiest desk in the US–papers piled and scattered, unneeded items, well, piled and scattered–and multiply by 50. The e-mail account is overdrawn. Opening drawers reveals chaos.

The above are NOT exaggerations. Some of the house stuff is based on my own dwelling (the in-laws), which, praise Jezus we are about the vacate. But I have not even told half here. I have also been in many, many Japanese homes and offices in my 8 years here, and above are the average, not worst cases.

Put simply, the concept of neatness, elegance, and refinement just don’t exist here. People with substantial incomes and who should know better live like swine. This doesn’t even touch upon the cramped and asinine housing designs one finds here.

This country is fuckin’ sloppy, and the oldies seem to be doing their best to flush it. We went house hunting, and everywhere you go you see oldies happily living in conditions that, in the US, would unambiguously qualify as slum living–in “nice” parts of Tokyo and Yokohama, too.

Japan, really–it’s time to grow up. For all your big economy and semi-ancient culture, you sure do live like a two-year-old: sloppy, ignorant, unsophisticated, and not giving a damn, either.

But the food is good. That’s the saving grace, I guess.

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[Chandler Bing]I knew it![/Chandler Bing]

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Who pissed in your wonton soup?

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It’s miso soup here, bub.

And it really is as bad here as I say.

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I’m not really crazy about many of the newly constructed homes I’ve seen in my area. There are buildings and homes constructed of what seems to be bathroom tile, and injection molded plastic bricks and clapboard. Don’t get me started on window and door frames. They look like they’re made of Lego doors and windows.

IMO, this is caused by the lack of competition in the construction sector and little or no resale of homes. There is also not much by way of consumer protection and it is difficult to sue a crappy contractor. Hence the junky construction.

I still don’t understand the bad use of space and horrible interior layouts.

In my experience, while many homes are crowded, they are not filthy or unsanitary. I agree with you on the bad design/construction/cramped quarters, but I must protest your comments about filth. Just about every Japanese person I know is a cleanliness nut.

I won’t say it doesn’t exist at all, but it is hard to find. You kind of need selective vision to see it. Wabi sabi my ass.

I think your experiences more accurately reflect the conditions in midst of a big city (Tokyo, Osaka). Things are a lot nicer out here in inaka. The new houses are rather large (if badly laid out), and there are still not a few nice old homes remaining. Just about everyone in my town has a lovely bit of garden or potted plants around their exterior. When I stayed in Okazaki, near Nagoya, a town of maybe a half a million, things weren’t so bad - largish homes, parks, ponds, grape arbors even. Parts of Kanazawa, near the historical districts, are also very nice.

I kind of like the place where I live - in between the homes, there are small rice paddies, about the size of a plot in a suburban area in the States. It’s rather picturesque.

Oh come on. I think your rant about the horrid construction practices is warranted, but your last statement just goes too far.

And haven’t you been watching Reform Before and After, the home remodeling show? Those guys do a great job, although many of the “after” homes look like a Japanified Pottery Barn.

Having addressed your rant, I will add a few things of my own. You didn’t mention the concrete-lined rivers and sea shores. This is a freaking travesty. In the far north of my prefecture, there are a few small rivers which have not been lined by concrete, but other than that, I have yet to see a river which hasn’t been concreted.

Let’s not forget the concreted mountain sides, either. It breaks the heart. Or the bridges and highways to nowhere.

But rather than reflecting the Japanese peoples’ lack of sophistication or whatever, the above practices reflect a bureaucracy gone out of control, with no one accountable for anything. Greedy politicians and bureaucrats lining their, and their benefactor’s, pockets. It’s a fucking ugly tragedy.

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As someone who’s lived in Asia for nearly twenty years and 2.5 years of that in Tokyo, I’d say it sounds like maybe you could use a break…Trust me, when I finished my 2.5 years in Tokyo I was more than ready to go.

As far as cleanliness, think back to your single days when you’d wake up after a rough night out, and discovered that Miss Right now from the previous night had not only left already, but tidied the place up as well. Not an unusual occurance.

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Well described. The scary thing to me is that things seem to be getting worse. If you look at houses that were built 20 years ago (and intended to be decent dwellings), they are blocky and rather unspecial, but they aren’t cheap and hideous. Now they are.

I certainly don’t have the facts myself, but this is the kind of thing you hear. The construction industry is infamous.

As for resale of homes, yes, it’s a problem. You have these oldsters sitting on $5M chunks of land in the middle of the city. Even after the taxes, they are going to be rich. But no, no–market mechanisms are not for them. They’ll blithely continue to live in their dump.

Yeah. They put kitchens in new homes here that would not satisfy most people living in poverty in the US. Hey, no oven for me! Yeah, two cabinets are enough. It’s amazing.

Wha’? Well, our house here for one is just fuckin’ dirty. I think my m-i-l cleans the toilet about once a month. But more than unsanitary filth is the dinge that is tolerated–burnt-yellow wallpaper in the apartments of smokers, rusty fixtures, etc. And there are levels of sloppiness and uncleanliness that border on dangerous. When we went house-hunting, we saw some pretty scary used-home interiors.

Succintly put.

Oh, my f-i-l maintains potted plants and ueki all around the house–it’s an aboslute disaster bordering on insanity. No sense of order or attractiveness.

But yes, the inaka is better. Marginally more tolerable. Houses can be genuinely gigantic out there. Overall, more civilized. But when I was working at Ehime Daigaku (long story), you should have seen the conditions the doctors worked in. See comments on “office” above and subtract heavily therefrom. Let’s put it this way: the narrow hallway was a kind of outdated medical library in spots.

Oh, did we start talking about Japanese hospitals? Talk about avoidable dinge and unnecessary scariness.

No, I’ll say it again: Japan is a 2-year-old content to be a child. It has a lot of potential to clean up its problems–just not the will. Surely you saw footage of Koizumi amoung the others at the summit recently. A child among the adults, making stupid, barely intelligible remarks in various languages. That’s Japan.

Basically just the news for me. I don’t want to go insane.

Good one. It’s comes from not fucking knowing what you don’t know. Oh, you’re not totally supposed to destroy the environment? Oh, wow, that’s news.

Yes, this is yet another problem. This country is circling the bowl, and it’s a fucking shame.

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2.5 years, wow, I usually reach that point in 5 days. A week, tops.

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This Saturday will mark nine years for me, but then I’ve always had a bit of a siege mentality.

I think I gave up on trying to fix the country after about 2.5 years. Now I’m just intent on carving out my own personal patch and defending it to the death against all comers. It tends to baffle my wife and mil at times, but they’re used to me by now.

I think once we move into our new house and I get permanent residency, I may take up a new hobby as a public nuisance: pestering local officials, putting up posters criticizing various politicians, maybe even running for neighborhood office now and then. Start getting things cleaned up around here.

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For any Westerner here, it eventually gets to be this way. For years I avoided the “NO!” in my heart for this country: I got lucky and had a good (but horrendously low-paying) job at a small, old-fashioned company with some good dudes. I used to think, “What’s all the fuss about Japan being so shitty?” But now I’ve done the big-company thing twice, and I am so fucking disillusioned I’m almost sick. The way this country (and 80% of the entities in it, like companies) sees itself and spins itself is so fucking far from reality that I just shake my head in awe at the self-delusion.

I’ve also seen this country just fail since 1992, the first year I came here, dropping the ball time and time again and losing some of the softness and charm it used to have. Now, every year we hear that the economy is coming back!–when what, GDP growth is 0.00001% or something. Hey, it’s not negative! And all the pissing and moaning about kaikaku when Koizumi is a dunce who probably can’t change his own underwear (I’m saying he’s the worst, though, noooo).

Won’t happen, can’t happen. About all you can do is pick up litter on the streets. It’s cluelessness, passiveness, and every other flaw of this culture in a soup festering in a 15-year-old rusty pot. I see no hope.

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So, Jovan, we’ve mildly disagreed before on Japan-related issues. Anything you’d take issue with in the post?

I always respect your opinion.

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Oh man, I hear that one! I haven’t felt that housing or offices were all that bad, but I had to go to the eye clinic a few months ago and it was chilling. It was like something from before the war. (Possibly the Crimean War.) At one end of the concrete bunker there was, I swear, a pot of boiling water on a Bunsen burner that nurses were using to sterilize things.

I had my fill of that pretty quick, and after a minor breakdown at the office managed to convince management to find someone else for me. The second clinic I visited was drab and poorly laid-out but did seem to be a part of this century. Or the 1990s, at least.

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Everything Aeschines said about Japan is true, but it’s not the only truth. Sure, Japan has shitty construction, but, hey, welcome to East Asia. OTOH, Tokyo has kickin’ night life, a great club scene, and is head and shoulders above other cities like Beijing, Taipei, or Seoul. If you think Japan is bad, take everything Aeschines said, square it, and you’ve described South Korea. Hell, my school was just a few blocks from the Sampoong Department Store which collapsed in June 1995 because the Seocho-gu building inspectors took bribes to overlook shortcuts in construction. Nearly 1,000 people died because the store mangers didn’t want to lose business by evacuating the store even after giant cracks had appeared in the basement ceiling.

South Korea is dominated by an incredibly grubby and corrupt political system , and the air in Seoul will smear your lungs with soot if you live there long enough. Not to mention that the concept of forming a queue is utterly unknown, so that you have to push and shove to get anywhere in that city. Tokyo or Osaka are restful, peaceful oases after living in South Korea.

Here’s a joke for the Asia hands:

Three diplomats are having dinner together at a restaurant after a meeting: a Japanese, a North Korean, and a South Korean. The waiter comes to take their orders, and says, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but we have no more beef today.”

The North Korean guy asks, ‘What’s "beef?’"

The Japanese guy says, “What’s ‘no more?’”

And the South Korean asks, “What’s ‘excuse me?’”

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Shikata ga nai

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But seriously, I’m not going to say you’re all that wrong… but I’ve found that thinking about it while knowing that there is absolutely nothing that you can do to change it is depressing enough that I avoid doing so at all costs.

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I meant that.

I have a sneaking suspicion you’d feel the same way about much of Western Europe, though- particularly the hospitals.

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My images of Japan are based on my time spent with Universal Studios in Japan. The desks or far more organised than mine and the city was neat and clean.

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It must be genetic. I’ve only spent a few months of my life in Japan and I’m horribly messy at home and work :smiley:

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Er…did you think about how much of a stereotype you were going to look like before you posted this? Some Westerner takes a foreign bride and then rants colonialist-style about her savage, savage homeland. Just saying, is all…

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Huh? The OP lives in Japan and is critiquing the place, backed up, you’ll notice by other posters who have spent time there or who currently live there. He’s not calling Japan “savage,” just commenting on the poor urban design and the slovenliness of the Japanese.

Heh, Japan’s a picnic compared to the rest of East Asia.