Japan, you are hell fuckin' sloppy.

[alice_in_wonderland]

[QUOTE=Aeschines]
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.

People with substantial incomes and who should know better live like swine. /QUOTE]

Well, I’ve seen pictures of my SIL’s downtown Osaka apartment. her 200 sq foot apartment. It is as you’ve described. Crap everywhere. Stuff falling out of drawers. Food interspirsed with clean and dirty laundry.

I’ve also seen her Canadian house. Her 2,600 sq foot house. Spotless. Impecably decorated. Every cupboard and drawer perfectly sorted.

I think space constraints have an awful lot to do with the mess you’re seeing.

[Miller]

@pizzabrat

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…

Wow. Coming from you, that takes a hell of a lot of chutzpah.

[RindaRinda]

@Really Not All That Bright

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

I’m just curious - the only part of Western Europe I’ve been to is Paris - are there buildings and houses with walls made of discolored and/or moldy concrete, draped with rusty metal railings? Are there huge ropy tangles of power lines everywhere? Are some houses there made of injected molded plastic brick walls? Are 50% of the buildings in the cities covered with mold streaks? Are the hill and mountainsides either covered with concrete walls or fake concrete stone? Are the riverbeds made of concrete?

[acrossthesea]

I was disappointed when I first got to Japan (where I lived for 2 years) by the dinginess of everything. I lived on an air force base in the middle of a city that is a suburb of Tokyo. The apartment building I lived in was tall enough to give me a great view of…extreme overcrowding and little dirty looking houses all crammed in and pointing in completely random directions! (Not set up in neat rows like I was used to.) Some of the people who lived in these little houses appeared to have bizarre habits, like collecting rainwater in old plastic bottles (pet bottles, though why they’re called that I never understood). Trash laying by the side of the road. I often wondered where that super-neat shiny clean Japan I read about in the books was.

Eventually I just figured that you have a country about the size of California, but with a giant population. No matter how hard you try, it’s got to be VERY difficult to manage under those conditions.

That still doesn’t make an excuse for the “bathrooms” on Mt. Fuji, though. Surely they could have done better than primitive-outhouse-that-opens-onto-the-side-of-the-mountain for their biggest tourist attraction. After all, they charge 100 yen to use them.

[RindaRinda]

@acrossthesea

…old plastic bottles (pet bottles, though why they’re called that I never understood).

They’re PET bottles. PET is polyethylene terephthalate, a kind of plastic that is relatively easy to recycle. It’s marked with a 1 with a circle around it in the U.S.

[Aeschines]

@RindaRinda

They’re PET bottles. PET is polyethylene terephthalate, a kind of plastic that is relatively easy to recycle. It’s marked with a 1 with a circle around it in the U.S.

Yes, and some of the OLD PEOPLE (hint, hint) here think that putting 50 of these things outside their houses prevents cats from pissing on the walls.

Cure worse than disease? Wellll, that’s LOGIC, not something very well known in this country.

BTW, I could do an OP on the things that Japan does better/nice than the US. I don’t hate this country, I pity it because it should know better than to do the things it does, and it has the money and productive capacity to live better.

South Korea sounds really bad, too.

[Aeschines]

@cckerberos

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.

You’re right about the macro–can’t change the country. But what about the micro: just getting my in-laws to live like civilized human beings. It SEEMS doable, but it just doesn’t happen.

BTW, one poster said that space constraints cause people to live like pigs. I agree that that’s part of the problem. But on 10% or so. Most people in Manhattan live in apartments comparable in size to what you find in Tokyo, but I have not seen the pig conditions I have seen here.

[jovan]

@Aeschines

BTW, I could do an OP on the things that Japan does better/nice than the US. I don’t hate this country, I pity it because it should know better than to do the things it does, and it has the money and productive capacity to live better.

I gotta ask you: why pit the whole country? Several of my friends and aquaintances (the majority as a matter of fact) live in perfectly clean and well decorated houses and flats. Why pit them also? Seriously, if I started a thread titled “America, you’re fuckin’ fat” I’d probably be on the receiving end of a well deserved pile-on.

Japan is not a sentient entity. It cannot know better.

[Aeschines]

Yeah, but Jovan–America is fuckin’ fat.

And that’s one of the things better about Japan than the US.

[colour_wolf]

Heh. Good rant. I have to agree with Gobear about East Asia in general too. You can take what he said about S. Korea, and apply it to Taiwan just as much if not more. I lived in Kaohsiung for more than 4 years. Everything is temporary. Apartments are left to rot. There is still the husk of a department store standing, that burned down more than 7 years ago. Buildings are started, and when the builders run out of money, the shell isn’t torn down. Sidewalks (where they exist at all) have huge holes placed at random intervals, apartments are a disgrace, workplaces are dimly lit, and the air is, if anything, worse than Korea.

That said, I loved it. Nothing better than shrimp fishing with the locals on a Saturday night…

[jovan]

@colour wolf

Apartments are left to rot. There is still the husk of a department store standing, that burned down more than 7 years ago. Buildings are started, and when the builders run out of money, the shell isn’t torn down. Sidewalks (where they exist at all) have huge holes placed at random intervals, apartments are a disgrace, workplaces are dimly lit, and the air is, if anything, worse than Korea.

Actually this is quite unlike Japan. While it’s true that a map more than 2 years old is less than useless, the public sphere is actually very clean. It’s just not arranged in a way that many westerners find aesthetically appealing. It took a very short time before all traces of the great Hanshin earthquake were erased, for instance.

[RindaRinda]

@colour wolf

That said, I loved it. Nothing better than shrimp fishing with the locals on a Saturday night…

Or eating freshly caught oysters fresh off the grill, right by the ocean. there’s a lot to love, despite the ogriness.

[colour_wolf]

@jovan

Actually this is quite unlike Japan. While it’s true that a map more than 2 years old is less than useless, the public sphere is actually very clean. It’s just not arranged in a way that many westerners find aesthetically appealing. It took a very short time before all traces of the great Hanshin earthquake were erased, for instance.

Oh, I completely agree. Japan is not nearly as dirty as Taiwan, no matter how you measure it.

[Sublight]

@Aeschines

Yeah, but Jovan–America is fuckin’ fat.

True, how many other countries are over 5000km across? You got Russia, Canada, and just maybe China. Compared to most other places, that’s a pretty tubby piece of real estate.

Anyway, maybe it’s some weird kind of schadenfreude at work, but I actually like the godawful architectural mess of Tokyo. There’s something kind of hideously beautiful about the endless sprawl that only gets better the deeper inside you go. I do wish they’d leave the rivers alone, though.

What really gets me is the way the politeness and the pervasive sho ga nai attitude combine to let bullies (personal, political and corporate) just run wild and walk all over everyone.

[DocCathode]

You people have really disappointed me. All these posters who have actually been to Japan, and none of them have posted the correct explanation.

Why bother building a nice house and keeping it neat, when Gojira, the Zentraedi, a Robeast, Zoanoids, or hordes of sex crazed tentacle beasts may show up at any time and destroy it?

“Ah, after many years my garden is finally perfect. Come, my family, let us enjoy its beauty.”

“Ha! Tobor, you will never defeat my newest giant robot!”

"Oh no! [sub]please don’t come this way. please don’t come this way. please don’t-[/sub]. . . . . . . . . . "

“Do not despair, my husband. At least we still have our beautiful house.”

“You’ve picked on the wrong girl! Honey Flash!”

“That’s it! I can’t take this.”

“Darling, perhaps you’d feel better after a good meal. Let us go to a restaurant.”

“Yes, a meal at my favorite restaurant sounds very good right now.”

“Umm, Father, wasn’t it levelled last week in the fight between the Iron Chefs’ Cuisine King MegaTasty FightingRobo and the Vinegar Destroyer of the Ota Faction?”

“I would have moved to another country long ago. But I can make no money since that day when Team Rocket stole my Pokemon.”

[user_hostile]

I remember watching an NBC magazine piece called, “Japan, The Story They Don’t Tell You.” It wasn’t at all flattering about the place. Later, I found a book with the title of “The Myths of Japanese Quality” written by a couple who lived there for about a four months. In both cases, I noticed that the image projected is far more important then substance with respect to Japanese culture. Could this be the thesis that everyone seems to be trying to express?

[friedo]

I would just like to point out that Junichiro Koizumi has the most spectacular hair I’ve ever seen on a man, and I want it.

[Kyla]

These stories about shoddy construction make me nervous. Don’t they have building codes meant to withstand earthquakes in Japan? It always breaks my heart when I hear about 6.5 earthquakes killing thousands of people in third world countries (for people not intimately familiar with earthquakes, a 6.5 is a pretty good shake, but not big enough to do a lot of damage if building codes are well planned and executed), but it’s expected in poorer countries. But Japan? They should know better, and they have the ability and money to build safe structures.

[Aeschines]

@Kyla

These stories about shoddy construction make me nervous. Don’t they have building codes meant to withstand earthquakes in Japan?

Yes, I think that houses and buildings are now made to withstand earthquakes.

The problem is more with appreance, layout, and overall quality: the shits.

BTW, some skyscrapers and commercial buildings are quite nice.

[cckerberos]

@Aeschines

The problem is more with appreance, layout, and overall quality: the shits.

What, you don’t like concrete?