After China, Seoul taxi drivers would seem positively boring. 
It’s a thread for venting. Like any thread on venting, which is stupider: commenting in it or commenting on commenting in it?
It’s annoying when people perpetrate stupidity, in a thread of fighting myths, on a board which claims to be fighting ignorance.
The first blatant myth I called out is that. A blatant myth, passed along as great knowledge.
To give credit for the second myth, the poster quoted Snopes, which one would hope would be a little more careful, but that web site also seems to infected with the same “Japan is soooo weird” disease.
As far as East Asian drivers are concerned, you’ve got to be pretty damn good to drive in Tokyo with the narrow, crowded streets. With great public transportation, it’s not really necessary. Go out two hours to smaller towns without the same infrastructure, and you get a higher percent of people driving, but they don’t have to have really the same skill.
When I was working campus security while doing to school, the university police would contribute to the confirmation bias with their jokes of DWO, Driving While Oriental. Yup, you get people who haven’t driven before in their lives, dump them into Salt Lake where you need a car. Those from China are stupid Asian drivers. Those from New York are just bad drivers. Unless they are Asian Americans, and then they are stupid Asian drivers.
'kay; point taken. For the record, I honestly wasn’t trying to imply anyone is stupid for commenting. It’s just something I don’t “get” and apparently took the wrong opportunity to get clarification. Perhaps I’ll start a new thread, but in the mean time ,thanks for responding and apologies for the hijack.
That’s actually the opposite phenomenon. Florida *imports *the weird, mostly from the rest of the country, but also the world.
Well… I saw what was purported to be used schoolgirl panties for sale in a Wakayama porn shop a couple times about 10 years ago. Might have been fake, of course.
But, at least for me, the annoyance isn’t people saying that there’s weird shit in Japan. Because there certainly are creepy subcultures here. What annoys the hell out of me is that people (and foreign media) love to assume that that weird shit is considered normal by Japanese or that your average Japanese don’t consider those otaku to be creepy losers.
It’s like assuming that all Americans are into furries.
It wouldn’t surprise me if someone were still selling used panties somewhere in Japan, but it would surprise me if someone were loading up vending machines with the evidence. Once Japan, Inc. decided that the sale of the items was a no-no, leaving that much of a physical trail would be pretty silly. If they were still being sold, I’m imagine it would be more like other illegal items are handled, under the table and out of sight.
As you say, there seems to be more of a thought that all the weird stuff is normal here. I remember when I first heard about the used panty market. It was back in the early 90s, and one Japanese guy was joking about it. I didn’t know the word he was using, so someone had to explain it, and they described it like a typical American would for someone else’s kink.
It’s not just people who have never been to Japan who are guilty of bad stereotypes. Some of the worst are people who live here, mostly those who don’t speak the language that well, and then pass along really bazaar explanations for things.
The lack of critical thinking never ceases to amaze me.
my bolding. Grrrr. Don’t get me started on the foreign media. You can tell when it’s another slow news day by “And here is yet another way them Japanese are weird.”
It’s just as bad or even worse in places like Tokyo or Bangkok, where this is out in the open around red light districts and local comic/net cafes.
It hacks me when my own ethnicity, Italian-Americans, is characterized as entirely made up of New Yorkers - and stereotyped New Yorkers at that, with the arrogance, abrasiveness, avarice, abruptness, and assholicity the image entails.
Admittedly, Jews get this a lot more than we do, but I don’t think it bothers them as much, as many think of NY as a sort of modern Jewish homeland.