LogFAQs > #887417545

chaosbowser posted...

Yeah but japan in many ways shafts itself with its cultural views. You can see the way their views plague their society from high suicide rates, hikikomori, deflation, and even their businesses suffer from their particular cultural values.

That's one way of looking at it. The flipside of that, however, is that Japan has extremely low crime rates, particularly violent crime (in some cases you are literally over 1,000,000 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime - depending on the crime in question - in America compared to Japan), has an extremely advanced economy (3rd largest in the world, despite having the 11th highest population), and enjoys the longest life expectancy in the world.

Every culture has their virtues and vices - culture goes a long way to determining what your society is good at and where it fails. If you asked the Japanese about Western values, they would probably comment negatively on rudeness/a lack of respect, rampant violent crime, significant inequality, and a generally selfish nature.

I don't agree that one is necessarily better than the other (though in individual areas, that can absolutely be argued to be the case); they are simply different.
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