LogFAQs > #887500503

darkknight109 posted...

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.

I would snort at the significant inequality. Japanese culture has overt racism and gender values reminiscent of 1950s america.

While their values did get them to where they are now somehow. Its currently plaguing them. Their economy and population is shrinking. Japanese men aren't defaulting to waifus because they have such a great culture. At the very least Americans have the decency to acknowledge our rampant violent crime needs to be addressed in some way while the Japanese still attempt to give themselves a masturbatory pat on the back about how great their shit parents are.
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