Why Tokyo Works
Japan and Tokyo works because people &quot;make themselves small&quot;. Whether that is wearing your backpack on the front on the subway, wearing a mask, sharing communal spaces, or not shilling dogecoin.<p>Most foreigners grow contemptuous of Japan when vacation mode subsides and they have to abide the social contract and logistics which makes &quot;Tokyo Works&quot;. For example, waste disposal and recycling are complex (and I&#x27;ve worked in AdTech). Leasing an apartment involves 3-4x months of deposit, including a gift to the landlord as residual traces from Japan&#x27;s feudal system, a inch thick of paperwork, and signing half a dozen places that you are not a yakuza member. Getting cell phone service too is a process, and when you go signup, about half a dozen employees will loop in and out of the process. There&#x27;s also kinds of ceremony and bureauracy, and things that are hard to reconcile for foreigners who are used to &quot;freedom&quot; and pursuing ones desires. Personally, everything about Japan makes sense to me, and why I&#x27;m one of the survivors. I literally have nothing to complain about Japan, whereas the Reddit group r&#x2F;japanlife has the highest concentration of cynical and mopey people I&#x27;ve ever seen.<p>Most of the unhappy foreigners come to Japan&#x2F;Tokyo thinking it is like London or NYC, except with Anime and Manga. I urge you to reassess the day-to-day realities before committing to a foreign country. There are things which the Japanese expect everyone to do properly, and whether you think it&#x27;s inefficient&#x2F;dumb, it&#x27;s not up for negotiation or discussion. For example, if you enter the subway gate and realize you meant to take a different subway gate&#x2F;train, you can&#x27;t back out, and some station staff will give you a hard time and hold you hostage instead of giving you a solution. There&#x27;s a strict protocol, which Japanese people have been trained all their life to not err, and when (foreigners) make these mistakes, Japanese people are like deer in headlights. Or, you bought a drink of the vending machine, then the bus comes, and you run to catch the bus forgetting to discard the drink. This will be frowned upon, and if you&#x27;re a tourist, you&#x27;re probably oblivious to it, but you are creating stress for people around you.<p>Don&#x27;t come to Japan if the believe in the notion of systemic oppression. Japan is not politically progressive, and it is socially acceptable, sometimes even encouraged, to not be an independent thinker or question social norms&#x2F;tradition. This is a stark contrast to the SF&#x2F;HN culture, especially the &quot;hacker&quot; mentality is frowned on. Consider how Japan only has 44 billionaires, whereas Taiwan which has 1&#x2F;5th the population has 36.<p>White collar Americans are obsessed with Japanese high cultural exports like Omakase because the Japanese do things that don&#x27;t scale. They dedicate their life to one modest craft, and focus on the details. Meanwhile, the typical tech person have this sentiment to focus on the &quot;big picture&quot; and things that scale to millions, billions, even if that means moving fast and breaking things. That&#x27;s kind of not Japanese.
Americans have been taught to think about &quot;big picture&quot;, and maybe that&#x27;s why America produces many innovations and innovators, but the Japanese are about doing things right. Nowadays everyone is talking about Squid Games, which is a huge commercial success mostly to Netflix, but it was accused of plagiarizing the Japanese &quot;As the goods will&quot;. There are lots of cultish products that come out of Japan, because people aren&#x27;t thinking about how they can capture the value to be billion dollar idea, but just focusing on their craft ( as a<p>Study Japanese before you go. You&#x27;ll learn that there are three writing systems, one of which is used to pronounce English words, but the Japanese way. This is one of the many reasons the Japanese do not speak good English. Foreigners complain the Japanese don&#x27;t speak English, but that reaction is precisely why they will be unhappy in Japan. This is there country, and the Japanese are proud, and as far as they are concerned, English is foreign, and if you are in Japan, you have to pronounce it in the mora-timed Japanese tongue. Deal with it.<p>Foreigners complain about how it&#x27;s hard to make friends or be fully accepted, even after being in Japan for years and speaking good Japanese, but Japan was never keen on having foreigners here. It&#x27;s like people who invite themselves to a party. Westerners feel entitled to the idea that the world is an immigrant country like the United States, but Japan is not. Just observe the historically districts where they placed foreigners.<p>It&#x27;s hard to describe Japan. Japanese zen poems known as koens are seemingly contradictory or paradox. That&#x27;s how I would summarize Japan. For all this about being private and not voicing your opinion and making yourself small, the Japanese love Twitter more than anyone else. It&#x27;s a land of many paradoxes and contradictions, that is not meant to be logically resolved and reconciled. For example, the thing that are trending right now are having an American BBQ, having an American tent and camping in the park. Meanwhile, the stories and staff providing these services can&#x27;t speak English. It&#x27;s not sufficient to call this appropriation. Japanese people love having weddings in a church&#x2F;chapel. Other than that, it&#x27;s a pleasant &#x2F; awkward feeling to stumble a church by accident in Japan. Watch Silence by Martin Scorsese to learn some history.