Japan is fairly safe in certain ways - you’re not at risk of getting shot like in the US, sure.
But the police and justice system is very dysfunctional, with crime statistics being under reported, and many murder cases being tossed aside as “suicides” or “heart attacks”.
Even without taking this into account, crime rates in Japan are comparable to those of safe European countries.
And this is not even touching the HUGE pervasive problem that Japan has with sexual assault. If you’re a woman living in Tokyo, you most likely have been sexually assaulted in your life, likely more than once, and likely by a coworker or in public transportation.
Japan is great in certain ways, and still very backwards in many others. But it is not some magical country where there is magically no crime and people are the most honest in the world because of some mysterious Japan only gene. On many metrics, Japan is aligned with the most developed Western European countries (including the famously quoted “fertility rate”, which is actually the same as Austria or Germany). If anything, it is the US that is an anomaly in many ways (crime rate, financial inequality, drug use, etc).
There is a grain of truth to the statement though. I’m just leaving Tokyo to come back to the US. I was pretty amazed at many things. People leave their purses on the table as they go to restroom. They leave their bikes parked with no lock. I didn’t see anybody jay walk, even across narrow streets where the crosswalks were spaced several blocks apart. That is not to say there aren’t lots of problems along other dimensions of society. But coming from DC to Tokyo it reminds me a little bit about how I felt coming from South Asia to the US the first time.
Yes, there are absolutely cultural differences at play. I wouldn’t leave my laptop on a table in a coffee shop in NYC for even one second, whereas I’ve done it in Tokyo.
But with all that said, I have friends who’ve had shit stolen in Tokyo, or been assaulted by a drunk guy, etc.
So I stand by my original point - saying that Japanese people are “the most honest and courteous in the world” is naïveté at best, and exoticization at worst.
In which major European city could you leave your laptop or purse on a table while you use the bathroom?
Japan is incredibly different from Europe and America in thousands of important ways. The idea that it's even similar is absurd. There's very few comparisons you can even make, beyond the very superficial. Everything is different, from childbirth, children, school, dating, food, holidays, marriage, death, etc.
Your only frame of reference seems to be a 30 year old book (about culture, hah!) and a few discussions with friends...
I am not saying that food or dating in Japan is the same as Europe (although I am not sure how you think childbirth works, I can assure you that the core of the childbirth experience is quite the same across humanity).
What I am saying is that when you compare things that are actually comparable - graduation rates, unemployment, drug abuse, illiteracy, child vaccination, etc - Japan is in many cases more clustered with the leading European countries than the US is.
Furthermore, when it comes to things like sexual assault, Japan is far behind.
On this basis, it is completely ridiculous to claim that Japanese people are the “most courteous and honest in the world”, unless your definition of a honorable society includes one where most women get groped on the subway as teenagers.
The safety (and cleanliness and civility) in Tokyo is especially notable due to its size. Bern is nice, but it's less of a challenge to manage a 500k pop than 13 million. And while I'd consider London or Berlin very safe, they still have a murder rate 4 times or greater than Tokyo. So it isn't fair to call it exoticism, it is just real observation. And as you can attest, it is particularly striking when you go between someplace like San Francisco and Tokyo.
I'm not jumping on either side of the argument about if Japanese are the nicest or not, but there are certainly some major differences from "nicer" western countries, with some of them hidden behind courteous outward appearances. In addition to common problem of assaults on women there is the whole child porn thing in Japan which strikes me as particularly egregious. Possession of it wasn't made illegal until 2014 and people were given one year to dispose of any they had. Apparently it has not disappeared, with record numbers of cases being reported by police in the three years since the law was passed [1].
For homicide/fertility/etc rates, a simple google search will give you numbers.
For sexual assault/corruption/etc, it’s honestly common knowledge at this point. Googling “Japan underreported crime” will give you plenty of results from a variety of sources.
Additional insight comes from having a few close Japanese female friends who have opened up to me over the years.
If you’re trying to cure yourself of the “Japan is a magical place” myth, I highly recommend “Making Common Sense of Japan”, written by an economist. It’s from 1989, so the data is dated, but most of it still holds to day, and the analytical frameworks it builds are just as relevant.
There was a blog post written on the subject that I saw on HN a long time ago that I will try to dig up, and will update if I find it.
Japan is fairly safe in certain ways - you’re not at risk of getting shot like in the US, sure.
But the police and justice system is very dysfunctional, with crime statistics being under reported, and many murder cases being tossed aside as “suicides” or “heart attacks”.
Even without taking this into account, crime rates in Japan are comparable to those of safe European countries.
And this is not even touching the HUGE pervasive problem that Japan has with sexual assault. If you’re a woman living in Tokyo, you most likely have been sexually assaulted in your life, likely more than once, and likely by a coworker or in public transportation.
Japan is great in certain ways, and still very backwards in many others. But it is not some magical country where there is magically no crime and people are the most honest in the world because of some mysterious Japan only gene. On many metrics, Japan is aligned with the most developed Western European countries (including the famously quoted “fertility rate”, which is actually the same as Austria or Germany). If anything, it is the US that is an anomaly in many ways (crime rate, financial inequality, drug use, etc).