![]() ![]() ![]() I'm sure many people prefer the western approach, but I will happily live in "poverty" in Japan instead. When I lived in the UK, the sky rocketing housing market split people into 2 camps - those speculating in order to make it rich, and those who were wondering if how they were going to be able to live on the pittance of a salary they received (and complaining about the injustice of it all). They just try to make a nice life within their means. Especially the "American Dream" is practically absent. Many, many people here are "poor" (I live in the countryside where jobs are not plentiful, or high paying), but I never hear anyone complaining about their salary. I think one of the biggest thing I like about Japan is the lack of societal angst that I perceive here. It is a double edged sword, but this strong cultural upbringing (enforced by teachers, not parents) does have a lot of advantages. This is something heavily criticised by foreigners who pity the lack of freedom that Japanese school children have. ![]() Japanese culture is drilled into people at school. I lived most of my life in Canada, moved to Japan for 5 years, moved again to the UK for 2 years and have now moved back to Japan (hopefully for good). I hate to say it, but I think the the article is spot on. I can understand why some people would like more a more quantitative exploration of the issue than the opinion piece that the article is. Stuff like people having two jobs just to survive is unheard of.Īs I said, nothing is perfect, but when I do hear people complain about Norway, it's usually from an outsider perspective, getting things like our taxes completely wrong, or from an insider perspective, complaining about dumb politicians or bad weather. When I've interacted with the police, they have been polite gentlemen who genuinely care about their job and their community, I've never come across the power and trigger happy psychopaths that the US unfortunately seems to attract for their police jobs.Īnd I know by experience that even somebody who has a "low" job like working at McDonalds is pretty well off, able to buy more than just the bare necessities. I know that if I suddenly lose both my arms in a car accident, or otherwise get long-term sick, the social safety net is there to get me back on my feet. I can't really comment on being biased or not, that's obviously not the sort of thing I would know myself, but I do have a lot of friends all across the world that I talk with regularly, and find that they have to deal with a lot of small crises and huddles in life I don't have to deal with (saving up for college, paying hospital bills, high insurance costs, etc). While I technically qualify as a foreigner, I would say that I'm a vanilla Norwegian guy. I moved to Norway when I was 5 (from Sweden). I appreciate this article for trying to find out why. Japan's society seems to be functioning better than the US. And Japan even manages to achieve this despite a significantly aging demographics (lots of social benefits paid to non-working people), compare. Japan is even on track to stop increasing their public deficit by this year (thanks to the new sales tax) whereas the US is far from being on budget. Japan's incarceration rate is 50 per 100,000 population vs 710 per 100,000 for the US. Japan's homelessness rate is 20 per 100,000 population (25,000 homeless people in 2001) vs 220 per 100,000 in the US. Japan's unemployment rate is 3.6% vs 5.5% for the US. Why so many negative comments? Japan certainly seems to outshine the US according to multiple metrics, so they are doing something right: ![]()
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