Looking around on Google Maps, I noticed that businesses in Japan often have lower ratings on average compared to the US, especially for restaurants, the average being around 3.5-3.9. What is going on here? Are Japanese just more critical? Also, this is an entirely unscientific observation from my searches, so I could be wrong here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/zpwphu/why_do_japanese_businesses_receive_low_ratings_on/
4 comments
Check tabelog. They’re even more vicious. If you manage to find a 3.7+ rating in tabelog, it’s probably really really good.
Award winning restaurants barely break 4.0
Japanese add or subtract points based 3.0. Therefore, a restaurant with a Google search result of 3.5~3.9 isn’t a problem.
The average Japanese has the following evaluation criteria
Incredibly tasty, impossibly tasty -> ★★★★★
A little tastier than expected -> ★★★★
Delicious as expected -> ★★★☆☆
So-so -> ★★☆☆☆☆☆
Not good, not palatable -> ★☆☆☆☆
The Japanese are tough graders, not just online but in the corporate world, too.
Nobody gets a 5.0, let’s just get that out of the way. So you are realistically looking at a 4-star scale.
The bottom line is that one must analyze the comments and rate the rater, can’t just look at the numerical score; if a lot of ultra-picky graders give you 3.8 – 4 stars then that business probably did something incredible. But read the comments, see what wowed them.
A fun thing to do is checking out scores for the sam product on [amazon.co.jp](https://amazon.co.jp) and [amazon.com](https://amazon.com). All products I checked had lower scores on .jp. I love it. If 5/5 is as expected superb products and services aren’t allowed to shine. (Yes Airbnb, I’m talking about you)