From what I have seen, a tight-knit, almost tribal society like Japan is better set up for straightforward productive competition than is the West. It places less emphasis on profit than on ensuring that every company and even worker will retain a place in the economic order. (Apart from raw materials and American movies, most Japanese would be content, I think, if the country imported nothing at all. Who cares about high prices, as long as everyone is at work?) Its politics is ridden with factions—because of certain peculiarities of the electoral system, politicians can win seats in the Diet with only 10 or 12 percent of their district’s vote. (Each district elects several representatives to the Diet, but each voter has only one vote. In a fourmember district, for example, the leading candidate might get 35 percent of the total vote, and the next three might get 15, 12, and 8 percent. All four of them would be winners.) But there are few seriously divisive political issues, and the country has a shared sense of national purpose, as the United States last did between 1941 and 1945.
by davidzet
4 comments
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I wonder how much has changed or not since the writeup. Fun read
> Orthodontia has never caught on in Japan, despite seemingly enormous potential demand, because by the local canon of beauty overlapping and angled-out teeth look fetching, especially in young girls. It was barely a century ago that Japanese women deliberately blackened their teeth in the name of beauty. The delicate odor of decaying teeth was in those days a standard and alluring reference in romantic poetry.
Holy shit the unabashed racism.
The weird American fetisihizm of Japan and casual racism was even worse then.