I think there are a few things that make Japan fascinating to anyone who lives in a car-oriented culture, and a very important aspect is that even the small, out of the way, rural towns are still connected via passenger train, which changes the relationship of the small town to the central hub in important ways like what's described in the article here. Getting off the train in a small town is very different than getting out of your car in a small town.

You can find this same dynamic in the US, btw. You'll find that old rural towns, that grow up connected to the central hubs by either boat or by passenger train, have a lot of the same charm and feel. But if things are developed along roads, there's no presumption about walkability: they are designed for people to get in their cars and go from one parking lot to another.

Anyway, I'm actually totally clueless about this and speculating with very little informed knowledge outside my lived experience. I should probably delete this comment.

Certainly there are a few to be had but (my impression) pretty much none in North America. Probably some places in Switzerland and Austria that tick most of those boxes which people seem to find similarly fascinating.

I live in a small decaying Japanese city and there is nothing fascinating about it. With a few exceptions, most Japanese cities and towns are really ugly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR_Y0XOin8Y

It’s more so that US small towns are deeply uninteresting since many have been hollowed out to have the same chains. Japan has followed the opposite model and promotes obscure regional specialties like an obsession.

Pre-smartphone, or if you don't have a signal, you check the posted timetable. In any decent good transit system, every stop, even the tiny bus stops in the middle of nowhere, has an up-to-date timetable on display. In a complicated area with several lines, they may also have a map showing all the different lines.

Or - ask a human! A bus is driven by a driver, and they aren't omniscient, but they do know stuff because they have to drive buses every day. Worst case, they could point you to the right place to find routes and timetables. If they've got an hour to kill before they drive the next bus back, they know that.

Post-smartphone, you get out your smartphone and check the transit operator's website or app. Transit apps are pretty useful: input where you want to go, and it tells you the fastest route to get there, including where you need to change to a different vehicle. I normally use the app from my local transit company (BVG), or the nationwide one (Deutsche Bahn) for long-distance trips; aggregators like Google don't always have the latest information. In Germany there is some kind of data-sharing program run by the government so that any transit company can give you accurate information for any other company's services and plan a route involving multiple companies. This might not be the case where you live.

I’m pretty sure this story is replicated by anybody who visits Japan. Once you use a bidet you can’t go back.

That’s a notably kind and humane gesture in the midst of winter.

Høje Taastrup is a large suburb at the edge of Copenhagen, and the end of an S-train line, but anyone who lives there will know an intercity train is faster. Trains to Aalborg stopping at Høje Taastrup leave at 00:50 and at 02:50 tonight. The other suitable intercity and regional trains overnight are to nearer places, 150km or so.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnkSuyRV54

Japan had its own domestic ecosystem of IP data to phones and web browsing 2006 and earlier, but page rendering features were very rudimentary, and you had to keep the total data transfer sizes down or nothing would load properly.

Indeed, it’s the same in Singapore.

Despite the law and order reputation of Singapore, plenty of people regularly break laws there, including littering.

All you need to do is get off the tourist strips and you can walk down park paths with plenty of trash strewn everywhere.

What people don’t see is the army of foreign labor who is constantly picking this trash up.

The government is good at enforcement - if an area has problems with trash cameras get put up along with signs warning of the consequences, but if the cleaning staff were to disappear overnight it wouldn’t take more than 24 hours for Singapore to look quite untidy.

In terms of Western countries like the US, cleanliness does come down to an operations issue. Cleaners don’t come often enough, trash cans aren’t emptied enough and littering enforcement is weak. But it’s certainly possible to make the US as clean as Japan with surprisingly little increase in effort.

Umbrellas? Not so much. Stealing umbrellas is the official city pastime in Tokyo. Turn your back for one second and that thing will be gone. Report it to the cops and they'll just tell you to steal somebody else's.

Well, in Japan, you still see that. Shop owners will go around their shop with a duster cleaning away any dust or cobwebs that might have sprung overnight. Awnings, signs, etc.

I felt so incredibly safe in Japan and I don't remember even seeing a cop. As an American, that felt crazy to me for how large those cities are. I had some expectation of that but it still surprised me, particularly in the touristy nightlife districts with the street drinking.

Obviously seems like there might be some downsides to the culture that leads to this.

Seemed more like obsession with being tidy than hygeinic.

Eastern europe in general less. Norther europe more.

Western and southern europe is mixed. Graffiti I have seen quite a bit, but broken glass or other types of vandalism are sadly common, too.

Europe is not one country, and even within the same country, there may be big differences between regions, and within the city itself. Naples and Geneva for example are like polar opposites.

Japan is very uniform by comparison, and about as clean and well maintained as the best European cities, I'd say the US is about average by European standards, but with less variation. The general, very rough idea with Europe is that the further north you go, the cleaner it is.

Way more than in NYC or Boston today, it reminded me of NYC when I was a kid in the 80s.

It's much better than 0 outside benchmarking, so I've learned to just let these threads roll on.

I would chalk up your experience to being generally overwhelmed and not used to it, mixed in with being illiterate in the local language (despite there being English and symbols to assist further).

Things can change if people will it into existence. My 2-bit belief is basically simplified "broken window theory", where stuff being broken leads to more stuff being broken, trash leads to more trash... so dealing with cleaning stuff up quickly is good.

Generating an environment where people have some pride in what's around them and are also benefiting from the thing themselves, on top of the thing not being busted probably helps a lot.

There's a lot of anti-littering campaigns and the like. I feel like the gov'ts as a whole are pretty responsive to new kinds of crime and try to build a public consciousness against it as soon as they realize what's up.

Plenty of hooliganism in Japan all over, and plenty of raging, but at the end of the day if there's a nice bench that someone is allowed to sit on in a chill way, people probably tend to not take their rage out on it.

Maybe everyone in Tokyo is just ground down from having to work all the time and is just subservient to authority. Who knows!

Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.

Japanese culture has an exceedingly high focus on the appearance of cleanliness and politeness. The inside of someone's home might be a hoarder's dream, but the outside will be clean.

Someone might be an absolute jerk, but to act on that in most social spaces would have very real consequences. Rude behavior, like dancing and playing loud music on a train, will get you arrested here.

Misbehavior in Japan is dealt with, and quickly.

On that note: Japanese police don't play games. You do not have a right to a speedy trial, there is no jury of your peers, and they can hold you as long as they'd like. The phrase "police brutality" does not translate into Japanese.

Do not break the law in Japan.

There is a de-facto truce between the Yakuza and the police, as the Yakuza deal with foreign gangs and other problems that would be... difficult to solve with normal police work.

Japanese gangs are fiercely nationalistic. If the police don't handle you, the Yakuza will, and although I don't have any data to back this up, I'd wager that the police are the better option.

Additionally, Japanese neighborhoods have social responsibilities. Every couple of months, I am responsible for cleaning our trash area for two weeks, and there's usually some kind of repair or cleanup event twice per year.

In Japan, many people have lived in the same place for multiple generations, and can trace their ancestry within Japan back for thousands of years.

Japan is, quite literally, their ancestral home, and they act like it.

They are much more united and much less diverse in various ways. While they have many subcultures, they mostly adhere to a greater social cohesion.

To make up for that a bit, they do allow people to get plastered and spray vomitus publicly, including public transit and no one bats an eye. That said, you don't get the public defecation that we get.

Even their bums tend to take care of themselves as best they can. They try to maintain a certain decorum despite their dire circumstances.

Americans, in a sense, lost quite a bit of their sense of shame.

For instance, many Japanese primary public schools have no janitor. This is normal. The children scrub the floors, bathrooms and do all the other cleaning tasks in a defined schedule.

some random reference examples: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=japanese+...

https://youtu.be/jv4oNvxCY5k

People will trust someone more the more they think the other person is similar to them.

Japan has made choices that make it relatively homogeneous, the US has made choices that make it relatively diverse.

Yes, and at least NYC is notorious for how poorly it's train network is maintained, which I suspect is no coincidence.

It's not only useful for people leaving a party, but workers on early or late shifts like cleaning out working in restaurants.