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Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

bbc.com

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Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#161

Post by wst_ »

jdkram wrote: post #85
dilap wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out, strangely, that it actually reduces throughput compared to just having everyone stand Wait, what? How can this be true? Imagine an escalator w/ both lanes filled with people just standing. Now imagine the left lane starts walking: clearly, higher throughput. Now, maybe you're imagining a scenario where people don't want to walk. Now everyone stands on the right, and the left lane is completely empty. OK,…

Transport for London experimented with this, and found higher overall throughput during rush hour with two standing lanes: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/it-is-faster-to-s... > Standing-only escalators had a "throughput" of up to 151 passengers per minute, while an escalator where commuters were still allowed to walk saw around 115. Your thought experiment's completely right, but in real world circumstanc…

Transport for London should politely refrain from any statements like that, I believe. They hardly can allow people to enter the platform because there's no space to fit the crowd. There's sea of heads almost every morning in front of most popular stations' gates. Not because they have a gates issue, or any other unusual problem - they are just regulating flow that way. So, I'd kindly ask them start modernizing platforms to allow more throughput in the first place. Then let them experiment and play with statistics, by all means.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#162

Post by mcintyre1994 »

wst_ wrote: post #159
nicoburns wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 12.5% service charge is a tip (you don't have to pay it if you don't want to, and it will generally go to the servers).

How can you refuse to pay? It's part of the bill, isn't it? In most restaurants I've been so far at least. Also foreigner, so maybe I am missing something.

You can say you don’t want to or state some other total you’re going to pay that’s >= to the rest of the bill. Obviously that’s awkward and that’s why they make it the default, but you can pay less/no service charge/tip if you want to.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#163

Post by kjs3 »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #62
hannob wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German I can assure you Denmark is far above the average in Europe in public space cleanliness :-)

As a San Francisco resident, I can say almost any major Western city is cleaner. SF is filthy, at least in the downtown areas. Every sidewalk needs a good power washing and there's poop everywhere.

Yeah...I don't much bat an eye anymore as often as I've seen someone urinating on the side of a building in a US city, but it's only SF where I regularly see someone cop a squat and take a dump on the ground. Just lucky, I guess...

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#164

Post by tasty_freeze »

The thing that struck me when visiting there (Kyoto mainly) was not only the general cleanliness, but that there were semi-delicate public displays and works of art that were not defaced/demolished. Eg, some city street sculpture that if was in the US would probably not last a weekend before some kid or drunk thought it would be clever to knock it over.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#165

Post by flavmartins »

I've been to Japan two times in the last year and I was shocked at this too.

It's interesting that years back there was a man with mental health issues who carried out attacks by putting chemicals in garbage cans in public places. After this Japan got rid of garbage cans in public. Most of them, at least.

You walk downtown Tokyo and there are no garbage cans and no garbage anywhere. Every once in a while you come across a small convenience store with a very small can inside or every 10 or so vending machines will have a small bin for bottles or cans. But for the most part Japan is EXTREMELY clean. The city can be old, but it's all still clean.

Go to Shibuya, the famous crossing with thousands of people. Show up there in the morning before rush hour and you'll see very few people, and the streets are all clean. No garbage anywhere.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#166

Post by rootsudo »

flavmartins wrote: post #165

I've been to Japan two times in the last year and I was shocked at this too. It's interesting that years back there was a man with mental health issues who carried out attacks by putting chemicals in garbage cans in public places. After this Japan got rid of garbage cans in public. Most of them, at least. You walk downtown Tokyo and there are no garbage cans and no garbage anywhere. Every once in a while you come acr…

Now that's a lie - go to shibuya around 5am right when the trains open, right at the crossing and look at Shibuya-Gai.

There's your trash.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#167

Post by solstice »

IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #157
dredmorbius wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Though as the article notes, Japan similarly has few rubbish bins.

For the same reason. There were some bomb and ricin attacks that prompted that.

France also removed most public bins in Paris after bomb attacks in the 90s (I think) but they ended up replacing them with hoops to which transparent plastic bags are attached. I'm not sure on the timeline (ie how long it took them to go from "no bins" to "crappy bins") but this seems like an okay solution. The lack of public bins in Japan is mildly infuriating

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#168

Post by dwd »

The only time I ever really noticed litter in Japan was in Ueno Park during Sakura.

There's a good chance it was tourists as they had brought in skip bins that were all overflowing to the point where the skip was sitting in a mound of rubbish.

Seems not having bins in public places cuts down littering as there is no expectation that you can dump your rubbish and someone else will deal with it. A similar thing happened in Brisbane when they removed all the public bins for the G20. The few remaining bins were all overflowing with litter everywhere or people dumped rubbish where they used to be.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#169

Post by myrandomcomment »

tasogare wrote: post #33
netsharc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in Tokyo and Osaka these last weeks, and China before Tokyo. Landing in Tokyo after China was magical. People didn't shout in public or have their phones blaring. They let people disembark trains instead of just barging in as soon as the train doors open, and they queue neatly for those doors. And yes everything was clean and tidy. But the touristy area of Osaka was back to being dreadful. People cutting you of…

> People didn't shout in public or have their phones blaring. Yet Japan is a very noisy country. Store clerks shouting irasshaimase like robots, speaking elevators, politians in campaign and their cars with mega-phone, etc. added to paper thin (sometimes literally) walls make it sometime painful to live here.

The Japanese DO NOT talk in elevators.

Re: Most first-time visitors to Japan are struck by how clean the country is

#170

Post by jessriedel »

ajhurliman wrote: post #152
jessriedel wrote: post #115

These sort of articles about Japanese cleanliness and homelessness are intellectually dishonest if you don't mention massive factors like the fact that Japan eschewed the deinstitutionalization process that most wealthy countries went through toward the end of the 20th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation and as a result, they have four times the rate of involuntarily locking people up for m…

This implies that the main cause of trash is homelessness. Although homelessness probably causes an increase of trash, I think it's clear that a culture of littering also causes trash, which is clearly not present in Japan. Bringing in the subject of homelessness seems tangential to the topic at hand.

It certainly doesn't imply that this is the main cause, it suggests that it's an important cause (say, > 10%) that has to be acknowledged in a 10k word article. I also think dwelling on a "culture of littering" is much vaguer and less likely to make falsifiable predictions.
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