Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 279 posts

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#151

Post by jborichevskiy »

asdff wrote: post #148
jborichevskiy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I worked in NYC coffee shops on a daily basis for 2 years (and Toronto and SF for more years). Whenever I went to the bathroom, I just asked a random person nearby if they would make sure no one walked off with my stuff. Used to do this as well (NYC) till I realized nobody was going to be pulling John Wick stunts to keep my five year old laptop from being taken away. Now I just make sure I'm not right near an entra…

Personally I'd pipe up if someone asked me to watch a laptop and another person made a move on it. In a crowded store full of witnesses, that's all it would take to deter a thief.

Fair point. Especially given such a crime would be pretty opportunistic.

That being said, this does remind me of the stunts pulled to get Ross Ulbricht's laptop:

> To prevent Ulbricht from encrypting or deleting files on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, two agents pretended to be quarreling lovers. When they had sufficiently distracted him,[30] according to Joshuah Bearman of Wired, a third agent grabbed the laptop while Ulbricht was distracted by the apparent lovers' fight and handed it to agent Thomas Kiernan.[31] Kiernan then inserted a flash drive in one of the laptop's USB ports, with software that copied key files.[30]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht

I do think if anyone was that determined to get my laptop they probably deserve it.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#152

Post by james_s_tayler »

samatman wrote: post #123
someone7x wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In every situation, the most natural strategy is to maximize personal gains. The iterated prisoner's dilemma begs to differ. There are many many situations where cooperation is both natural and optimal.

The iterated prisoner's dilemma does no such thing, as it's scored by maximizing personal gains. It does point to the advantages of not defecting on players who cooperate.

What's fascinating about the iterated prisoners dilemma is there is no optimal strategy as the optimal strategy changes depending on the distribution of strategies in play.

The best you can do if you have no idea what strategies are in place is to employ Tit For Tat (I think?) as it's optimal under the largest number of conditions but not all the time.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#153

Post by dba7dba »

yongjik wrote: post #136
dba7dba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loled at that `must have been a Korean` comment. History of Koreans in Japan has a complicated story. But basically ethnic Koreans are treated as a second class citizen in Japan. A Korean-American friend told me this story. He worked with a Britain/Ireland born coworker who was working in US at the time. Blond, European. He traveled fair bit to Japan. He knew this guy was Korean-American and in a conversation he as…

> This EU born coworker was confused what changed in that 5 year period. Could be this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bae_Yong-joon Or more seriously, a series of Korean dramas that somehow gained immense popularity in Japan. Bae, nicknamed Yon-sama, became so popular that Japanese prime minister (Junichiro Koizumi) joked that he wanted to be like Yon-sama.

Yup, I looked up and sure enough 'Winter Sonata' TV series was shown in Japan in 2003.

Irony is that of the 10 richest peeps in Japan, 2 are Korean descent. One owns big chain of pachinko. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-pachinko-gambling-ja...

The other is Masayoshi Son

Both were denied the path to a stable salary career life time job at a big firm and so they went on their own way.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#154

Post by asdff »

zebnyc wrote: post #27

Honest question: Do folks feel warm fuzzies when they do something "good / +ve"? Frankly unless I went out of my way to do something significant, I don't feel anything. Asking as there might be some of that going on here. For e.g., around Christmas here in SF, I was a at a shopping mall parking lot waiting for my wife to return. I noticed a man counting a few bills of cash. He counted and then turned to head to his c…

Earlier this week I spent 20 minutes following around a stray dog on my way home while on the phone with security so they could find and help him out. It's not warm fuzzies, it's just doing the right thing, like throwing trash in a bin. I feel obligated to uphold the social contract, even though many don't.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#155

Post by zuminator »

TomMarius wrote: post #131
selectodude wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, spending postage and effort to return a $20 gift card (or whatever it was) is so rude. I'm not sure where in the world that wouldn't come off as rude.

> From the address I saw that the owner lived in my neighborhood Probably went on his foot

Since they sent me a Xmas card, I reciprocated in kind, also enclosing the gift card with a note apologizing but asking that they give it to a needy person at their church during the holiday season. (They had also sent me an invitation to attend services.) So no additional postage needed.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#156

Post by CydeWeys »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #10

This smells like a lot of post-hoc rationalization. Collectivism? What about China, which did terribly on this kind of test. Shintoism? Only 3-4% of the population follows that. See https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-people-are-honest-los... where the graphic in the middle of the page compares countries. It appears that Scandinavian countries fare best followed by Eastern European. I would be happy to hear what p…

Syncretic Shintoism/Buddhism is pervasive in Japan. It's absolutely not true that only 3-4% believe in it. The real figure is way higher. The issue is it's not a religion that you believe in in the same sense as, say, Christianity; there's a lot of disparate practices that most people adhere to at least some of.

Just walking around in Japanese cities, you see shrines everywhere. Way more than you see churches in US cities even (admittedly the typical shrine is a lot smaller).

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#157

Post by CydeWeys »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #37
jessriedel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but note that Japan has 126M people, so it's quite large.

Yeah, but when you compare 126m to 1.3b I feel like you'd expect to see drift between the results. That's 10x the amount of people. If only 1 in every 10 people in each country is willing to break the social norms and ignores social pressures, then China will have 10x the amount of these infractions compared to Japan. But yes, Japan is not a small country even if it is a relatively small landmass.

The infractions are per capita. If a country has ten times the population and the same percentage of honest people, then it will have ten times the number of people breaking the social norms.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#158

Post by SenHeng »

mmhsieh wrote: post #116
hourislate wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost my passport (didn't know at the time) at NRT. I had left it on a counter at a coffee shop. About 15 minutes later while sitting at the gate an airport employee ran up to me and handed it back. Just amazing.

I got lost when going out to hike Mt. Nokogiri. I was walking wrong-way down some road when the employee at the visitor center some 1.5km away comes running after me to inform me that I am going the wrong way. I don't know how he deduced this after I walked out of that center. He escorted me to the correct trailhead which I missed by about 500m. Welcome to Japan.

It's possible they had someone monitoring the paths or someone saw you from higher up. I've hiked Nokogiri before and along some of the sketchier areas, the stairs were literally giving way under my step. It was pure luck that I hadn't fallen to my death multiple times over.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#159

Post by wisty »

lawn wrote: post #60
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a good blog post about a guy living in Japan. Here he was in this clean and crime free place, but his bicycle kept getting trashed overnight. Just his bike parked in a sea of other bikes. He thought it was because he was a foreigner, but finally after he reported it to the police numerous times someone explained the phrase "The nail that sticks out gets knocked down." and pointed out the bikes he was buying…

Wasn't there a story a while ago how a Japanese school essentially forced (or put a lot of pressure) a schoolgirl to dye her hair to fit in with the other girls, but it failed over and over until she got burns on her head?

There was a ban on unnatural hair colours. A foreign student was told to dye her hair black.

Re: Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

#160

Post by hnick »

zebnyc wrote: post #27

Honest question: Do folks feel warm fuzzies when they do something "good / +ve"? Frankly unless I went out of my way to do something significant, I don't feel anything. Asking as there might be some of that going on here. For e.g., around Christmas here in SF, I was a at a shopping mall parking lot waiting for my wife to return. I noticed a man counting a few bills of cash. He counted and then turned to head to his c…

It's more that I feel bad if I don't.

A bit like when my dog begs for food, I'm not happy I fed him some pizza crust but I feel bad if I don't. It's self imposed guilt in both cases.

Post reply on HN