#4 "Maintain Manners" is hardly simple.
I don’t know. I, the individual, can maintain a lot of manners fairly simply if I really wanted to.
Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
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Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#12#4 "Maintain Manners" is hardly simple.
In some places it is something sadly absent or overlooked...
And with countries with lots of newcomers it can take decades (well, generations) to take on the host countries manners rather than sticking to home country manners that may not mesh with host country’s manners/customs.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
simple and easy aren't synonyms. It's a simple rule, but very difficult to implement.
It's brief but it's not simple. "Manners" is an extremely complicated concept.
What qualifies as good manners varies from situation to situation, but the concept of acting with good manners is hardly complicated (conform to the expected behavior of the situation).
Enforcment is a matter of encoding the rules and then applying a carrot and/or stick -- same as any other rule.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#14> It's a concept that's difficult to replicate elsewhere, but Lydon compares it to what made old Main Street America so special. Designing at a people-first scale pays off. "The smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access, a feeling of safety and community for all ages… it's hard to overstate how well this all works." Honestly, even though I…
That kind of thing is extremely rare in the US sadly.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#15#4 "Maintain Manners" is hardly simple.
I don’t know. I, the individual, can maintain a lot of manners fairly simply if I really wanted to.
I think they are saying that it's difficult to "maintain manners" for hundreds of thousands to millions of diverse "I, the individual" 's. It's great that you don't struggle with that yourself, but your manners can be made entirely irrelevant by 1 person in a public place who has anti-social behaviors (doesn't share the same set of "required" values for that society).
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#16#4 "Maintain Manners" is hardly simple.
It needs critical mass, but then it cascades.
If you read through the description, what they talk about is that the culture is built around the idea of the individual being part of something bigger, and that consideration and respect for that something bigger (other people), is core to your own identity.
That's not hard for a lot of cultures, but it's almost impossible for most cultures in the Western hemisphere, and to change it would require a cultural reset that would run against the grain of many things that make those cultures what they are.
If it were possible though - and there are times when certain subcultures had standards of etiquette different to those widely accepted today in the West - it wouldn't need 100% of people to "sign up", just enough to make it ostracising to not conform. And then the outliers would conform.
We do this already: it's OK (albeit illegal), to cycle through a red light where I live, because lots of people do it, but if you were to try and get served ahead of your turn in a pub, you might get into an argument, because nobody does that without expecting a problem.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#17> It's a concept that's difficult to replicate elsewhere, but Lydon compares it to what made old Main Street America so special. Designing at a people-first scale pays off. "The smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access, a feeling of safety and community for all ages… it's hard to overstate how well this all works." Honestly, even though I…
> smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access
The genius of the BBC is to gloss over that in a culture that isn't Japanese these things all easily become negatives.
Who wants the smell of other people's food, maybe from a cuisine you hate? Or new local businesses cannot start because they can't buy property limiting options for consumers? And public transit stops become noise and litter parties.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#18> It's a concept that's difficult to replicate elsewhere, but Lydon compares it to what made old Main Street America so special. Designing at a people-first scale pays off. "The smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access, a feeling of safety and community for all ages… it's hard to overstate how well this all works." Honestly, even though I…
That kind of thing is extremely rare in the US sadly.
Nowadays. The last 50 years haven't been kind to people in the US.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#19> It's a concept that's difficult to replicate elsewhere, but Lydon compares it to what made old Main Street America so special. Designing at a people-first scale pays off. "The smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access, a feeling of safety and community for all ages… it's hard to overstate how well this all works." Honestly, even though I…
TFA explains that Japan is unusual as being the only country in Asia with two cities in the top 10 most liveable cities in the World. That's why they wrote the article. If Spain had been the only country in Europe with two cities in the top 10, they might have done it in Spain.
Re: Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities
#20#4 "Maintain Manners" is hardly simple.
I don’t know. I, the individual, can maintain a lot of manners fairly simply if I really wanted to.
The actual question is if you could move to another country with a very different system of "manners" (read: culture) and throw out your learned behavior and adopt theirs.
My experience living in an incredibly multi-cultural immigrant dense area, is overwhelmingly "No". People like their "home" cultures (generally they believe its the best), and they tend to carry some degree of resentment for their new society for not recognizing that. It creates endless friction at the edges (whereas core values tend to be pretty similar globally).
Japan doesn't really deal with this at all, and what immigrant ingress they have is usually fueled by people trying to live a Japanese like life.