Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

> I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable.

When I visited Tokyo in 2008 I felt the same thing upon my return home. The transportation systems are efficient, punctual, and clean. People paid for their meals, bought snacks, and took the subway using their phone to pay for all of it. People were, with few exceptions, polite and helpful despite my boorish attempts to fit in.

Everything... it's so well thought out. You hand the store clerk your yen on a small tray. You can swipe your phone at a vending machine to get a quick bottle of water. You can walk from a bustling interstitial arcade into a quiet shrine. It seems like everything is meticulous and considered.

Even the seediest clubs in Roppongi or the dirtiest punk bars I could find still maintained the propriety and concern for others I found everywhere else. After one show the band passed around a bucket for some yen and we all sat down together and had food and drinks. One of the kids I came with made sure I got on the right train before the subway shut down. Even as a foreigner I could find people who were concerned about me as they were for everyone else.

Arriving back in Canada, where I'm from, was not what I had expected. The streets are haphazard and practical without a consideration for how it looks. People are louder. Traffic is thick. Litter abounds. Turnstiles, ticket booths, and grumpy ticket booth operators. Pushing... always the pushing. I had to wait a while before Street Fighter 4 would come across the Pacific so I could play it again... and 7 years for Apple to announce that you may eventually be able to buy a Coke with your phone in certain regions. Coming back to Canada felt like walking backwards in time.

Are you a native or have you moved there from somewhere else? I think the dual to "the grass is always greener" is that you might not realize that some things are problematic, or that there are better alternatives, unless you've have the chance to look at it from another perspective.

I moved to Norway when I was 5 (from Sweden). While I technically qualify as a foreigner, I would say that I'm a vanilla Norwegian guy.

I can't really comment on being biased or not, that's obviously not the sort of thing I would know myself, but I do have a lot of friends all across the world that I talk with regularly, and find that they have to deal with a lot of small crises and huddles in life I don't have to deal with (saving up for college, paying hospital bills, high insurance costs, etc).

I know that if I suddenly lose both my arms in a car accident, or otherwise get long-term sick, the social safety net is there to get me back on my feet.

When I've interacted with the police, they have been polite gentlemen who genuinely care about their job and their community, I've never come across the power and trigger happy psychopaths that the US unfortunately seems to attract for their police jobs.

And I know by experience that even somebody who has a "low" job like working at McDonalds is pretty well off, able to buy more than just the bare necessities. Stuff like people having two jobs just to survive is unheard of.

As I said, nothing is perfect, but when I do hear people complain about Norway, it's usually from an outsider perspective, getting things like our taxes completely wrong, or from an insider perspective, complaining about dumb politicians or bad weather.

Depends on your definition of credible evidence, and your personal theoretical bias, as with most things in economics (see: China bull vs bear case).

My position on the matter is "I don't know, and I'm unwilling to invest the effort to know"; the extent of my interest in Japan is how the ever lowering JPYSGD makes for good value holidays. But it was an interesting theory worth chucking in.

The Japanese have "interesting" statistics elsewhere; for example, their famed longevity might just be the result of people not declaring deaths: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/10/japenese-centen...

I've also seen some interesting playing around the components of CPI in Japan and elsewhere, taking them in and out of the index as required to obtain the right result. Can't find a link, unfortunately; it was probably a paid bank research report and I've been out of the field for half a decade.