The general rule is, if I am not mistaken, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” That means everything and everyone must appear and function the same under guarantee of punishment by the community.
How would the U.S. behave and function? What would or wouldn’t we have? It’s government? Products?
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That is a poor summation of Japanese social culture IMO. It is better to summarize as “value the group over the individual”
You do things to benefit the family, even if it is not best for you. You spend time improving the neighborhood, even if the problem isn’t your fault and doesn’t impact your life. You strive at work to improve the company, not your position within it.
Your Nail analogy unfortunately starts in preschool.
Yet, we need those same creative minds to remedy this sick world.
Crazy.
To answer your Q, OP: Our roads would change since they have beautiful monorails. And speed trains.
Our water quality would drastically improve.
We would no longer collectively tolerate “cultural disruptors” that feel it’s ok (or deserved) to hop fast food counters or crowd-rob Apple stores.
It would be a lot more….calm.
I think there are two major differences between the two that create such cultural differences: the perception of oneself within the greater society, and the influence of historical wealth and social inequality.
I’m no expert in Japanese history or culture, so I won’t speak much on that subject. I also don’t necessarily think Japanese culture is something we should strive to emulate. Quality of life isn’t amazing there and many people feel trapped in a culture that prioritizes outdated traditions and homogeneity above all else. There’s an entire class of people in Japan that more or less feel like robotic peasants forced to run on the hamster wheel to appease the culture at large. People work themselves to death and allow outside pressure to push them to the brink of mental collapse.
America, on the whole, is a nation where individualism is treated as a religion. People here are, on average, much more self-centered and will sacrifice potential improvements to quality of life in order to preserve that abstract ideal of being hyper-individualistic. People are much more obsessed with this idea that they should have to answer to no one but themselves, and that society exists to detract from the individual, rather than individuals existing to contribute to society. It has created a culture where people put themselves and their ideals at the center of their world, and see any outside force as an assault on their individuality. It causes people to lapse into national mythology and fantasy, where they start romanticizing ideals from the past and believe that progress, in any form, is an assault on the individual and the ideals of the individual. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to get momentum behind any kind of progressive movement in America. Progressive movements are built around this idea of building a strong, vocal collective to push against the status quo. A lot of people would rather maintain the status quo or even dial back progress if it means they are able to protect their ideals of individualism.
America also just has such a complex history of religious conservatism, frontier expansion, and social/economic inequality that has led to the prominent attitudes held in this country today. I understand that Japan has an equally (and much longer) complex history with plenty of struggles with isolation, tradition, and social/class strife. But I think the US just has this baked in idea that society not only comes second to the self, but it is something to be feared and skeptical of as an enemy to the self. Japan, on the otherhand, views society as the framework from which the self is constructed, from what I understand at least.
If the US were to have more of that cultural mindset, where the society comes before the self, just about everything would be different. People would be more invested in their communities and have a greater sense of pride in maintaining those communities. But with that would be the drawback of motivation through shame; people doing things out of peer pressure and “tradition” rather than out of their own sense of social pride.
Don’t they have used panty machines and places you can go in and there are just women’s asses sticking out of curtains that you can stick your face into?
I’m not so sure it’s as strict as you think
If you think America has a racism problem now, just imagine that with a hefty dose of Japanese xenophobia. Also, realize that in Japan you can basically be jailed without trial forever. Things in neo-America might be harder for many minorities.
Japan is racist. If you don’t look like the rest of them, you are different.
Heck, you can be Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, mix and they are racists.
I think they tolerate Americans better because they know in general, we are not there to stay , but they still have places where it is Japanese only.
The US wouldn’t be the US if it functioned like Japan.
Much of what is tolerated in the US would never be tolerated in Japan. The crime, the homelessness, the addictions, the garbage piled in the streets and alleys in the cities, the graffiti, the random violence on the streets. The violent protests. The crumbling infrastructure.
None of this is tolerated in Japan and that’s why Japan is Japan.
I think Britain is also a country where the nail that sticks out gets nailed down – but its so much more diverse than Japan that the definition of “a nail which sticks out” is hard to define, and one persons hero is another persons nail
So given that USA is even more diverse than Britain, i think I would think along those lines