Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property | Hacker News Reader

Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property

bbc.com

288 pointshhs273 comments

I experienced this while visiting Japan.

While doing a transfer on the Shinkansen in Hiroshima, I left my camera bag at a noodle kiosk on the platform (around $3k worth of equipment). Didn't realize it until 2 hours after getting on the next train.

When we arrived at our destination, I told my friend we were meeting (a Japanese native) what happened, and she reassured me that it would be right where I left it (said something about there being a "taboo" with the Japanese and touching other people's private property).

So we walked over to the JR attendant and explained what happened, and in no time at all she had the other station attendant on the line who confirmed they found my bag. Just as easy as that.

Then I proceeded to lose my wallet and passport in a taxi, which we recovered just as easily!

Japan is a great country to visit, if while abroad you displace the part of your brain that keeps track of things...

Is it possible the social support structure, education, etc are creating a society where unfortunate people don't have to steal/pawn to make a living?

I think the point is that it's a cultural thing, regardless of how fortunate or unfortunate someone is.

I'm sure it plays a role, but there are countries with similar wealth and support systems, but so many things (like the lost property example) are unique to Japan.

It’s more to do with the purity of their culture resulting from low immigration which fosters a high level of mutual trust. Invariably immigration corrupts the hosting nation’s culture with trust absorbing the initial impact.

"purity" is an odd word choice there when "homogeneity" or perhaps more neutrally "uniformity" are equally accurate.

more broadly, when i see/hear this line deployed by westerners in regard to certain east asian countries, I always wonder if such westerners think such statements are generalisable to other nations, or if they have considered whether other specific cultural factors than uniformity are in play and causing/contributing heavily to the supposed higher level of mutual trust.

It's my view that, other factors disregarded, having fewer cultural/ethnic outgroups does not magically result in higher levels of mutual trust in a society. After more than 4 years in Korea I am tired of westerners using Korean society as a shining beacon-like example of cultural/ethnic uniformity in order to air their beefs with immigration in their home countries (and no, that isn't how I interpreted the parent comment; just pursuing a line of thought).

Another interesting thing to consider: the prevalence of general corporate and political malfeasance in Korea and Japan relative to their status as highly developed nations. Certainly no culture-driven concern for the wellbeing of countrymen there.

edit: Ahh just looked at the parent poster's post history and am now happy to issue a big fat Never Mind. At least I got the thought out.

> It's my view that, other factors disregarded, having fewer cultural/ethnic outgroups does not magically result in higher levels of mutual trust in a society.

This is a classic scissor statement to use SlateStarCodex lingo.

Late reply but thanks for that, I'm a casual reader of SSC and its satellite blogs but hadn't come across the Scissor one before.

I'm a little skeptical. Many Japanese live in a pretty grinding form of underemployment poverty - "freeter" will get you lots of hits in Western media. Moreover, some truly deprived groups like the urban homeless are almost notorious for generally _not_ engaging in the sort of petty property crime we're talking about that's common in similar demographics in the West.

Those make me lean towards cultural factors.

We tend to underestimate the effect culture can have. It's also why the Japanese don't litter their cities, despite few garbage bins.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/why-japanese-dont-lit...

Yeah, well. Maybe, maybe not. Quoted from a previous discussion:

> I was cycling in Japan for about 2 weeks, just a few weeks ago. I was also impressed in most places by how clean it was, not only in the cities, but more generally speaking about everywhere.

> At some point though, I was cycling along the coast of Mie then Wakayama prefectures, and although the scenery and roads were clean, I had a glance just behind the ramp walk, and realized that behind the trees, in the bush next to the road were hundreds of garbage bags, litter of all sort, really anything, just lying below. There was such a contrast from what my eyes were seeing until, I was shocked.

> In another town several kilometres after (I forgot which place exactly, must have been while cycling up towards Wakayama city), I passed next to a big commercial area on my right. On my left there was a small patch of forest then the sea and again, that forest contained many many plastic bags, full but neatly tied up, every couple of meters or so, for several hundreds of meters.

> I originally thought the first thrashes I saw along the road in the country side where "mistakes", like things flying off the window or pushed by the wind from another place (although there was a lot of garbage anyway). But when I saw these tied up plastic bags, they weren't there by chance, really people throw these bags away on the forest right here. That made me a bit sad, especially since it broke the original image I got.

> (And I haven't spoke about the beaches and seafront all along that peninsula; I wouldn't walk bare foot there).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21240083

When I was in Japan in 2009, every pedestrian in the cities waited patiently at each crossing until the light turned green, even if there were no cars around at all.

However, when the streets were mostly empty, I saw one Japanese man come to an empty crossing, glance around, and cross on red.

Can't generalize much off a single example, but it did make me think peer pressure is probably a factor.

In America, the primary "road safety" I was taught as a kid was "look both ways before crossing the road." I think the Japanese priority is based more on obeying traffic lites, though this is just conjecture from media and my experience.

This said, when people are around there are more likely to be sudden cars as well. It's easier to justify jaywalking at midnight than noon.

Adhering to crossing lights is a very cultural thing. There was a thread that came up about this a week or two ago. Even within the US, perhaps especially within large northeastern cities like Boston and New York, people will cross if there's no traffic (or even if a driver has hesitated for a moment). Whereas on the West Coast people mostly obey the lights.

It depends on the situation with traffic and enforcement. At my college town the police were obsessive with writing jay walking tickets. Even if no one is around at all. They really took pride in fining broke college kids $300 for crossing the road.

In LA, there is no jaywalking enforcement, or any petty crime enforcement for that matter. The LAPD is a disproportionately tiny police force that has far bigger fish to fry. People don't jaywalk though because more pedestrians die from drivers here than any other city in the nation.

>At my college town the police were obsessive with writing jay walking tickets. Even if no one is around at all. They really took pride in fining broke college kids $300 for crossing the road.

And police in America wonder why people hate them so much.

It's sad, because sometimes you read articles about a small town's main revenue source being a speed trap. Municipal governments have not gotten the historic funding they've enjoyed from state and federal government over years of being routinely slashed by a political party that enjoys slashing routinely when in power.

So you end up with broke college kids using their student loan money to ultimately pay for trash pickup or other critical city services that were previously paid for by taxation and higher levels of government.

There's probably a historical influence here to. Most of Western US cities were designed after the introduction of the car, while Eastern cities were designed for carts and walking. That would also help explain why Japan follows them, and Europe is to massive to generalize.

I wouldn't underestimate the effect of culture, I would just tend to assume that something about Japan has caused its culture, rather than culture itself being a primary cause of attitudes towards lost property. In other words, I wouldn't consider "it's just their culture to respect lost property" a useful explanation.

I suppose you’re being downvoted because you’re seemingly hinting at genes having an effect on one’s behavior rather than just their cosmetic traits.

No, it's a cultural thing. Home burglaries and thefts from cars and shops are fairly common, but you don't take unattended bags and such that are left in the open.

On the other hand, the Japanese are inveterate umbrella thieves. So much so that you will find locking umbrella racks in many buildings.

The pressure has to go somewhere.

Why umbrellas specifically? I read the article and I enjoyed it, but the question of why umbrellas are not treated the same in terms of being returned was mentioned but not answered. Near the end of the article, there is this sentence

> “Communal property is virtually unheard of except for that many people seem to regard umbrellas as up for grabs if not properly secured.”

Because when the rain comes down, it COMES DOWN HARD, and you NEED an umbrella NOW. I started doing the same after living there a few years.

Same thing with stealing crappy bikes with flat tires from the nearest bike rack to get home when you're drunk as a skunk at 3 am.

You can buy them everywhere for 300-1000 yen, those models are the ones that everyone uses so it isn't much of a sacrifice for everyone to buy another umbrella a few times a year.

an even more basic answer is that these super cheap umbrellas that everyone buys all look kinda the same, so it's hard to track your own umbrella unless you put some sort of sticker on it.

So it's not even necessarily a concious system, just the end result of easily being confused between umbrellas.

Yeah, everyone has a moment when they notice a wrong umbrella in their hand. Could happen immediately upon pickup or could happen later.

From there your view branches into the direction of either communal property idea or an internal shame/rage/regrets. So far I consider mine a personal property.

Is this for fancy umbrellas or any umbrella? I once lost a cheap plastic umbrella while visiting a castle, which I left for a minute to take a photo and it was gone, and I always assumed another tourist took it by mistake.

The article hits on this, suggesting that they are viewed as communal property since they're so abundant, cheap and frequently forgotten. Umbrellas are also an on demand item, so can see how this could evolve as a sort of community solution to the rain problem.

I visited Japan and was caught in the rain with no umbrella. I hid next to an awning near a school. A person came out from inside and offered me to take an umbrella from the numerous ones that were left by the people inside.

I suspect "communal property" is a better way to think of what happens with umbrellas than "umbrella thieves".

I was in Japan last week and I can confirm that I forgot every umbrella I used -- I hope you got one of mine.

My family of 5 was caught walking back to our AirBNB in pouring rain during a trip to Tokyo. A man ran out of a FamilyMart (think 7-11), chased us down, and handed us umbrellas for the entire family. My first thought was, how nice of this gentleman to do this for complete strangers.

My second thought, how cheap am I for not walking my family in the store to buy the damn umbrellas myself?!

What is the rain problem? I live in the Pacific Northwest where it rains for 9 months out of the year. Our solution is to not use umbrellas at all. Everyone has a waterproof rain jacket.

In Seattle where it rains frequently but lightly, you really don't need an umbrella. But in places where it rains hard, umbrellas become a lot more desirable. A waterproof rain jacket won't help much in a torrential downpour. Maybe with a waterproof wide-brimmed hat as well, but chances are you'll still get drenched without an umbrella.

To put some numbers on it for perspective: Seattle is infamous for rain, but only averages 38 inches of rain per year. Miami, which is known for sunny beaches, averages 62 inches of rain per year. Tokyo gets 60 inches.

Plus, the raincoat doesn't mesh well fashion-wise with the suits everyone wears to work and uniforms for school. People dress very well in Japan.

>To put some numbers on it for perspective: Seattle is infamous for rain, but only averages 38 inches of rain per year.

I wonder if it has to do with duration vs. intensity. Long periods of drizzle might not be nearly as much total rainfall as short periods of downpour. From what I've seen of the PNW on my few trips there, it seems to drizzle a lot.

Yes, that's precisely the case. Seattle is perceived as very rainy because it's very often rainy. But rarely does it rain hard. Usually it drizzles so light it won't even mess up your hair.

In Japan and many other parts of East Asia, it rains most during the hottest months of summer. You don't wear jackets when it's 30+ °C and humid outside.

But after living in the region for many years, I agree people also tend to be a bit irrationally afraid of the rain.

Ah, but I suppose there are areas with bigger fears of rain. I was hitchhiking through spain and someone who picked me up was a wine farmer, who told stories of people not coming to work, because that day it was raining - in a different village.

I've had people cancel meetings with me in San Francisco 'because it was raining'. To be fair the roads here do become significantly more stressful then, but whenever it happens it feels ridiculous. My theory is that whatever the worst 1-2% of weather days per year becomes a weather excuse anywhere in the world. In the Phillipines it had to be bad typhoon, not just a normal one. In London it was moderate snowfall (that wouldn't cause a dent in switzerland for instance).

I remember my first visit to California. We were in Santa Cruz for work, and got down to the breakfast room in the hotel and the tv news talked about storms. We looked out and it was drizzling. Walked to the office and got slightly damp, and coworkers thought we were crazy.

Lived in Juneau Alaska years ago, and my first year there it rained every day except for three. Those three sunny days everyone called in sick and met down on the beach!

It's funny, in Japan, nobody wears sunglasses, but _everybody_ carries an umbrella. Basically the opposite in the US.

Generally the months with rain are the hotter ones - wearing a rain jacket would result in you sweating buckets

In Japan blue skies is the norm though. No clouds most of the time.

I find ppl who wear rain jackets smell (and look goofy)

Do they smell like rain?

Good old 'petrichor'[1], I've never noticed it emanating from a human. I wonder if geosmin is used in any fragrance-products though, or even if specific skin flora (bacteria) might produce it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor?wprov=sfla1

Sounds like geosmin is actually not that pleasant on its own.. I like petrichor personally but can imagine the earthy aspect on its own might not be entirely pleasant.

No, BO. Anyway a astringent acidic smell. Like lactic acid.

I have a sensitive nose, and my office mate bikes into work 7 mi through hills in any type of weather. Good for him.

But, if he had to wear his rain coat, he smells. Even after he showers and keeps his gear in the lockers.

It’s nauseating.

It's too hot to wear a rain jacket in Japan. You'll get wetter from sweating than you would from jumping fully clothed into a pool.

> Everyone has a waterproof rain jacket.

PNW rain season is winter, summer is fairly dry.

Japan is the opposite, and quite a bit warmer than PNW (at least at Tokyo’s latitude). Sweating is a problem as is in summer clothes, rain jackets would be detrimental to health.

the problem? this:

So I was getting my hair cut at this cheap place, no appointments, no conversation, you sit on the bench, wait your turn, each time a chair frees up they pop the next person off the queue. ( _alright deque_ ) It's raining and cold, and it's Melbourne so bunches of black wet puffer jackets are dripping off the two coat racks.

person in : black puffer on the hook, person out : black puffer off the hook.

Then one guy starts screaming, 'who stole my jacket? it's a north face, it's a north face.'

He's flipping through the jackets throwing people's clothes on the floor, including mine so I'm a bit unhappy with him and I walk up get him to calm down.

we manage to pair each jacket with it's owner, and we've got one left - a black superdry jacket, with some nice bluetooth headphones in the pocket.

I'd seen the owner come and leave, I suggested he would realise and come back. He could leave his number. He's not happy with this, so I sugest he take the superdry jacket to stay warm and dry, leave his number, and if the guy comes back they can arrange to swap back.

At this point the screamer starts screaming that superdryguy obviously stole his jacket because north face is better, and he's going to take the superdry jacket and the headphones as 'compensation'.

Screams some random abuse about the absent guy as he launches back out into the street (no number left).

Two minutes later the superdryguy is back - wearing a north face jacket, the scene basically repeats with a new idiot screaming, this time that he is going to sue and something about rare headphones.

I don't think this happens in Japan. Must be the umbrellas.

A beat-up genic mamachari bicycle sometimes fits this pattern.

Left unsecured near a station, it might get "borrowed" by a drunken salaryman and discarded somewhere near his home a kilometre away.

They're pretty much communal when I visited Tokyo/Kyoto. Pretty much always left the building with a different umbrella than I entered with. Just about everyone uses the same $5-10 black/gray/white/clear umbrella. They all go into the umbrella bucket when you enter a building. Everyone just grabs one on their way out that's close enough to the same as the one the dropped in. Sometimes you leave a building and it's not raining anymore and people forget their umbrella behind. People even just leave them behind before getting on the train and take one from the stop where they get off.

Note that for this to work, people have to only take the umbrella you need. Not grab all of them and sell.

BTW: I'm really glad to hear this, because I've been having some regrets about grabbing random umbrellas in Tokyo, because everyone seemed to do it. Glad I did it right after all!

I can't even imagine the effort of stealing the office umbrellas and selling them being worth it.

Yeah, right? Who would buy them when you can just grab free umbrellas at every office?

Still, I'd expect this system to break down in most non-Japan places because of things like this.

Only grab an umbrella if you also deposited one! There’s nothing more annoying than to come out of a store and find all umbrellas gone.

While I was in Tokyo a couple months ago, I put my common black/clear umbrella in the ramen shop rack. Upon exit, I was forced to grab another as mine had been nabbed. I felt horrible grabbing someone else's umbrella (though I still did haha)! I feel relieved to learn this is ok.

That's interesting because when I visited I went to an onsen and my umbrella didn't fit the lock system. Then I thought, "What do I have to worry about? I'm in Japan. Nobody will steal it." 3 hours later and it was still there waiting for me.

Probably because it was not raining?

I only had mine with me because it was raining.

There are other negative outlets. Evan Hadfield's "Rare Earth" has covered a couple of these:

- Japan's criminal justice system: https://invidio.us/watch?v=IRn4xzaugbk

- Japan's untouchables: https://invidio.us/watch?v=SIsndKkasfI

(There are of course positive elements, and Hadfield has covered those as well.)

Umbrellas are super cheap and readily available when you need one though.

I noticed this the last time I was in Tokyo. This is a place where if a stranger saw me drop cash on the sidewalk, they would hunt me down to return it. So what's the deal with all the umbrella locks? TFA explains it.

I accidentally dropped many Yens coins in Tokyo last week and multiple individuals rushed to help me. I was literally shocked.

I also forgot my wallet with my passport beside an arcade game in Akihabara and someone found me inside the arcade to give it back to me before I even noticed it was lost.

Un-locked bikes, products outside of shops, etc.

Their "Trust" system is incredible. It would never work here in Canada.

I really enjoyed my 3 weeks in Japan.

It’s because almost everyone uses the same umbrellas (cheap from a convenience store). Ive never had any other type taken.

It’s hard to tell which one is yours and it basically becomes an umbrella share pool. No big deal.

I’ve also had cases where I was caught in the rain and people tried to give me their umbrella.

This brings back strong memories from college. Everyone had black Northface zip-up jackets, so when you would go to a frat party, there would be a giant pile of jackets laid on the couches in the common room. At the end of the night, it was a crapshoot whether drunken party-goers actually found their jacket, or one of the dozens of identical ones.

The next afternoon, there would inevitably be a cascade of campus-wide emails asking for the return of jackets containing wallets/ids/keys.

The thrift shops did a strong business in supplying the most garish and distinctive "frackets" to combat this problem.

The hack here is to put distinctive stickers or something on them so anyone picking it up knows it's definitely not theirs. I've had the same umbrella in Japan for 4 years.

I really can't believe you've had a Konbini store umbrella for 4 years. They're really not that well made?

Yeah it's not holding up too well but it still keeps the rain off me!

Umbrellas are less like physical items and more like Higgs fields in Japan. They exist as a probabilistic continuum, and materialize when you need them.

Said another way: let go of the notion of “your” umbrella, and just accept that when you do occasionally purchase one, you’re inserting an umbrella into a broader system.

I’ve had people come running out of their houses to hand me umbrellas on a rainy day; they really are a social good.

Yeah.. I'd be wary of cooking up these cliched stories like the BBC. I remember being losing my cheap umbrella at the store. A woman who was happened to be coming out, upon seeing my predicament and on the rain pouring down, handed me some random umbrella from the bucket (or whatever that thing is called). I refused. So she proceeded to give me hers and then she took one from the bucket.

Umbrella's are really communal possessions in Japan. May be its a good thing, may be bad. However, this kind of silly reporting and patronizing 'cultural deconstruction' is really annoying to those of us in Asia who've subject to this for centuries on end.

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.

I'd always heard about this, but the one time I left my backpack in a Yamanote Line train, it was returned with around $2000 worth of cash (in multiple different countries' currencies) missing from my wallet. My wallet was really deep inside a bag inside a bag, too, so someone clearly went digging into my backpack.

I once found a wallet on the sidewalk outside a mall in Japan. I tried to drop it at the mall's lost and found, but the security guard there took me with him to a police box. The policeman there took me to the local police station, and we spent the next hour filling out a report. They were all very friendly and appreciative that I turned it in, but it was really quite an ordeal. If I were to find something valuable again, I might just leave it alone to avoid the hassle.

I think this might have more to do with you not being one of the locals.

A good 'hack' to this might be to pick a set of 2-3 local looking people and loudly point out the item in question so that someone else can deal with it.

This works. And I do it. Too many unhinged people out there. Here in the US, I've found things in restaurants a couple of times and pointed it to the staff.

It clears the liability for all involved, since no one can claim that the staff or a fellow patron 'took it'. It was pointed out by a customer and removed with witnesses. I generally mention it to more than one staff.

I try to baseline assume that the person I'm dealing with in public is not fully there (which would include the property owner). It makes it easier to deal with when it is actually the case.

Even if you're a local this is the procedure. If the building doesn't have a lost and found (besides the train systems not all places do) then the police box will make you give over your contact information and a bunch of other stuff. It doesn't take an hou (maybe ten minutes if you speak Japanese), but it can be a pain if you just expected to throw it in without any questions.

I happened to study the process few days ago. Officer pulled out an elaborate form, asked the guy if he wants his copy, wants rights to the item if owner didn’t show up, to which he said no and no, and then he was asked to sign the blank and was told him they take care of the rest. Took 5-10 mins max.

Technically no one should ever sign a blank sheet, ever, but that could be done, I guess.

That's the beginning of a very common confidence game in Europe so I'd probably not do it. But IDK, maybe not in Japan.

Honestly, I generally prefer to find my lost item exactly where I left it.

I’ve done something similar. Dropped my hotspot in a cab and didn’t realize until after dinner a couple of hours later. Had the restaurant call the cab company and they tracked down which cab it was, confirmed it was there and had the same cab drop it off for us again at the restaurant. I don’t think this would’ve happened anywhere else.

Though don’t get a false sense of complacency; the crime rate is low but not zero. My friends had a couple of snowboards stolen from a hotel luggage concierge.

If you steal even a few dollars of merchandise from a corner store, the police can hold you for a number of days without trial. And most people won't feel sorry because that's what happens to thieves, so you should have known not to do it.

A society decides what's acceptable, and how far they're willing to go to uphold these expectations.

Likewise DUI in Japan. Japan is much more strict than the US. One beer before driving and you become a guest of the state for 3 years. Just don't do it.

It’s easier to sleep it off in Japan, just lay down on the sidewalk and come morning, you’ll be unharmed, and may possibly have gained a blanket overnight. Source: many internet photos of salarymen sleeping one off in every conceivable public place

I’m sure public transit helps too.

In Japanese cities, you don't need to drive if you're drunk, and you don't even need a car at all. Just get on the train/subway, or hail a taxi, or even walk.

Drunk driving is a problem in the US because you can't get home without a car except for a handful of dense cities (Manhattan, etc.). The rise of Uber/Lyft is helping this, though.

Completely agree if you're in the cities. I spent a lot of time in Okinawa and other remote areas of Japan last month, and a car is very necessary there.

(NB driving in Japan is like driving in England except the turn signal is on the right side of the steering column, so I was constantly engaging my wipers when I wanted to turn. The locals call this "the Okinawa wave".)

Yup, Uber helps a little bit, but unless you're in the heart of the city, it can easily become very unaffordable. Like $80 per night. If you like to have a vibrant social life, even wealthy people can't afford it. That's not even touching US driving culture.

LOL, we went by that on platform noodle shop (I think they specialize in Soba) a couple times this summer, but never had the time to eat there in the end. :) Was their food good ? :-D

On the first day of our last trip taking my grandmother back to her home village outside of Kyoto, some of her luggage was left behind on the train, and while Lost and Found managed to pull it off at a later stop, it had gotten a pretty far distance from where we were heading.

I navigated to the small station on the lower platform where the attendants held her luggage and gave them her name. The younger one asked where my grandmother was and then gave me a regretful look when I said she was disabled and wouldn't be able to travel this far, because they could only release the bag to its owner.

An older attendant pulled him aside then stepped up and asked me what my name was. "I'm her grandson, Washadjeffmad. I reported the missing luggage.", I explained and held out my passport. Without looking at it, he sighed and stepped off again. When he reappeared, he asked me again where she was, and I told him- on her way to Kyoto. He closed his eyes, said something I didn't catch, and then asked "Are you sure she's not here?" Clearly she wasn't. It'd been a decade, but was my Japanese really so bad?

Another man emerged from the back to observe his two obviously frustrated coworkers, then pulled them back to talk. When they reappeared this time, the older man asked, "Are you Washadjeffmad's grandmother?" And it finally clicked.

"Yes. That's me."

And they immediately handed over my bag.

Japan is a funny place.

It's funny, but in South Africa crime and especially theft is very common, and at the same time, personal property sometimes find their way back to you.

This especially tends to happen if for example you were robbed and your wallet was left behind or let's say the police were harassing you and threw your driver's license over a fence or something (true story).

I think the reason for this is that the serial criminals are really <1% of the population and probably >50% are really just normal and usually decent people.

There are both amazingly good and amazingly bad things about Japanese culture.

The shame of being seen to be not honest or respecting people's property leads to amazing responsibility and kindness.

But it also leads to people being depressed and feeling constrained not to be able to break out of societal expectations.

The very things that make us love Japan, would make you go crazy to live there. So enjoy the privilege of being able to visit and experience the benefits, while not having to deal with the downsides.

And maybe it causes you to reflect that, in the US -- the very personal freedoms (i.e. lack of guilt on being disobedient or trying new things) leads to a society where it's more likely you're not getting your wallet back if you leave it somewhere...

This is a good assessment. I believe Japan generally only works for people that already fall in line with societal norms to some extent.

I do wish to believe that a personal freedom society and a society that takes your wallet don't have to be tightly coupled... Although I will say the public shame of Japan is stronger than the private shame of the US.

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 were from China.

His bike looked similar to everyone else's bike in the area, but it was made by a Chinese company and there had been news stories about how these bikes were faulty / dangerous / bad (the information apparently was somewhat questionable).

So he bought a proper Japanese bike that looked like the other bikes, and it never happened again.

The contrast of a clean and orderly society with very targeted pressure by random members of society not to do something like buy the wrong bike ... is quite striking.

> "The nail that sticks out gets knocked down."

Ever since I first heard this I've kept both this phrase and the phrase "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" in mind at the same time.

Basically, both sides of this coin together ask you "should you speak up?" type of thing; substitute "speak up" with whatever the given situation is.

We Dutch have a similar proverb: "Whoever sticks his head above ground level, his head is cut off. "

That seems a lot less elegant a phrase...

I'm guessing it sounds a lot more elegant in Dutch...

Not really. It's a literal translation, and it's just as bad.

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

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

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

Tall poppy syndrome, which can be oppressive in Northern Europe.

Germany seems more relaxed than the Netherlands, and France seems to be worse. I've had friends telling me their Mercedes got frequently keyed for no reason, and the old Mercedes star on their classic even got ripped off.

French guy here.

There is a proverb in France that says that to live a happy life, you'd better keep a low profile (not literal translation which would more be to live a happy life, live hidden) "vivons heureux, vivons cachés".

So yes if you own nice things and show it publicly, you'll get annoying comments, have them damaged or stolen. And it is getting worse.

Unlike in Japan, I would not expect a lost wallet to be returned to its owner, never.

That's very true in Germany. They do have a lot of freedoms, but they aren't very creative as a society. They fall back on strong adherence to rules and their culture re-enforces it.

See this:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/10599631/Why-the...

I don't think creativity and adherence to social rules lie along the same axis. Strictures can spur and channel creativity. And the absence of strong normative behaviors doesn't coincidence with greater creativity--there are plenty of countries, mostly undeveloped, where people generally do anything they want[1], but there's not much creativity going on.

As the rest of the world industrializes and the deficiencies and costs of our own social fabric are revealed in comparison, Americans seem to increasingly like to distinguish ourselves as "creative". But it's really just a euphemism intended to characterize our differences in a way that permits us to claim that we're "better" at something. Back when the U.S. was a leading industrial power house, when our democratic institutions were unique, there was no need to identify a specific quality like creativity to distinguish ourselves.

[1] I've been in at least one country where the very concept of a line seemed foreign to most of the people, who were within months or years (not even generations) removed from an nomadic lifestyle. This was qualitatively different than in some other countries with aggressive line jockeying and cheating.

" and the old Mercedes star on their classic even got ripped off."

That was a competition for punkers. Who could get the most of these stars ...

It is interesting to ponder why we do either.

We hammer nails because we want a flat surface. We grease wheels because we want quite wheels.

If you get the hammer or the grease depends upon what is needed to fix the problem. Do you need a punishment or a reward.

I typically follow that with a warning that the wheel that squeaks too much or too loudly gets replaced. A personal lesson on appeasement or the value of conformity, I suppose.

And in Japanese there are a plenitude of idioms about not standing out. The high post gets hammered down, the tall flower gets pruned, and the speeding car gets stopped are others I've encountered.

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?

Another regarding gender expectations is the recent news that a (maybe more than 1?) Japanese medical school's admissions staff were rigging standardized test scores to disfavor women applicants. This is because they were seen as less reliable / career-oriented or productive (or whatever justification) for not favoring them to receive the education that men deserve.

Expectations.

It isn't an irrational bias thing. Women in Japan are pressured to stay at home to take care of the kids, so they're less likely to work as much as a men.

Bias is bias. Not to mention this can cause vicious cycles where women don't progress in their career due to a perception they'll become homemakers -> are pressured to work less because the career is going nowhere -> continue to not progress.

This wasn't a case of gender discrimination. It wasn't a requirement that girls have black hair specifically, but that students do. The issue is the assumption that black == natural, which for people who aren't ethnically Japanese may not be the case

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

Michele Gelfand on tight vs loose cultures. There's also a link there to her TEDx talk.

I remember there was a YouTube video making comparison between Japan and China. Of course Japan is much better in many obvious ways, and the comment sections also reflect most people prefer Japan over China.

Then I saw a Japanese commented when he was traveling in China he saw a lot of employees playing with their cellphones during working hours. He said he was all of a sudden really jealous of those people do that while in Japan he has to work all day long without much personal life.

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 people at HN think are the real reasons.

For what it's worth, as a scatterbrained person, I think it would be great living in a country with so much trust that I could expect my lost things not to be stolen.

Homogenous, nationalistic, small country with high IQ, good education system, high GDP, low levels of immigration, and a culture that emphasizes community.

Oh, and lower levels of inequality, relatively, and a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust.

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.

China is rapidly developing. A lot of Chinese people would LOVE to see a move towards a lot of what Japan has, they just haven't been able to implement it yet (because of historical reasons that left the country screwed up).

Immigration has been steadily increasing in Japan.[1] That homogeneity presupposes trust is a right-wing stereotype used to devalue immigrants in a society and justify harsh enforcement. You can find people of every ethnicity in Tokyo, including many half and full Brazilian people that you could mistake for latinos here in the US[2].

1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/11/national/japan-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan#Migration_...

Go to Japan. Immigration is absolutely nothing like European or American countries.

I have. I've been to Tokyo. When I said you can find people of every ethnicity, I meant I encountered people of every ethnicity.

1 in 10 residents of Tokyo are foreign nationals[1]. https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO32872510R10C18A7EA2000/

> 東京都では20歳代の10人に1人が外国人だった。

1 in 10 people in their twenties. (Still more than I expected.)

The situation is very very different outside of a few big cities. We spent a few days in Izumo and in the area around it and we hardly saw any non Japanese at the turrist spots, let alone any locals.

>Ethnic groups: Japanese 98.1%, Chinese 0.5%, Korean 0.4%, other 1% (includes Filipino, Vietnamese, and Brazilian)

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

It's true that Japan has a lot more ethnic homogenity than most countries, but this is is a misleading statistic. The Japanese census considers all people with Japanese citizenship to be simply "Japanese" regardless of their race.

There have been 559,789 naturalizations total from 1952 to 2018: http://www.moj.go.jp/content/001180510.pdf

Many of those have probably died by now, but likely not without leaving a few descendants. So there may be a million or so Japanese citizens with a family background involving migration within the last few generations.

Ainu, Ryukyuans and Burakumin should probably also be counted as "non-homogeneous", even though they're not "foreign".

besides from naturalizations, there's also quite few half-japanese people that acquire citizenship by birth-right. Although I'm pretty sure the wide consensus in Japan is that half-japanese is considered non-japanese, so the number would go down a little bit more.

Do you have a source for that? It's certainly not the legal case.

> That homogeneity presupposes trust is a right-wing stereotype used to devalue immigrants in a society and justify harsh enforcement.

The fact it's a right wing idea doesn't mean it's wrong. A nation's laws is written by its people. The fact is different peoples have different cultures and follow different sets of rules. The ideal immigrant is the one who naturalizes and fully integrates into the existing society. What usually happens is they stick together in foreigner groups for mutual support. They maintain their culture and continue living by the same rules they are used to.

It is extremely demoralizing to see people not only break the rules we follow but come out ahead for doing so while escaping any retribution. It's even worse when foreigners do it because it simply isn't part of their culture. If a group of people doesn't litter the streets and foreigners who think nothing of it suddenly arrive, they will be looked down upon.

> You can find people of every ethnicity in Tokyo, including many half and full Brazilian people that you could mistake for latinos here in the US

A relative minority. Many more japanese live in Brazil than the other way around.

>What usually happens is they stick together in foreigner groups for mutual support.

Which is why proactive government outreach and support is so important. Why trust-building is important. People need to understand the VASTLY different role police play in Japan, and they need that information communicated in accessible ways. Harsh enforcement degrades that trust and creates insularity. Immigrants provide benefits to the host countries' economies, but rather than use some of that wealth to create and foster social programs, host country politicians instead use these communities as a scapegoat for the anger generated by austerity's impacts on the working poor.

Countries want the economic benefits of immigrants without the necessary investment in immigrant communities.

>They maintain their culture and continue living by the same rules they are used to.

Every person understands theft and the effects it has. This notion that the immigrant or their community is somehow inherently lesser or more tolerant or capable of anti-social behavior is textbook xenophobia.

> Harsh enforcement degrades that trust and creates insularity.

Indeed. It increases the risk associated with being part of that society. I don't know what the correct answer is.

> Countries want the economic benefits of immigrants without the necessary investment in immigrant communities.

Many immigrants also want the benefits of living in a developed country with a high quality of life without fully integrating into the society that made it possible in the first place.

> Every person understands theft and the effects it has.

Yes, but the rules and consequences for violating them are not universal. Depending on where they come from, violence may be an acceptable way to resolve conflicts. In some circles, people are immediately held accountable for their actions. In other circles, they might be quietly excluded from a group.

> This notion that the immigrant or their community is somehow inherently lesser or more tolerant or capable of anti-social behavior is textbook xenophobia.

Not all immigrants will be like this but it is a mistake to simply ignore their background. Every immigrant has the potential to naturalize but it is also important to think about what could happen should they fail to integrate.

> The ideal immigrant is the one who naturalizes and fully integrates into the existing society.

Ideal according to what metric(s)?

According to the population who already lives there and have well-established laws and customs. Humans are tribal, diversity isn't generally desired by most.

I live in the Japanese city with the highest number of Brazilian immigrants. My wife works for a law firm.

Most of their cases are insurance settlements and divorce disputes. They have a few criminal cases, but the overwhelming majority are foreigners. Americans get occasional shoplifting busts, and virtually all drug and violent crime issues are Brazilians and some Filipinos. “Virtually” as in in the year she’s been there, they’ve all been foreigners except for maybe 2 domestic violence cases. Drug distribution cases involving immigrants come in at a rate of at least once a week.

There’s no slum or anything resembling a ghetto here, and virtually all of them have decent employment with auto manufacturers.

Side note, I’m a foreigner as well.

> a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust.

Japan is essentially a right-wing, one-party “democracy” put in place by US intelligence services, postwar. The current prime minister is literally the grandson of a CIA-backed war criminal, who was famously known as the “Devil of the Showa Period”:

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

Freedom of the press is absolutely abysmal in Japan and has been further on the downslide since Abe came to power:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/13/japan-accused-...

I speak Japanese, have spent a lot of time in the country, and have a great admiration for its people, but about the last thing I’d express any admiration for are its politics and media. And speaking anecdotally, very few people there seem to put much trust in them either.

I didn’t express admiration, I just pointed out the reasons the people have such high trust and cooperation.

>I speak Japanese, have spent a lot of time in the country, and have a great admiration for its people, but about the last thing I’d express any admiration for are its politics and media.

While the media might not be great, at least the politicians, right-wing as they may be, actually seem to be trying to do things to improve the country, and even pushing some relatively progressive ideas (for instance, they're pushing for more women in corporate leadership positions, something Japan is woefully behind on). I just can't say the same for America these days; our national government (and especially the executive branch) is moving things backwards and making things worse.

Abe has a good PR team pushing this narrative abroad, but it doesn’t map to the material reality of most women. While female labor force participation rates are up, most women are locked into lower-level positions with bad wages and little hope of advancement.

Likewise, women still face a level of misogyny in Japan that is truly unimaginable to most Americans. This has been led in no small part by Abe and the LDP, who insist on the enforcement of absolutely regressive social mores. Most recently, they vehemently opposed women being allowed to keep their own last names upon marriage.

>Abe has a good PR team pushing this narrative abroad

>While female labor force participation rates are up, most women are locked into lower-level positions with bad wages and little hope of advancement.

How is that the government's fault? That sounds like a problem at the corporations. In any democratic country, the government only has so much power over the personnel decisions of companies. You can argue they should have more regulation, but how exactly do you force companies to promote more women into the executive ranks without having the government basically take over the corporations (which reeks of authoritarianism)?

>This has been led in no small part by Abe and the LDP, who insist on the enforcement of absolutely regressive social mores.

Examples?

>Most recently, they vehemently opposed women being allowed to keep their own last names upon marriage.

Did they succeed?

As for misogyny and Americans, is Japan trying to ban abortion? They most certainly are in America, and it's quite possible it'll happen to some extent thanks to Trump's SCOTUS appointees.

>Homogenous, nationalistic, small country with high IQ, good education system, high GDP, low levels of immigration, and a culture that emphasizes community.

I've lived in a Scandinavian country with similar quantities most of my life (well except low levels of immigration) but I can't recall a single time lost property came back, even at a local small town bakery. The experience is very different from my life living in Tokyo.

>Oh, and lower levels of inequality, relatively, and a more aligned politics/media system that doesn’t foment distrust.

Considering my homecountry having almost the lowest level of inequality in the world, and a highly aligned political/media system I don't think this is a factor either.

> I've lived in a Scandinavian country with similar quantities most of my life but I can't recall a single time lost property came back

But my experience is the opposite: Managed to leave my backpack on a bench in the busiest part of Oslo S when taking the train with too much skis and stuff so I forgot it in the struggle. Anyone could have just snatched it walking by, but instead someone saw it was unattended and delivered it at some lost&found so I got it back a week later.

Also in Oslo, I forgot my laptop at the table on an outside cafe. When I came back to fetch it a few hours later it was still where I left it.

So while there probably can be differences between countries, I also think it's too easy to extract too much from one's own experiences, which may not be typical.

Shame and the homogeneous makeup of the population likely play large roles.

Comparing China to Japan won't do any good as the cultural revolution decimated its social capital.

I don't know about that last part. Most Eastern European countries were part of the USSR and underwent massive revolutions. I've even seen them described as low-trust societies, but they seem to do well.

The Cultural Revolution was unlike the political revolutions of Eastern Europe. It was a bloody orgy of violence and vandalism that attempted to tear traditional Chinese culture out from the roots, and in the process destroyed China's social fabric and trust, perhaps irreparably (or at least until the Party collapses and the country can confront its past - something the Eastern European nations have been allowed to do).

An excerpt from the book 'Out of Mao's Shadow':

> Families were torn apart as wives divorced husbands who had been accused of political crimes, children condemned parents, and siblings turned against one another. When the Cultural Revolution finally ended, it was easier for many people just to move on than talk about it...

> ...Such violence has not been expunged from the country’s collective memory so much as repressed, and repressed memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly. There have always been voices in China calling on the nation to confront the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution. Only with an honest accounting and thoughtful examination of the era, they argue, can the country come to terms with the legacy of mistrust and moral decay that haunts it today.

The cultural revolution was not the cause of this. Chinese history did not start in 1966. 1966 was preceded by six decades of brutal military occupation, a complete breakdown of law and order, and civil war.

I'm not sure you can point at any country that had gone through such a violent, unstable, and lengthy period of fragmentation and bloodshed, and came out on the other end as a cohesive, high-trust society.

Taiwan and South Korea were both bloody, autocratic military regimes. Many nations have walked the bridge to hell and back, but the cultural revolution meant that China burned the bridge after crossing it.

One of your examples further proves my point - nobody can categorize Taiwan as a high-cohesion, high-trust society, despite not having a 1966 moment.

The other's not a very close parallel.

Korea was under Japanese occupation in that same time period, which was no picnic, but it at least had a functional, centralized government, and at least, was not an active warzone through most of it. (It is more similar to post-war Eastern Europe in that regard.)

It also did not go through a multi-decade-long civil war.

> nobody can categorize Taiwan as a high-cohesion, high-trust society

Having done business in both, it is an order of magnitude better than mainland China, both in terms of civil society (helping out strangers, littering, tax dodging etc) and in terms of larger-scale trust issues (prevalence of fraud). Same goes for Korea. (As for Korea not being an active war zone and having a functional centralized government in WW2... the Korean War put paid to that pretty quickly.)

> Having done business in both, it is an order of magnitude better than mainland China, both in terms of civil society (helping out strangers, littering, tax dodging etc)

Your personal anecdotal experience does necessarilly agree with the statistics. There's a difference, but not an order of magnitude one.

According to the corruption perception index, Japan is at 73, the US is at 71, Taiwan at 63, Korea is at 57, India is at 41, China is at 39, and the Phillipines are at 37. Neither India, nor the Phillipines had a 1966 moment, if I may point out.

According to trust polling, people in China trust their peers, and businesses more than in most other countries, but I'd assume you would want to dismiss that result.

I can't think of a good objective proxy besides those two. Do you know of one?

> As for Korea not being an active war zone and having a functional centralized government in WW2... the Korean War put paid to that pretty quickly.

The Korean war lasted 3 years, and was largely a proxy conflict, with clearly-defined sides, largely made up of foreign armies.

The Chinese civil war lasted 30, without anyone having a clear understanding of who the enemy was.

It's like saying "The United States had a civil war, and it's now fine!" There's more than an order of magnitude difference in the cultural trauma of a war that lasts a few years, and one that lasts an entire generation.

Yeah, but North Korea is still deep in the hole

What do you mean when you say eastern european countries "do well" (supposedly compared to China)?

Some (like the Baltics) are doing great, but I don't think I'd rather live in Moldova, the Ukraine or Albania rather than China.

“Well” was the wrong word (unless one is thinking of the experiment as a test). I simply meant the percentage of lost wallets returned. In the study from Science that the LA Times article covers, this group of countries as a block did better than all countries from South America or Asia, for instance.

I completely agree. Foreign culture analyses like this are always tinged with bias and an incurable desire to find little small-picture justifications. I'm sick and tired of seeing every random quirk of Japanese people being explained as "Shinto this, Buddhism that"; it's such an oversimplification. The interior lives of human beings are built upon perhaps 1,000,000 variables, not just 3 variables.

The writing is in English, published by someone who spent an entire life growing up in the West. And, as you mentioned, this "returning item phenomenon" seems not to be the case in modern China, even in the cities.

If you want to even begin to describe Eastern culture in English, maybe take a look at how hard it was, and still is, to articulate the internal world of the Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_soul

I interpreted this particular article's main point as being:

Don't assume Japanese people are more honest than people in other countries, there are many social and cultural factors at play that influence behavior.

Generalizing a group of people is almost always inaccurate, and often frustrating to read, but I don't think this article is an egregious example of that. This is a fluff piece to get people interested in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, don't mistake it for serious cultural analysis.

I was born in one of the "safe" East Asian countries and I think it all comes down to their sense of ownership in the community. Koreans and Japanese have this deeply ingrained idea that the entire history of their country has been built and run by their "people" and they will have a hivemind-allergic reaction to anything they see as undesirable. There's very little crime in public in these countries because people equate a crime that happens in some back alley of a major city to a crime that happens in your cousin's backyard. It's simply abhorrent.

Needless to say, this culture does have its drawbacks, but I think the key takeaway is to increase people's sense of ownership in our communities.

Clearly, it's a lasting side effect of the Meiji Restoration, because it's one of the few things I remember about Japanese history.

While that was a joke, that does seem to be how people pick these explanations. Everything about Japan seems to be explainable by social homogeneity, WW2, or philosophy/religion, which is just the set of facts foreigners tend to know about Japan.

I can't explain my own culture, and I've actually studied its history. I'm not even confident I can identify the differences it has with other cultures. We're often more similar than we think.

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).

BTW, the japanese Shinto shrines and Budhist temples just seem so much more alive and part of the community, than western churches, which often seem like almost foreign and disconnected from actual current society.

Part of this, imo, has to do with the architecture and it will really depend on the city (speaking from a US perspective) you're in. If you're in Philadelphia or an older city on the East Coast some of the old Catholic or Episcopalian Churches/Cathedrals do feel like they're integrated into the community because they were built around the same time as the rest of the buildings and housing. In the midwest this trend kind of wanes, as many of the Catholic Churches were built after Vatican II and ... don't have the same kind of aesthetic, to put it mildly, and weren't necessarily built the same time other housing was built. By the time you get to the West Coast you'll start finding examples again that feel like they belong there, like Spanish Missions. So it's mostly age and the timeframe in which everything was built.

All that said, I've greatly enjoyed my trips to Japan and feel the same way about their Shrines.

Yeah, and there's evidence everywhere that these shrines are active. They're taken care of, there's always offerings, old cemeteries centuries old are littered with recent wooden arches, ribbons, flowers, and other recent stuff, and bigger shrines with attendants have long lines to get red book stamps.

In China, it's very common to leave your property out of sight for minutes and it would be stolen. Collectivism isn't really associated to this topic at all.

I found this similar mentality in Korea where you can leave your laptop, phone, etc. at a cafe completely exposed on a table while you go to the restroom or even out to lunch. When you come back your stuff will still be there.

As I live in NYC, this completely blew my mind and I still felt that anxiety and awkwardness just leaving my stuff to go use the restroom. Near guaranteed theft in NYC lol.

---

And to add another story. A friend and I were traveling in Japan a few years ago. My friend had the lucky privilege of forgetting his backpack (with laptop, passport, all the not-fun-stuff to lose items) not once, but twice during the trip.

The first time, he forgot it on the train ride to Osaka (left it on the rack above the seats). The bag went all the way to the end of the line. 4 hour round trip to get it back, but we were super surprised.

Second time was the day we were to fly back. He left it on the train platform bench (!!!) for that non-stop ride to Narita. That feeling of dread when we started moving and he realized he had to wait at least an hour before he could contact anybody about it.

Long story short, he took the 1 hour train back and it was still sitting there. Missed the flight, but got everything back safely. Amazing.

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. I never had anything stolen, and the people I ask don't seem bothered in the slightest. It's a very small burden, and I think there's something pleasant about having someone put their trust in you.

This is the standard I've encountered at coffee shops and school libraries, no one seems to mind. However, it would be easy to build an app that alarms when the battery becomes disconnected (i.e. someone walks away with your stuff).

> It would be easy to build an app that alarms when the battery becomes disconnected (i.e. someone walks away with your stuff).

Wait what? How does this work?

This is already a thing: https://beepify.com

$19.99...

Seems a reasonable price.

If laptops/phones have power events that you could hook into for when charger is unplugged. Just start blaring the speakers when you detect such an event without the alarm being disarmed first.

on OSX or Linux you could grep the logs every few minutes or seconds or whatever and see the battery status that includes AC power. From there you could have it alert you via whatever method you want.

On OSX:

pmset -g rawlog

Output:

$ pmset -g rawlog pmset is in RAW logging mode now. Hit ctrl-c to exit. * Battery matched at registry = XXXX 01/15/20 XX:XX:XX No AC; Not Charging; 75%; Cap=5490: FCC=XXXX; Design=XXXX; Time=X:XX; -752mA; Cycles=14/1000; Location=XX; Polled boot=01/15/20 XX:XX:XX; Full=01/15/20 XX:XX:XX; User visible=01/15/20 XX:XX:XX

I expect there are more elegant solutions, but this would theoretically work, as I used to use this among other things to track my daily laptop usage to see how on task I was any given day. If the lid is closed but unplugged then I was probably going to/in a meeting, if the lid is closed and charging then I was likely afk, not working. Worked pretty well to give me a ballpark of my productivity.

If you just want to talk to someone, I get it, but otherwise there's no point. Nobody's going to fight a thief to safeguard a stranger's stuff (and shouldn't because they could be sued by the thief). And it's a crime of opportunity, thiefs are not sitting in cafes waiting for a laptop user to go to the bathroom; high risk, low reward.

> 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 entrance and leave my stuff with reasonable confidence. YMMV of course.

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.

Wow, this guy got a double life sentence plus 40 years for "money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics"? He could have gotten a lighter sentence if he had carried out a mass shooting.

And how did the flash drive trick work? Was he running Windows on that laptop? Very bad idea.

I lost my phone on the NYC subway. It was returned to a station and I picked it up a week later.

Here in Hong Kong that’s pretty common too, I’m still super surprised people actually do this without fear. I regularly work in coffee shops, but when I need to use the bathroom I always take all my stuff with me.

When I was living in Japan, i once lost my wallet on a bicycle ride. It must have fallen out of my pocket somewhere on the route i was taking.

I didn't notice it was missing until I got home, got my keys out to open the door and realised the wallet was missing. I went back out on the bike and retraced my route but couldnt see the wallet annoyed that I would have to cancel cards, get a new ID card.

After I got home again, i was procrastinating about cancelling the cards for about 30mins and then decided to crack on. After I picked up the phone to start, the front door bell rang, I opened the door and there were 2 ladies with my wallet, they handed me my wallet, asked me to check everything was there and then apologized for taking so long to return my wallet.

Apparently they found my wallet, went to an address I had left in there, but I had recently moved apartments, so they went to the Koban, Police officer told them my address based off my ID card and then they came to my address.

Well, would you look at that privacy leakage there.

"What’s in it for the finder to be honest enough to hand in the item?"

By asking this question, you deny yourself access to its answer.

When you take a basic moral truth, but then phrase it so that it will not immediately be apparent what you are saying....

You create the appearance of profound wisdom. And often book deals.

Studies have shown people recall information better if they had to put some effort into acquiring it. Sometimes a profound wisdom lodges better if the "ah-ha" moment occurs in the reader's mind and not on the page.

Why? That's the kind of question that makes up the entire field of game theory.

In every situation, the most natural strategy is to maximize personal gains. That's how natural selection works. But when people don't act like that, it means there must be some opposing force, normally one that benefits society. There is a lot to learn here, in fields as diverse as biology, economics, computing, and of course, games.

> 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.

> optimal

i.e., there is something in it for them. It doesn't have to be a tangible thing, it could be a simple as self-satisfaction.

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.

As Hobbes writes in The Leviathan, Western civilization views the world as a "war of all men against all other men." Basically, the world is made up of individuals, and everyone is on their own, and they must fight with others in a zero-sum game to attain safety and happiness. If you subscribe to this view, it becomes harder for people to see that it's actually in your interest to act in good faith.

That is how I understood GP's comment.

I guess there's just this mentality of "the peace of all with all" instead of "the war of all against all". That's how it feels.

>Why? That's the kind of question that makes up the entire field of game theory.

I think it depends upon the person who is asking. The average person asking it comes from a different perspective than someone who studies game theory and human nature asking the question.

I don't know what it means to say "that's how natural selection works" in this context. At times, evolutionary pressure favors cooperation and altruism.

It's not quite at the level of Japan, but Aftenposten, which is a newspaper in Norway, conducted a test [1] (translation [2]) in Oslo where they "lost" 20 wallets. 15 eventually returned.

Personally I've lost my wallet twice and it has been returned both times.

It is nice to be able to trust your fellow citisens somewhat :)

[1] https://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/i/zlOb/slik-gikk-det-da-a...

[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

The Toronto Star tried the same thing in Toronto. 15 of 20 were returned. (One minus the cash.)

https://www.thestar.com/life/2009/04/25/we_left_20_wallets_a...

Another study was done with multiple countries and 17,000 wallets with some interesting results

https://www.boredpanda.com/social-experiment-lost-found-wall...

The abundance of "police boxes" in Japan, small satellite police stations, probably helps a lot.

While living in Japan, I found a lost wallet on the street, in the gutter. That wallet was sitting just down the street from the police. Line-of-sight. Picking up the wallet and taking it to the station was immediately obvious and convenient.

I love the police boxes. When I was in Japan the officers helped me a lot with directions and reading maps.

That's totally different from America, where police will get pissed and yell at you to get lost if you ask them for directions. (Speaking from personal experience)

I know! I didn’t even have to ask for help in Japan. I think seeing a tourist holding a map is all they need to spring into action. Gotta keep those tourists out of trouble.

I like how police officers in other countries look like normal humans and not stormtroopers. Makes me feel safe.

>I like how police officers in other countries look like normal humans and not stormtroopers. Makes me feel safe.

Yep, I feel exactly the same. The police in Japan look very professional, and not at all like stormtroopers; the shirt and tie they wear just isn't something you'd wear into combat.

See: https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3451993.1523010914!...

Versus: https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-respect-for-police-re...

It also helps that police in other countries don't just shoot first and ask questions later, like American police: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-pacific-38534288/wrap...

"Tamura describes the concept of 'hito no me'; the ‘societal eye’. Even without a police presence, no theft will occur while there is hito no me. But left in a place where there is no one watching, thefts do occur."

"Likewise, in Shintoism everything, from rocks to trees, possesses a spirit. While organised Shintoism is a minority practice in Japan, omniscient objects permeate the culture....if you are always being watched and your natural disposition is to think of others first, it is natural that you would be bothered to hand in the lost item."

The concept of "standing out" is a bit foreign in collectivist cultures like Japan, and getting blamed/shunned/etc for stealing would be mentally taxing.

That is how I analyzed it for the most part since there was such a wide variance between countries. Eastern Europe really stood out to me and I believe that may have to do with a generation of people that were used to the surveillance state of post-communist society.

In the US, the social impact generally means little, however the economic and time one matters a lot (via jail or fines). Post-communist states might be still conditioned to live in a culture where people are used to corrupt police that ENSURING you have nothing damning is far better than taking a risk and dealing with getting out of that.

> In a study comparing dropped phones and wallets in New York and Tokyo, 88% of phones “lost” by the researchers were handed into the police by Tokyo residents, compared to 6% of the ones “lost” in New York. Likewise, 80% of Tokyo wallets were handed in compared to 10% in New York.

Wow!

My phone slipped out of my pocket on the subway on my last night in Tokyo. Realized 20 minutes later, talked to some employees and described what kind of phone it was (a cheap Samsung, really not a big deal), gone as can be. Flew back home to Miami.

Received my phone back in the mail a month later. A friend of mine there kept checking with the employees and it eventually showed up in lost and found. Refused to allow me to pay for the international shipping.

My first day in Japan I fell asleep on the train. I woke up to a train employee telling me to leave the train. I grabbed my bag and left in a daze, only to realize too late that I left my duffle bag on the top shelf. I reported it and was assured that it would be found. 2 weeks later they still hadn't found my bag but kindly told me that it must have been a Korean.

Um. Well, that was 20 years ago. I'm sure things are different now.

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 asked the Korean-American why Japanese didn't like Koreans.

The EU guy said when he visited Japan in 2000, Japanese told him they didn't like Koreans.

And than in 2005 or so, he heard from Japanese that they liked Koreans.

In what context the Japanese told a blond European guy why they liked or didn't like Koreans is unknown.

This EU born coworker was confused what changed in that 5 year period.

> 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.

This might give you some perspective. I befriended and later dated a Korean whose parents were both Korean but even though she was born in Japan, since her parents never became citizens, she was still considered an alien. So, even though she was raised in Japan and spoke fluent Japanese (as well as English) and was for all intents and purposes as Japanese as anyone in Japan, she had to go back to Japan every couple years to renew her... resident visa.

It might be a while until such attitudes go away. From what I can tell the feeling isn't very mutual on the Korean side, either.

Funny this story should come up now.

Two days ago I was on my regular running route and I saw a wallet on the ground. It had 5000 yen (around 50 USD) sticking out of it. The weather was a bit damp and it was far from a police box so I didn't want to risk getting randomly stopped and searched on my way to hand it in so I just put it on a fence post and went on my way.

I run the same route everyday, so when I ran the next day lo and behold, the wallet was still there, complete with 5000 yen note sticking out. I'm curious if it will still be there on today's run.

Is getting randomly stopped and searched a concern?

It doesn't happen that often but it does happen. Foreign residents are required to carry a resident card at all times and the police are allowed to check for it. This can come with a search.

Japanese nationals don't need to carry any form of ID by law, so you can see that how the police choose who to stop might be somewhat problematic.

I lived in Japan for over 3 years and I was never stopped. It can happen, technically, but I don't think it happens all that often.

Personally I have never experienced a random stop here in Japan. None of my friends here have worried about such either.

It depends on where you live. There are areas where you never hear of it, and others where being carded once or twice a year is the norm.

I think part of this is that a far greater proportion of "lost" valuables in Japan are _really_ lost than in other countries, street crime being pretty rare.

But still, that 6% figure for New York! Can it be true? Is it really normal to steal other people's shit if they leave it behind?

Yes.

A youtuber did a similar test (but probably a lot less controlled) and it wasn't that bad (4/10 for NYC). Result spreadsheet: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m2ahob0949mmj3s/Wallet%20Data%20Ag...

Man, I was living in the UK. A kid on a skateboard dropped his phone, didn't notice. Less than a minute later, a guy (gardener or construction worker by the looks of it) picks it off the ground and gets in his van. Bye bye phone.

Another time, found a wallet and returned it, the woman said it's unbelievable, no one else would do that. Gave me 10 pounds, too, heh (there was way more in the wallet, plus cards and ID, it's how I found her). I'd be very happy if someone did that for me.

But yeah, usually "finders keepers" holds true :/

I like these kind of stories from Japan, makes it seem like people do respect each other. Shame not everything is that good over there.

What would a better response be to a dropped phone? From the story as told the guy may well have tried to find the phone's owner when he got a free minute.

Catch up to the kids and return it? They were down the street within view. Tbf, I'm not one to judge, I just watched, so...

But still, that 6% figure for New York! Can it be true? Is it really normal to steal other people's shit if they leave it behind?

Who said anything about shit getting stolen? The article claims: 88% of phones “lost” by the researchers were handed into the police by Tokyo residents, compared to 6% of the ones “lost” in New York. (emphasis mine)

I found a wallet in NY once. The ID had the owner's address around the corner and I was able to drop it off to him. I found a phone once (I noticed it was ringing on an otherwise empty table) it was the phone's owner calling from her girlfriend's phone. I was able to hand it back to her myself. The cops really didn't need to get involved in either case and didn't. In another American city, I've left my phone in a cab and gotten it back without going through the police as well. Is a city a less trustful place if the cops aren't thought of as a lost & found?

In our area of the UK, possibly nationwide, the police non longer accept normal lost property. Infuriating.

I found someone's house key in the road, likely of a nearby resident.

A safety issue as far as I was concerned - not a particularly rough neighbourhood but not a great one either. Some smackheads would absolutely have tried it in the closeby doors.

Police couldn't help. I ended up putting it in an envelope with a note, posting it through the letterbox of the nearest church. I put up a note on the closest lamppost, posted a redacted photo on Facebook, but never heard anything further.

Just as an anecdote from a NYC resident, a couple years back I found a Japanese woman's wallet on a commuter bus. From the address I saw that the owner lived in my neighborhood so I went by her home after work to return it. Nobody was home so I left a little note with my phone number. She called me, and I met her the next day to return it to her. I considered our business concluded but about two months later she and her husband sent me a Christmas card with a gift card inside. I thanked them but sent the gift card back.

I have also lost my own wallet on multiple occasions when I was younger and more careless, and I would say it was returned maybe two out of five times. Not great, but not that bad either.

I don't know about Japanese culture, but where I'm from accepting the gift would be the polite thing to do (vs rejecting it).

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.

If they attend a church, they are really odd for Japanese, since almost no Japanese are Christian (at least in Japan).

they represent about 1% of population (see https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/Pope-Francis-...), seems to me that "almost none" is bit strong :)

You could have just given it to a needy person yourself.

Americans would find it rude because accepting help is a burden on the giver and a failure of the receiver's independence.

I can't speak to NYC but in SF you absolutely will lose your shit. I have had coworkers get their cars broken into midday after leaving their backpack unattended for an hour or so. Friends have had their backpacks yanked from between their legs on Bart as it entered a station. These are not situations where these items are just laying around, and they were still taken.

Coworkers have lost their laptops at bars or coffee shops because they got up for a few minutes. It could be that the value is so well established in this area; if you steal a backpack you are almost guaranteed to get a Macbook. IDK if that is similar in NY.

My wallet dropped out of my pocket in Manhattan. After maybe 10 minutes, somebody picked it up and proceeded to buy as many things with my cards until I cancelled them.

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 car. As he turned he dropped a couple of bills. I just shouted out to him to bring it to my attention so he could get it. I don't feel anything about the incident and would be hard pressed to use it as a barometer of my character.

I don't. I do "good" things because that's the way I was raised. I actually dislike getting thanked or anything that draws attention to the "good" thing I did because it seems so needless.

Occasionally I'll feel a twinge of guilt if I could've helped out and didn't but usually I do it out of habit.

Likely a few dollars means nothing to you so the act of pointing the nearly lost dollars is a similar small task (not withstanding the possibility the act could have a profound effect on the recipient depending on their situation).

When I was younger and we were struggling hard, we found a wallet in a store loaded with green bills. That money would have had immediate, real, positive impact for us, like gas money and food that we did not have. We turned in the wallet and did not bother counting the bills. The cashier might have pocketed the money, who knows. But hopefully the owner of the wallet got their stuff back. I think that act does cast a barometer on my and my wife's character. We did what was "right" -- the property was not ours and not ours to take. Did we feel good about it? Nope! It was just doing the right thing even though there was a touch of pain to it.

Why did you give the wallet to a random person you had no reason to trust when you could have looked at the address on the ID in the wallet and taken it there yourself?

Solid question. We did not have a vehicle to deliver nor a way to pay postage to mail them their wallet. Also, naive youth - we just hoped the store clerk would do the right thing when the person came back looking for their wallet.

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.

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.

I remember forgetting an umbrella in a restaurant in Tokyo, and being chased down in the street by someone returning it. It was pretty amazing.

Anecdotal evidence here: Went to Japan, was out in a crowded area after dinner. A woman's wallet fell out of her pocket as she walked along. Literally a crowd of people rushed to pick it up and give it back to her. Never seen anything like that. One of many strange phenomena observed on the streets of Tokyo at night.

Yes, it is very impressive. I lost my prepaid card (Suica card? withou name or password stuff) with tens of thousands of Yen in Tokyo's Disneyland train in last year. After half an hour, a sweating Metro staff found it and returned to me.

The article attributes this characteristic with Buddhism and collectivism without much comparative evaluation, and I find the explanation utterly unconvincing. For if it is Buddhism and communalism that led to such societal behavior, why is it that its neighboring largely Buddhist and largely collectivist East Asian and South-East Asian neighbors don't exhibit such characteristics? A proper argument in terms of "cultural history" needs to account for comparative evidence.

Interestingly when I encounter this kind of sloppy "cultural history" reasoning it is from a BBC article.

Little-known tip: in the US, if you happen to find a lost wallet that contains an ID, you can just drop it in the nearest postbox and the USPS has the duty to attempt to return it to its rightful owner. Here's the relevant page of the postal code: https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/507.htm

Given what I've seen and also have personally experienced with postal employees, I wouldn't place much trust in it, for example:

"USPS loses about $1800 of packages from store.rossmanngroup.com :(" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4CCuMg6jXI

I don't think you can point the reason for this on one specific cause, and better bundle it up as "culture".

I've wonder if this is also the cause for the low appreciation for privacy in the Japanese society. I've noticed that the Japanese seems to be more "ok" with the idea of Google/Facebook/Line/big company snooping around and collecting your data, even engineers. It is also culturally more accepted to point out physical feature and ask private questions in this country. "you've become fat!", "Why don't you have a girlfriend/boyfriend?", "you speak/walk/do something very weird" is comments you can get from both relatives, co-workers and not-so-close friends.

The typical "mind your own business" attitude you expect in the west seems to not be as prevalent here, and the "If you have nothing to hide, you don't need anonymity and privacy" is an argument most people consider to be valid here.

its funny that this article is part of a japan 2020 olympics feature, when there will surely be an increase in crime and bad behavior due to all the 2020 visitors.

i lost a phone in shinjuku station and located with the help of the station employees within 30 minutes. somehow they did this location act in the busiest subway junction in the world, with just a few phone calls.

Proves that honesty is really about being well trained. Which in America at least is the backbone of many, many unsolved problems . A entire culture based upon education and training only going to who is approved by the State and Capital, instead of training young people because they are young, and people.

discipline, education and culture

> discipline and culture

Monoculture

Do you say that with a negative or positive tone ? It's hard to tell from your answer. And if so, why ?

I took it as an observation or speculation of cause and effect. There is no judgement (positive or negative) needed for this.

So like a monorepo ? ;-)

It's both a myth that Japan is, or ever has been, a "monoculture", and quite the leap to assume a "monoculture" would produce such behaviour.

I was in Japan in 2008 and we didn't have an umbrella, when someone from a store gave it to us I felt so happy and thankful from the store how come a random person be so nice, couldn't believe how they went from Naijinh to Pokemon in one generation

I notice that this story and the story about Carlos Ghosn's escape from Japan are both on the front page of HN.

Lucky for Ghosn, the rest of the world is less successful at returning Japan's lost property.

I love Japan and the mystery continues with its fascinating culture.

Britain is bad at returning stolen property. Eg Kohinoor

Because they care about others

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