First, there is the tax rate, which is super-high and the vast majority of Japanese pay without complaint. I am pretty sure there’s the highest top bracket in the world, and it’s super-progressive so you hit it quickly. Many of the foreigners who move to Japan try all sorts of tricks to avoid paying it (you get 5 years to avoid paying on foreign income not brought into the country), which just makes everyone else silently dislike them even more. I’ve literally been at a Japanese government office filing papers and overheard a Singapore resident asking a government employee if he can just transfer his business to a family member to avoid the tax rate because “it’s just too much.”
Then you’ve got the sense of shared suffering that is part of Japanese culture and super important. I think a lot of people who talk about “racial cohesion” are incorrectly identifying this, which is basically a sense that “we are all here to make this work for each other, and if you’re not you’re part of an other.” It’s not a race thing, although it can appear that way to others — if you’ve grown up in Northern Europe, you’ll understand what I mean; it’s kind of like the Asian version of Jante Law.
I can’t stress that shared suffering thing enough. Since the 1600s, Tokyo was destroyed on average of, like, once every 10 years, and right now everyone’s just waiting for the Great Earthquake and The Great Mount Fuji Eruption. It’s a hilarious, tragic, comical, romantic drama that plays out in the Japanese subconscious. (And since everyone will continue to pay a surtax for their shared national obligation to rebuild after the Fukushima earthquake — a tax that will continue for another decade — everyone’s also acutely aware that the bill will be massive, and they’ll be expected to contribute. Cue more foreigners departing to avoid taxes.)
The tax rate, combined with the sense of obligation to each other, supports one of the best healthcare systems in the world. Which in turn is part of one of the best government administrations in the world, filled with extremely smart people who feel a real sense of obligation toward their country to do a really good job. (Don’t confuse this with the political machine... let’s just not go into that.)
When you have a society where everyone is willing to “suffer” for each other, you can have a society like Tokyo. Like so many other great places, it works because people can just sort of expect others to do what’s right. And conversely, for reasons that look racist to outsiders but really aren’t, everyone also silently expects foreigners to do everything wrong. If there was an influx of people into Japan who didn’t share these values — and they’re real values, not a race thing — the whole country would quickly fall apart.