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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

> US Americans tend to live in their homes, while in many other places people live in their city.

American cities generally have more of these problems than the burbs so this line of reasoning doesn't work irl.

Also you just haven't seen those fines. Doesn't matter what your sense of community is, once dem fines start rolling in you will NOT litter.

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I think you misunderstood OP.

For European city dwellers, "where you live" and a sense of "ownership" extends far beyond the walls of your apartment/home - to incorporate your neighborhood to some extent.

For a lot of US folks in cities, this doesn't seem to be the case.

At least, that's what I got from the post.

The post is wrong though. Tokyo isn't a nice city because Japanese people are mystically polite to each other, it's nice because it has good policies which you can copy yourself.

It is because of the culture of the Japanese people. In the World Cup and other stadiums they pick up all their trash when they leave and leave it pristine. They don’t have to worry about fines in the stadium.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/sportskind/2022/11/28/...

They are rather polite, but they also have good residential trash pickup.

In this case, anyway. It's actually pretty difficult to get rid of some things, so people can build up a lot of junk at home - Marie Kondo's books in Japan actually have extra sections on how to get rid of it.

Maybe. It's equally possible that any particular policy won't stand by itself. That for the garbage policy to work you also need some large number of other policies that are endogenous to Japan.

Rereading it I guess I did. Still not sure it’s true though. I largely consider this American individuality to be a myth

I'm not OP but I'm pretty sure the argument is that Americans (even in the city) lives less in the city and more in their homes - comparably.

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