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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.

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Not sure what you are driving at. This thread was about Japan and I responded about Japan. If we were talking about Italy or South Korea then my response would be different.

You are correct that Japan isn't the only nation with large problems, particularly around declining populations. The thrust of my initial comment is that no nation is perfect and thoughts of "why aren't we just like that nation" are a little silly.

It's very easy to come up with a few bullet points of the big problems of a nation. Just like it's easy to generate such bullet points about the positives of a nation.

It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.

There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.

Businesses I've dealt with in the manufacturing world (so most American workers before the 'service economy' revolution) deal way more with Japanese companies than Italian. Also I think humans just need an ideal to aspire to. We don't respond well to 'it's all crap, always has been, always will be'. Foreign countries we like look better because we see what's better than where we are. There's a reason for the saying 'the grass is always greener (because from a distance you can't see it's full of dog crap)'.

> talking about "open kimono" leadership

That’s not a thing.

- Western media wants to focus on negatives of Japan because the idea of an alternative functioning system is narrative breaking. - now that UK is out of EU, negative EU messaging about Greece, Spain, and Italy is unlikely to reach US. - the media doesn’t want to promote a “declining white birth rate” narrative - there are a lot of nerds on the internet interested in Japanese culture. - neighboring Asian countries do not tend to love Japan

Anime and 90s propaganda from people appealing to Japanese businessmen.

Because we aren't bombarded with "Why don't we do things like they do in Italy" messages on every online forum like we are with Japan.

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