I always enjoyed this aspect of being in Tokyo. Similar to rayiner's comment, I'd then get a huge shock on return to Europe.
But I was also struck by the flip side of this when reading Murakami's account of the sarin gas attacks (Underground). Everyone was so keen not to make a fuss that trains were sent on their way too soon, poisoning even more people.
The best definition of "culture" I've ever found is "how we do things 'round here". It's valid in both the large and in the small.
Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.
Cultural baggage, for the lack of a better word, drives how we tend to approach reality (holistically or by dividing and classifying things, monistically or dualistically, materialistically or idealistically, and so on), and reality includes the very thing under discussion (consciousness, culture).
Shared cultural baggage is perhaps the thing that makes us believe another being is conscious (i.e., shares similar aspects of self-awareness). Shared culture manifests itself in an infinity of fine details of one’s behaviour; looking like a human but not behaving like a human can be a great horror movie trope, depending on how carefully shared culture is violated[0].
This carries over to animals, to a degree. A dog is social to an extent that many would consider it conscious. An octopus is legally recognised as sentient in some countries—thanks to it behaving in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of ourselves. Same reason we call ravens smart.
Most humans anywhere on the planet, though, share enough cultural baggage that we do not question whether others have what we consider consciousness; though I think some people are more sensitive to how much shared cultural baggage another human possesses, the small lack of which could lead to fear, cautiousness, and/or a feeling that they are in some ways subhuman (closer than a dog, but not as human as their peers in local community) relative to them, which eventually contributes to exclusion, racism, and so on (well demonstrated in both Japan and parts of the US).
[0] Arguably, “behaving sufficiently like a human while being not human at all”, which we have plenty of examples of now in the last year or two, is another such trope.
Majority of people are sleep-walking as machines driven by imitation, habit and external forces. We live in a dreamlike, mechanical state lacking the awareness of this itself. apropos: Gurdjieff
Are they rote-students imitating or copying memes and as such are driven by inadequate-ideas or are they students who understand the subject from its first assumptions and as such are driven by adequate-ideas. In the quote above, the suggestion is that majority are rote-students.
Which can, of course, be random, self-reinforcing, etc.
Culture, by and large, isn't random nor arbitrary. Culture is obviously influenced by the past and the environment, but it's mostly artificially created by the elites. Once established it is self-reinforcing.
> Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.
It's not mysterious. Monkey see, monkey do. We see the higher ups do it and we mimic. Or we are told this is how we do things and we obey. This applies to nations, corporations and families.
This is not unique to Germany, of course. We long ago gave up on the four humours theory. We long ago gave up on burning women who wear pants. We long ago gave up of many things that used to be European culture.
The culture of queuing in Japan works because you are looked down upon if you don't participate and because it is better than the random stuff we do in the West. However, it would probably disappear pretty soon if it wasn't also a good solution.
What is your epistemological basis for this claim? Any proof of this?
And just for extreme clarity note: at no point have I made a claim yet
Materialism is a theory, not a reality, but its adherents can't tell the difference.
Unfortunately there are quite a few things of that nature. In no case does it justify blindly picking one of the options and then following up with bold claims based on an arbitrary assumption.
Actually quite unbelievable to see it considered hilarious.
But in any case, your edge-cas applies when someone exists to manage the queue. That's not the case for e.g. elevators, self-checkout lanes, DMV lines, or, I'd argue, that vast majority of queues encountered regularly.
Well, Indians are the pits in all 3, so your definition computes.
Source: am Indian.
Yes, more so than everyone else who act like any animal. I can’t help to think of the “human test” in Dune, when we use our minds to override our instinctive urges, it is human behavior.
you know that voice in the back of your end that amps you up for your first day of a new job, or springs to life when you see someone doing something annoying like cutting in line, or fuels the anxiety in the back of your mind as you lay awake at night? that's just your inner voice, right?
well, really, a lot of people share inner voices. everyone has their own spin on it, and some people's inner voices are completely different than anyone else's (maybe schizophrenics? or prophets?), but generally there are shared components.
the collective aspects of these shared inner voices, if not culture, are at the very least what creates culture.
We are also limited by the linguistic structures we inhabit. And many languages have multiple variants. There is the respectful, obedient "formal" variant used at the workplace and the informal "colloquial" used in other places.
Linguistics is one of the fields where HN consensus goes directly against the scholarly mainstream of the discipline for what I mostly find to be ideological reasons. So hopefully this isn't that and you're just a bit out of date. But there's been a big reevaluation of this in the last twenty years and virtually no contemporary working linguists represent the strong relative view anymore. It simply did not consistently produce useful results and has been abandoned.
The human brain is one of the most powerful filtering devices that exists. If you train it not to see something, that something can effectively disappear for you. Families, cults, and even societies quite often work on this premise.
what's interesting is how few people notice the framing itself. you can spend years inside a particular app's reality tunnel and never question why those things are the ones you're paying attention to.
Going Japan reminds me of coming to the U.S. from Bangladesh. It’s so clean, so orderly, so disciplined. I’m in a grumpy mood for weeks when I get back to the U.S. Our major cities are such dumps in comparison to Tokyo or Kyoto.
The real dumps are the people who complain along the way but make no effort to improve their world. Aka American culture.
But you didn't actually succeed in cleaning up New York, right? So maybe the problem is a culture that prioritizes "making issues visible" and engaging the "community" in "political movements," instead of every parent teaching their child from a young age to pick up after themselves?
> All of our non-major cities are even bigger dumps then.
Most, but not all. I was shocked to my core when I visited Salt Lake City and Provo. The closest place to Japan in the whole U.S.
Maybe bad example but, Let's say you spill some food at a fast food place, shopping mall, airport. Do you make an effort to clean it up yourself or are you like "It's someone's job to clean this place therefore I can just leave it for them".
Maybe that's too harsh an example but I see locals cleaning the streets in Japan, not government hired street sweepers. I don't know the details if they just did it, or if they registered to volunteer to be responsible for that area, or if there is more to it. And I also don't know if they feel put-out, as in "why am I doing this" vs proud for making the area clean.
> provo and salt lake
Not sure in what dimension? Plenty of neighborhoods in larger LA, SF, SD, Seattle, are clean.
What amazed me about Provo and SLC was how clean and orderly the busy public spaces are, not just the nicer neighborhoods. There’s clean and orderly rich neighborhoods in every place in the world. Palo Alto pays people to go around and power wash everything. What’s rarer is places where even the busy tourist areas and lower income neighborhoods are clean. What you’ll see often in Tokyo are places that are not nice—worn out buildings, or buildings with mildew on white surfaces because it’s still a hot and humid country—but where the streets are clean and well kept.
It's true technically that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but the median homeless person is "between apartments" and the intractable cases, the people who are screaming on the street corners and breeding pitbulls that bite people on the Ithaca Commons are a public health problem.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/09/16/good-trade-off-rat-ha...
https://gothamist.com/news/the-hottest-clubs-in-nyc-these-da...
I would even count Congestion Pricing as cleaning up the city:
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/traffic_and_transit/2025/12...
SLC is a major city and a dump then by your observation-only position.
> instead of every parent teaching their child from a young age to pick up after themselves
What? Are you going to fine or arrest every parent that doesn’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves? How has expecting parents to do that worked out so far? Their culture is similar to how you suggest to operate: just complain about society instead.
That’s why they don’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves.
> SLC is a major city and a dump then by your observation-only position.
SLC is the 111th largest city in the country. Maybe you consider that a “major city,” but I was referring to the big ones like NYC, Philly, etc.
> Are you going to fine or arrest every parent that doesn’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves?
That might be more effective than your community organizing and political activism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991515
I also protested during BLM and advocated for repealing 50-A amendment that gave criminal police protection from prosecution in NY. And we succeeded at that too!
But what the article is talking about are the deep layers of culture. Rooted in how mothers and fathers socialize their children from an early age.
