Won't Miss #52 - bicycle parking problems (reflection)

Bikes being taken away for illegal parking. To retrieve them, you had to wait several weeks and then pay $25-$30 to get your bike back.

For many years during my time in Japan, I suffered from severe back pain. I'm not talking about the type of thing where you exert yourself and your back hurts later. I'm talking about the thing where you wake up every morning, walk for a minute and agony sets in. If you walk or stand for too long, you suffer burning, agonizing pain during every moment that you are sitting. There was a time when I'd get up in the morning, go to work in pain, and sit there for 6 of my 8 hours in horrific pain. This ended in my taking two months off and working from home in bed.

During this time period, which lasted, oh, about 9 of my 12 years at the company I was at, using a bicycle was my salvation. I even rode the bike to work rather than endure the suffering of walking 15 minutes from the local train station to the office. Even forty minutes of sweating through the Tokyo summer (one-way) was better than the pain I endured. Unfortunately, my ability to use a bike to mitigate my pain was monumentally undercut by the increasingly limited and difficult bicycle parking situation. As I mentioned in my original post, it went from a situation in which I could park nearly anywhere for any length of time to nowhere for niggling amounts of time. Eventually, the parking situation became so hard that I took to struggling to walk the 9 minutes to the subway (stopping three times to rest to reduce some of the agony as it got worse the longer I walked).

I don't miss how owning a bicycle turned into a nearly useless thing because someone decided that having bicycles parked along the street in Tokyo was too troublesome or aesthetically displeasing to permit it. 

Won't Miss #28 - aggressive drivers (reflection)

Early on in our time back in the U.S., my husband and I had an experience which came to represent one of the many psychological differences between Americans and Japanese. There was a judgement call at a crosswalk in which a pedestrian who had not yet entered the crosswalk was walking fast down the street toward it as our car approached the intersection. There was no crossing light but there was a stop sign. Since the pedestrian was not in the intersection and was somewhat distant from it, my husband had to make a guess as to whether or not to pull up to the intersection to turn right and proceed. He went up to the intersection, and was preparing to turn when another vehicle came up rapidly and he had to halt in the crosswalk due to the unexpected change in conditions.

The pedestrian deemed this to be a violation of his right of way and the law that cars yield to pedestrians because he could not merely saunter straight through the intersection. He had to walk about 4 feet back around the car or he had to wait for our car to clear the crosswalk. Never mind the fact that he wasn't in the intersection when these events rapidly played out (which is a clear indication that a car should yield and stop before the crosswalk). He felt so entitled to walk across the moment his pace took him to the crosswalk that he banged his fist on the back of our car in angry retaliation at what he viewed as a violation. What it was was an issue of timing and judgement, and an unclear understanding of when he was actually going to enter the intersection and the impossibility of predicting that another car would come and our car could not clear the crosswalk as anticipated. The pedestrian is, at least in California, king.

In Japan, no pedestrian expects that cars will yield to them unless the light has been on "walk" for quite some time, and even then you have to be apprehensive. In America, I've seen pedestrians scream or behave angrily more than once over perceived failures to yield. In Japan, drivers behaved far more aggressively toward pedestrians than they do here because there are rarely consequences either legally or socially. I don't miss the way cars would regularly run lights and cut me off while the police stood by in their koban (police boxes) and watched it happen. 

Won't Miss #319 - institutionalized sexism

People stand around the dohyo (the ring) to make sure no one runs up and steps on it as the national stadium (kokugikan) empties after a day of sumo wrestling.

Sexism, like racism, is everywhere in the world. This is obviously a fact. No society can dictate the thoughts or actions of individuals. What a society can do is make rules and laws in order to reduce the ability for its citizens to act on various prejudices. The presence of those laws and the way in which they are enforced (or ignored) represents the aggregate wishes of the society. In Japan, there are equal employment laws, but they are ignored. In some areas of Japanese culture, there are laws that overtly prohibit women from taking part in various activities even when there is absolutely no reason or rationale behind that prohibition. One example of that is the fact that women aren't allowed to step onto the sumo dohyo to hand over the sumo tournament trophy to the winner. It's understandable that a woman can't take part in sumo wrestling itself because of physical capabilities. It's not understandable that she can't present a trophy because she is considered too "unclean" to step on the dohyo (ring).

I won't miss this type of institutionalized sexism and how it is tolerated.

Won't Miss #313 - "law and order" moral mentality

Those who study psychology are familiar with Kohlberg's stages of moral development. For those who don't know about it, this theory breaks down the way our moral sense develops into 3 levels with various stages. At the second level is "law and order" determined morality. Japan is a shame-based culture, not a morality-based one (this ties into the lack of a strong religious backing which I praised previously). In conjunction with a heavy emphasis on getting along with everyone (not being the nail that sticks out by questioning or disagreeing), this has created a culture in which morality for many people is defined not by ethical principles or deep consideration of the implications of an act, but by what is legally allowable. It's very likely that this is one of the underpinnings of the high level of approval of the death penalty in Japan. It's legal, so it's okay. If it's not legal, it's not okay. The question is rarely pondered more deeply than that.

I won't miss discussions about the morality of a situation with Japanese folks which end all too often with, "it's okay because it's legal."

Won't Miss #241 - the doodoo street

Signs like this one telling people not to leave their dog's feces all over the place are abundant in residential areas in Tokyo. There wouldn't be a need for these signs to be plastered everywhere if people weren't leaving poop behind when walking their dogs.

There's a back street near my home which I always take to go shopping for groceries as it leads to a wonderful shopping area not too far from my apartment. The street is often traveled by pedestrians, but not in great numbers, and particularly not at night. It's also very popular for people to walk their dogs along when they need to "go walkies". Though there are rules (possibly even laws) in Japan about picking up after your dog, people who take their dogs out to do their business on this street frequently do not clean up if no one is around. It's so bad that every single day when I walk down the street, it smells like dog crap and there are piles of it in various parts of the street (which is for pedestrians only, not an area for traffic). This is despite the fact that people who live in those areas are cleaning up the street in front of their homes everyday. That means there's a fresh layer of crap being left behind on a regular basis.

I won't miss seeing and smelling the results of people who willfully and blatantly ignore the rules or laws about cleaning up after their dogs simply because no one is there to see them do it.

Will Miss #107 -gun control

The previous post aside, handguns are illegal in Japan so the chances that you're going to get shot by a disgruntled coworker are pretty much zero. No, if a pissed off former employee wants to take it out on his former compatriots, he's going to have to go for a mass stabbing instead (as that has been the trend in the past year or so). I'm going to go on the record as saying I am for gun control in the U.S. and think that the current situation is ridiculous and certainly ends up increasing violent crime rather than protecting people from it (not that my opinion appears to matter as politically, the NRA is going to trump little old me all the time).

I'm pretty satisfied that the law keeps most guns out of the hands of regular citizens, and I'm going to miss that.

Won't Miss #79 - Japanese don't jaywalk myth

One of the most enduring and absolutely false myths is that the Japanese are so law-abiding that they will stand at a crosswalk in the dead of night on a deserted street and wait for the little man to go green and allow them to walk. The notion is that they are more concerned with not breaking the law than the point of that law. Trust me when I say that I see people crossing on a "don't walk" sign several times a day and crossing where they are not supposed to cross, both on bicycles and on foot.

I won't miss the juxtaposition of this myth with the very obvious reality.

Will Miss #28 - copyright infringement

The copyright laws are different in Japan so you find that the ludicrously long duration on some copyrights by big businesses (*cough*Disney*cough*) in America are not an issue here. Also, Japan isn't as litigious as the U.S. so relatively small acts of infringement tend not to get copyright lawyers' undies wadded up into such big bunches. Knowing that big business can't buy the political influence to gut fair use somewhere in the world is gratifying on a certain level.

I'll miss seeing things that give me a sense that someone somewhere is sticking it to the man in a small way, and the man just can't be bothered to do anything about it.