Will Miss #469 - everything is priced

It may be overpriced for consumer grade boozy chocolate bon bons, but at least it is priced.

Having been away from America for so long, there are some things I never would have imagined I'd miss about Japan because I didn't think or remember that they were absent here. I'm sure that's an assertion I've made before and will make again, but one of those things is stores that have a price on every item. Since coming back home, I've been in two different states and many different stores and one thing which seems to happen nearly everyday is that prices for various items are missing or extremely hard to find in U.S. shops. I find it incredibly frustrating when I am interested in some item and have to hunt down an employee to get the cost and then said employee wanders off for 5 minutes to find the information. I just give up when that happens because it's not worth the hassle.

I don't know what it is with American shops, but it was extremely rare for me to go into a Japanese store and find no price marked on an item and it seems to happen every time I shop here. I miss having all prices clearly marked on goods. 

Will Miss #409 -orderliness

I have spent a long time pondering what it is that essentially makes American culture different from Japanese culture. While I do not flatter myself sufficiently to believe I have anything resembling a full understanding, I think that one essential aspect of Japanese culture is that there is a very high valuation of order. This is why there are so many rules and relatively rigid thinking. It's why people are trained to follow the same pattern and perform their jobs like automatons sometimes and seem incapable of using their own judgment to deal with a novel situation. The desire to predict what is to come is a product of a need to make sure all is following the expected order. Violations are essentially the introduction of chaos into the situation and that does not sit well with the Japanese psyche.

The way in which order is valued means that people tend to behave in expected ways. This offers a sense of security when dealing with people and I will miss the way in which valuing order creates comfortable and comforting predictability.