I am often asked during interviews here in Japan and by friends in the US what the differences are between Japanese Culture and American Culture. Needless to say, this is hazardous terrain to cross since judgments of this type can easily be read as condescending or chauvinistic. Worse yet is the “Dixie Chicks/Jane Fonda Syndrome” where one visits another country and uses the opportunity to bash their own. I was born in the USA and plan to die there. In between, I’m spending a big part of my life in Japan and would not be doing so if I didn’t like it here a lot. So I have no axe to grind on the subject. Having said that, one thing which must strike any first-time visitor to Japan is the the high quality of public life. Tokyo is a city of spacious, well-maintained parks, clean streets, graffiti-free buildings, bridges and overpasses. Commercial areas feature open plazas with fountains, greenery and an abundance of places to sit and relax. Customer service in Japanese Post Offices and Train Stations, not to mention restaurants and shops, is uniformly excellent. There is a vibrant street life where the young and old mix freely. That is not to say that there are no seedy areas of Tokyo but rather to emphasize that the overall character of the city is amenable, open and accessible to the public. In my experience, the same could be said of every large city in Japan from Sapporo to Nagasaki. The cultural investment is in public life and they bear the financial implications of that in the form of higher costs. By contrast, we Americans prize our private spaces. We love our spacious homes, backyard swimming pools and tennis courts. Many of our garages are larger than the average Tokyo apartment. We enjoy infinite choice at low-cost “big box stores” in exchange for rudimentary customer service. We are less-concerned about public facilities and, in fact, bridle at the costs associated with schools, fire stations, and roads, not to mention “luxuries” like public parks and recreational areas. This is because our cultural investment is in the individual. So which is better? I have lived in an apartment in Tokyo and would find that a difficult adjustment to make in order to have a graffiti-free walk to the train station. But when I go through airport security in Japan and am consistently treated with courtesy by the personnel there I can’t help but be impressed. So the Japanese tolerate higher costs in order to sustain their public culture and we tolerate a poorer public life in order to have more control over our financial destiny.
