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PROS AND CONS OF THE USA AND JAPAN

I've lived in these two countries and this is what I think are their strengths and weaknesses. I massively prefer Japan and hope to live over there again at some point, but I will be honest about the areas that it is not perfect.

USA

The USA is basically a continent and there is a great degree of difference between individual states and even within states in a way that is really pretty unique. But I do think there are some trends I can broadly point out. But of course exceptions exist to every rule. Keep that in mind.

THE GOOD

＊People are friendly, especially in smaller towns. This is similar to Japan, but the kind of friendliness is different. And that's kind of a preference thing, admittedly. Some people prefer a culture where people are more willing to say hi to someone they don't know, where the lady at the cash register will make small talk with you, etc. The USA is usually more like this. Compare that to Japan and other East Asian societies, where that would be seen as "bothersome," and it's thought that you show compassion by being as formal as you can and not bothering people with your own feelings, etc. There's good and bad to both. I would say that if you're living alone or in a new city though, the more standoffish style can reinforce loneliness. Sometimes those small interactions are really precious and meaningful. Even outside of that though, American people are generally pretty quite friendly and warm compared to the European or East Asian average, I think.

＊There is a general respect for people living unconventional lifestyles as long as they don't harm others. Of course there are intolerant parts of every society, but I think that a respect for pluralism is pretty hard to extract from America. I will give an example: I use earbuds to listen to music from my phone when I'm out walking or taking public transit. I dislike the ones that penetrate inside your earholes and prefer the ones that just rest in your ear. In the US, you can go into an electronics store and find both easily. In Japan, 99% of them are the penetrating kind because everyone is expected to conform to the "norm" of what is most popular. There are a lot of examples like that.

＊People have a respect for individuals to resist their backgrounds. For example, the child of a murderer won't be judged for the bad actions of his father. Obviously it isn't easy to get rid of our prejudices completely (witness protection exists for a reason), but compared to a lot of other countries there is a greater opportunity to "recreate" yourself in the US.

＊The US justice system is pretty good. Being assumed innocent until proven guilty is a luxury that not everywhere in the world has. And I appreciate the court not being actively involved in fact-finding in the investigation. It creates more transparency and is a good way to guarantee fair trials. Of course, the stereotype of Americans being incredibly litigous and obsessed with suing each other is reinforced by this. When the court is more passive, the individuals involved in the case have to be more active in bringing about justice. That can lead to some bad results. But there is a good side of the coin.

＊I guess when you have such a huge country it's inevitable, but there's some truly beautiful nature in the country, and a lot of it is more unspoiled than in Europe, for example. You can find almost any kind of landscape and climate that you want, even tundra in Alaska and jungle in Hawaii. At least for as long as it will last before wildfires consume it all (thanks in no small part to Trump selling out the EPA to sociopathic oil executive cocksuckers).

THE BAD

＊The vast majority of negative things about America can be traced back to one thing: neoliberal capitalism with minimal regulations. Almost all the ills of modern America are the logical endpoint of fuckheads like Ronald Reagan promoting the privatization of everything. The deregulated energy industry has destroyed the environment, the deregulated healthcare/pharmaceutical/food industries have destroyed public health, the deregulated development/transportation industries have destroyed public infrastructure, the deregulated firearms/military industries have destroyed public and global safety, the deregulated education industry has destroyed public intelligence, the deregulated entertainment/communications industries have destroyed arts and media. The list goes on. Of course, any country with some degree of unregulated neoliberal capitalism will have similar bad effects, but the degree to which corporations have been allowed free rein is particularly awful in the US. Obviously I don't trust the government to be saintly. Far from it. I advocate for a mixed economy of sorts where the state and the market can keep each other in tension. But the US is losing all ability to check corporate power. Obesity, gun violence, atrocious healthcare, social atomization, environmental degradation, etc. all follows from that.

＊There remain strongholds of fundamentalist religious extremism. And the worst part of this is that many non-religious people in the US have simply replaced religion with something like LGBT, feminism, capitalism, socialism, being a tradcon, etc. and held onto the fundamentalist, puritanical zealotry as their frame to view the world in. One bad effect of this is a peculiar fear of nudity and sexuality. Of course it makes sense for the religious right to be afraid of nudity and sexuality since they have inherited the anti-life values of Abrahamic religions. But there is a strange hypocrisy about being "accepting" or "open-minded" towards sexuality in the American liberal-left as well. Many secular Americans still have an inherited sense of guilt about sex and the human body. Let me give some examples to show what I mean:

Why these weird double standards? I think it's because secretly (perhaps subconciously) they are actually still very puritanical and afraid of sex and free open expression. They only think it's okay if they can "justify" it as a "tool of resistance" for an "oppressed" group instead of just being a good thing in and of itself. This causes the American liberal-left to arrive at a strange double-standard where you can be as much of a degen fuck as you want, but only as long as you are somehow "oppressed." What's the difference between this and a Catholic thinking you can indulge only as long as you say the right number of "Hail Mary"s? Functionally, nothing.

＊Mutilation of infants' genitals is for some reason completely normalized among not just Jews and Muslims but Christians too. This is odd since Christians in Europe were never so addicted to the "letter of the law." Paul explicitly portrays circumcision as a Jewish ritual that no longer contains the spirit of the law. It's even been normalized to some degree among the non-religious. Thankfully this is starting to change (I can never thank my parents enough for being bad goys and leaving my dick intact). But we still have a long way to go.

＊Unless you are one of the indigenous tribes, if you are an American you will have no longstanding tradition or history of your "people" to turn back to. Non-indigenous Americans are rootless people who have been denied the ability to have a deep connection to any piece of land. This leads to constant alienation. There are usually two ways that Americans try to make up for it, neither of which are good. The first is the right-wing method, where some mutt American will desperately cling to the bit of European genetics they have and LARP that they are really French or Italian or Norwegian or whatever when they probably couldn't point out the country on a map. The left-wing method is to deny that cultural roots are important for a person at all and try to make up for it by being egotistical and desperate. Culture requires a connection to land. When people have no land they belong on, they will have no culture. And when they have no culture, they will lash out in shortsighted and obnoxious ways like committing thoughtless violence against their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair in a desperate effort to give themselves an identity.

＊There are so many fucking furries! When you find a community that is not so deathly afraid of sex and sexuality, it will be flooded by degen furfucks. I thought this was just a meme until I lived in Japan and now am able to compare the "nerd" communities. I have no clue why so many Americans are disgusting degen furries. Maybe it's because so many of our cartoons had to remove any cute girls to appease fundamentalist Christians and had to use animal characters instead. And now they created a generation of sick fucks who want to fuck anthropomorphic animals because they grew up watching Arthur or some shit. I'm glad that I became a weeb early on and missed that brainwashing. Yiff in hell, furfags.
(Ok, that was a little harsh. I have a friend who likes furry art and is an amazing person and one of my favorite people to talk to online. But she mostly prefers Japanese kawaii furry art, which I can sympathize more with. The American shit is 99% vile.)

＊There is a cult of productivity and work in the US which makes Americans work many more hours on average than Europeans. Granted, it is generally more of a "grindset" or "hustle" culture that sustains it, which is more individualistic. I do think that this is at least better than the corporate slave culture of Japan, which is much more authoritarian and therefore harder to resist. But it is still bad.

＊Imperial units. Self-explanatory. Why didn't we toss these out when we stopped being cucks to the English crown again?

JAPAN

Japan is a smaller and much more homogenous country than the USA and therefore I think I can speak more meaningfully about it as a whole. However, it still has a great degree of variation between prefectures and big cities vs. small towns. So keep in mind the same warning about not clinging to these stereotypes too harshly.

THE GOOD

＊Japan has a lot of traditions that stay alive because it has been allowed to isolate and maintain its indigenous culture for so long. Compared to other industrialized societies, it has a lot of identity that makes it distinctive and unique.

＊People put a big emphasis on treating each other with kindness and gentleness. It makes it easy to want to do good for others when you know it is reciprocal.

＊There is a big emphasis on being clean and proper. The cities have almost no litter and trash on the street, and there is even less in the countrysides. This is in spite of there being far fewer public trash cans.

＊The culture broadly promotes beauty, sensuality, and emotion. These things are considered inherently good and important for the functioning of a good society. More societies should learn from this. What might seem "superfluous" is actually an essential glue for making society compassionate and pleasant. It also allows all the great "aesthetic" elements of religion to permeate through what is a very secular society. We get all the rituals, the beautiful temples and shrines, the cultural distinctiveness, etc. without any of its bad elements.

＊The society has a great deal of order that is orchestrated through voluntarily not breaking rules or etiquette. The voluntary aspect is important, because that means that it is orchestrated without the authoritarian overreach of the state. North Korea is probably very orderly too, but Japan accomplishes it without sacrificing freedom.

＊The above is sustained because Japanese people have a very good ability to "divide" parts of their lives responsibly. So on the one hand you have a very demure, polite public that doesn't step out of line. You can genuinely enjoy becoming a part of the big mass of people and not sticking out. There's a great degree of security and solidarity in this. But then take a bit of a step outwards and you'll find some of the craziest, most out-there art you want. They truly get the best of both worlds because they are very responsible about where the "borders" are. It's what allows a society where you can buy lolicon doujinshi and then go into an onsen where fathers aren't afraid to bring their underaged daughters in with them.

＊While I believe there are cultural factors that largely maintain the above, I do want to admit that there are material historical reasons that help all of those. As much as I love to villify the influence of the US on Japan, a lot of the good things about their societal structure comes from the influence of the post-New Deal US. A lot of the good things I sketch out above about Japan are pretty similar to the US in the 1950s and 1960s. Japan just never had a hellspawn like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher destroy their social government services and thus destroy their social cohesion as a result. Of course, barely having to spend anything on the military because of Article 9 also ensures that they have a lot more funding into public works and policing. And when you are such a small country it's easier to be internally integrated and standardized.

＊The culture is unique and varied in the great amount of local history and traditions they have, yet it also has a great homogeneity. I want to be clear that I'm not merely talking about ethnic homogeneity like a lot of /pol/ types do. I don't think that race and culture are inherently tied by any means. But I do think that Japan is great because there is such a strong homogeneity of culture. And what is great about it is that it isn't a chauvinistic kind of nationalism. In fact, the fact that Japanese people have such a strong and robust native culture generally gives them a greater appreciation of other foreign cultures, because they understand how valubale cultural uniqueness is, even when it is deeply in contrast to other parts of the globe. But they don't lose their own culture by diluting it all down with a bunch of "cultures" from all around the world. An art museum is wonderful to walk through, but there's a reason that you put all the Dutch still lives in one room, all the Babylonian stelae in another room, and all the Japanese Imari ware in another. If they all were next to each other in the same room, it would clash and you couldn't savor the broader cultural "mood." Japan has found a good way to maintain their culture and keep opposing cultures "at a distance" without resorting to cultural chauvinism. At least this is what they need to fight for. It is hanging in the balance, especially in big cities. And no, I am not opposed to immigration to Japan. I just think you NEED to do your best to adapt.

THE BAD

＊The tendency of Japanese people to be polite and accomodating allows foreigners who go there to trample all over their traditions and norms and makes it harder to retain their cultural distinctiveness in an increasingly globalized world. And it doesn't even have to be because foreigners are ill-willed. A lot of times they WANT to be corrected and learn to adapt, but the Japanese people are too afraid to let them know.

＊Japan's cult of work is infamous. Working hard, diligently, and seriously is a good thing. I like how many Japanese people take their work seriously and want to give the customer the best possible experience. But their society overworks them to a degree that outweighs any societal benefit. It is in fact the biggest reason that their birthrate is in sharp decline. Having an overachievement cult in schools can be similarly detrimental, although Japan isn't quite as bad about this as Korea or China. But at least school is a much shorter period of your life than work. I know that universities in the US tend to be a lot tougher while work isn't quite as bad as in Japan. I prefer that.

＊Following rules and being careful not to transgress is a good thing. But a lot of Japanese have an absurd degree of moralfaggotry about pirating games, movies, music, etc. (well, to the degree that it isn't just technological illiteracy). It means that a lot of Japanese will never experience the great, obscure, forgotten treasures of their own culture, even if they aren't stealing money from anyone by torrenting them because they're abandonware. Yes, it's very good to support small, indie game developers. Nintendo, on the other hand, can gargle my shit. I wish more Japanese could make this distinction. Well, I think a lot of them can but are kept in check by fear of a corporations that are unbelievably litigious and greedy on a level that puts any American to shame when it comes to copyright infringement.

＊Related to the above, a desire for conformity sometimes materializes in a sick form of consumerism where people CONSOOOOM physical plastic crap to an unhealthy degree in Japan. Gift-giving and everything is fine, but I wish more of it would be sustainable.

＊Pornography continues to have mosaics because of remnants of cucked Victorian-era censorship laws imposed by western devils.
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