Charles C. Mann: observation

Transcript context

…You can’t find trouble. Right. One time I was riding on the train in Tokyo at one o’clock in the morning with a friend of mine, who was just from the United States. He suddenly realized — we’d gone to a sake bar and had quite a bit of sake — that we were riding on the subway at one o’clock, and we were both a little unsteady on our feet, and he got alarmed, right? Because this is something you wouldn’t do in many places in the United States, or certainly Mexico City or what have you. And then he looked around, and he realized that every other person on the train was drunk, too. And you see these in the Cherry Blossom Festival, where everybody goes out to the parks, and everybody in Tokyo is completely plowed at eleven o’clock in the morning, and there’s no fights. There’s hardly even any litter. It’s really remarkable. So, I thought, why do the Japanese do this? And to some degree, it has to do with a level of social engineering, I think, that we are really uncomfortable with. If you get on the subways, you hear all the time these sort of chirpy female voices telling you something in Japanese. And when I lived there, I learned enough Japanese to realize they’re always saying, “Hey, let’s not talk on our phones, it’s so rude,” or “Hey, don’t do this . . .” Those sort of admonishing nanny state–type things that we Americans find so irritating? They’re just all over the place. And they also have a zillion cops who are just everywhere. Tokyo has a huge police force. I mean, it’s a huge city, but it has a much . . . Police box on many corners, right?…

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