After two weeks in Japan, here are some negative findings:
-- Most bus stops in Tokyo are without roof cover or benches.
-- Such extensive plastic packaging! Wasteful layer on layer...
-- Rather scuzzy apartment buildings take ultra-grand names:
zzzz "Royal Heights" or "Palace" or "Grand Villa" ...
-- Use of gauze face masks by public workers has increased.
Perhaps 50% of such people are masked.
It's difficult to hear a voice through a mask.
-- Noise pollution. Too many announcements continuing too long.
-- Employers require a standard health check - 健康診断.
I had to push hard at the clinic to get a copy of my own data.
It's as if the population are lab rats. We are not 「 マルタ 」 !
-- (Positively, there is great care in food presentation, but : )
Negatively, behind the form, can be horrible fabrication.
I've received thin tiny slices of processed frankenfoods.
Pleasing to the eye, but poor taste & maybe even dangerous...
Some food & drink coloring agents are unnaturally garish.
-- Fabrication is too often of poor substance. Surface finishing of
buildings and public works is good, but substandard materials
soon deteriorate. Instead of wood & brick, it's fancy plywood
and artificially concocted thin veneers that flake away to soon
expose rust & cheap filler products. Surface beauty, with
doubt inside.
-- Japan remains a monoculture in a multi-ethnic world.
It's still very tribal here, perhaps racist. Imperial Japan
promoted itself in the late 1930s as putting "all corners of
the world under one roof" and for Co-Prosperity, but the
reality then & now puts non-Japanese Asians as inferior
(other peoples & races are valued as zoo critters).
Not everyone feels or acts negatively if a non-Japanese
human is near, but it's tough to swim against the tide...
