Lessons from Japan 1

I firmly believe that people are essentially the same the world over. Everyone has the same resources, the same fundamental equipment to progress through life. As such culture is a set of learned behaviours. Its these lessons I'm looking for now.

The things intriguing me at the moment are:

1. filial piety - Japan are big into this.
2. conservation of space - particularly from a geoist perspective Japan uses almost every inch available productively, even national parks probably currently are extracting full realisable value. But they operate under a private land ownership system rather than resource rentals.
This does reduce the study to its other beneficiary - wealth distribution, I don't feel equiped though to follow the paths wealth takes through the population. I imagine speculation must just about be inflated to its logical extreme here though given the productivity per square meter. (if there is a space a vending machine can fit it is put there).
3. convenience is fixed - miki put me onto this one. Conveniently stores other than boarders are open until 11 at night here, infact almost everything is open until 11 at night. Tuesday is a great night to go out on the town. so is every other night. But what allows this to happen. Presumably the population and population density in japan makes this feasable, however Misaki inconveniently works retail here and so is occupied until 9-10pm at night. By virtue of her store closing early at 9pm. but the crazy thing is, Japan's workforce hasn't been casualised, so she is working 12 hour shifts 6 days a week. And from my wanderings in takamatsu this seems to be the case in almost all retail outlets. But says I, if everyone is working all the time, how convenient can the long opening hours be for anyone but tourists, uni students and the retired. Namely three groups with no money between them to be throwing around on consumer durables.
So such convenience comes at a cost, a terrible cost of shitty full time jobs. I think this would defeat the arguement against casualisation in one go, because I'm telling you, if you need the money from that kind of job with that kind of hours, then you have bigger needs than that, you have something wrong with your life, give up your house or kid or whatever is putting in that situation because god knows you can't appreciate it.
4. Attitudes to transport. The Japanese have much higher per capita utilisation of bicycles, also of umbrellas, also if you get caught drink driving even a little over the limit you get fined $2000 equivalent in yen, not just you but any friend in the car who has allowed you to drive.
5. Attitudes to water, every business I see is hosing down the pavement in front of its premis without fail sometime between 8 & 9. this is then mopped as pedestrians walk over it. Exorbitent, exorbitent water usage. You should see the baths also.

So I guess you couldn't really say 'lessons learned' more points of ponderisation. However I do believe the central learned behaviour of this culture is 'tatamae' or loosely translated 'appearances' the official reality is far more important than the actual reality. In other words, if the map doesn't match the ground the ground is wrong.
I really notice the strain Japan goes to to pretend things are okay, or that things are working well.There are big gaps and assumptions that dictate behaviour. As a foreigner these are easy to exploit, not that I want to, such as growing a beard my own highschool would never allow when an exchange student. (that time I wanted to) anyhoo, as easy as it is to exploit it is hard to correct, even using a powerful questioning technique such as NLP.
I did have some success getting Misaki to reevaluate her own mapping for withholding her opinion. The waiters at the restaurant were so fucking distracting though. I hate fancy restaurants.
Apart from that, I shall keep my eyes open.