The buses in Japan have a wonderful system. There are two doors, one and the front by the driver and one in the middle or towards the back. You get on the bus using the latter, and at the end of the journey you pay at the front using exact change or a preloaded travel card. Small children, I have noticed, are able to use passes which they show to the driver. Handy, given that they are often to small to reach the magnetic swipe panel. When my boyfriend was here, he remarked to me sadly ‘it’s a good system and it works so well, but you couldn’t have it in the UK because you would just have chavs jumping out of the back door and running off without paying.’
He’s right, of course. If we had such a system back home then people would be taking advantage left, right and centre. The Japanese are such law-abiding citizens that if anyone does take advantage then I’m sure the incidents are few and far between. Why is this? What makes an entire nation so respectful of the rules and social harmony?
I couldn’t possibly hope to analyse all the reasons this might be, but I have noticed aspects of school life that I am sure are partly responsible. At the end of the school day, the school gets cleaned. Not by a hired cleaner, but by the students themselves. It does mean of course that the school is pretty dirty compared to a UK school (these are kids after all, they’d much rather leave the classroom quickly and find their friends), but it does teach them valuable lessons. They learn the importance of working together to get a task done, of taking it in turns to do difficult or unpleasant things (the students clean their own toilets), and of having respect for communal places and facilities. This mutual respect for other people and their possessions, coupled with a national determination to ‘not rock the boat’, means that Japan is the cleanest, safest place I have ever lived in.
It doesn’t end at school; the values that the students learn seem to be carried with them throughout adulthood. A few weeks ago I was at a bus stop at 6:30am (in the freezing cold, I might add), when I noticed a male jogger coming up the street towards me. He glanced at the other side of the road and seemed to notice something, so he jogged across the road to it. I watched him crouch down and pick up a chocolate wrapper, jog back to my side of the road and up to the convenience store on the corner. There, he put the wrapper in the bin and continued along his route.
I would add that there are hardly any bins anywhere in Japan. In England I have genuinely heard people complain that the nearest bin is across the road, and drop their litter where they stand. In Japan, people put their rubbish in their pocket until they find a bin. And don’t even think about dropping a cigarette stub on the pavement in Japan, they have made that much illegal. This is, almost certainly, an unnecessary measure as I doubt people would drop their cigarette butts on the streets here even if it weren’t accompanied by a hefty fine.
This sense of social responsibility is undoubtedly one of my most favourite things about the Japanese people. It is also one of the things I will miss the most when I come back to the UK, and I certainly feel a twinge of apprehension when I remember our city centre streets laced with litter, smatterings of dog dirt, and the occasional splat of congealed vomit (a Sunday morning treat for anyone walking to the train station through town.) I can’t help but feel it’s too late to re-educate our nation, so I’ll just enjoy clean streets and public transport while I can!
