[ixtli]

Can you explain why this seems so to you? Totally not my experience with visiting national parks in Korea and Japan. For one thing, much of Japans un-developed nature is such because its largely as impassable now as it was in the 1600s when Basho wrote Ooku no hosomichi. I dunno why you'd bother paving anything.

EDIT: It's also certainly not just westerners, but again, my experience has shown me that there are societies that do better at training citizens not to litter.

[seattle_spring]

Never been to Korea or Japan, but I spent several months exploring the parks of China. I never want to go back.

[yannyu]

So your experience of "East Asian national parks" is just China?

[jacquesm]

You really should not extrapolate to a whole continent from such a small sample.

[cglace]

Do be fair, they did say "east asia" and China does make up the majority of east asia by population and land mass.

[jacquesm]

Yes, but at the same time it is a-typical in its approach to many concepts, apparently including national parks. And even there, given the size of the country there is a very large chance that OP's sample size is small even within China alone.

They could have just as well been more specific and simply said 'China' or name the specific parks rather than to write 'east Asia'.

[cglace]

My main point was just that he was not "extrapolating to a whole continent". Which is a nitpick, however, it also makes your nitpick more nitckpicky due to his generalization becoming far less general.