[unmole]

> My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.

Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are closer to China in terms of both geography and culture without having problems with corruption. It's almost as if 400 years of history has very little to do with it.

[rayiner]

Hong Kong was long a British colony. Taiwan and Singapore are tiny island nations, with founding generations small enough to retool the culture and institutions. The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was deliberate about reshaping the country’s culture because he was adamant that “culture is destiny.” https://paulbacon.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pd...

[unmole]

And Japan is an American protectorate whose constitution was written by foreigners. So, what?

[rayiner]

So was Afghanistan. But a short duration of military dominance and writing words in paper can’t change the culture of the people. Colonization, as with Hong Kong, or a generation of top-down rule over a small population, as with Taiwan and Singapore, can. Again, read Yew. He was deliberate and methodical about all this, and has written and spoken widely about what he did to transform Singapore.

[forgingahead]

Great comments, though one small nitpick: For Chinese names, the surname goes first, so for "Lee Kuan Yew", his last name is "Lee", not "Yew". He's often abbreviated as "LKY" for locals though.

Interestingly, LKY was known as "Harry Lee" until he became active in politics, upon which he went by "Lee Kuan Yew" to apparently help endear himself to the local Chinese population. He took Mandarin lessons well into his old age as it wasn't the language he spoke at home. I think most of his counterparts overseas knew him as "Harry" (Thatcher, Kissinger, etc) and even his wife called him "Harry" per biographical accounts.

Lee was undoubtedly a product of the British system - an English-educated ethnically Chinese man, straddling both sides in order to navigate those early years.

[rayiner]

Thank you.

[swsieber]

I dunno. That suggests that it's not culture and it's not geography... So what's left? Genetics and history? I'd pick history, the accumulation of aggregate choices.

[tptacek]

I don't understand the premise, where Japan is supposedly uniquely high-integrity. It ranks around the United States in metrics of corruption, sometimes higher and sometimes lower over the last 20 years, and historically was significantly worse than it is now. It's about as corrupt as any of the many countries on this planet that have the rule of law.

[unmole]

> I'd pick history, the accumulation of aggregate choices.

So, Japan doesn't have corruption because it hasn't had corruption for 400 years?