[CarlitosHighway]

Thank you for this post. I am a "Westener" who lived in Japan for 6 years. Boy, was that eye-opening in terms of "the map and the territory". Basically nothing is what it seems to be - and unfortunately the positive things mostly turn out to be nationalism-motivated make-believe, wishful thinking, or only made possible by extremely lax attitudes to amassing public debt (any country could make the trains run on time if they were ready sell their future for it).

Western Japanophiles, especially from the US, and even if they speak the language and have lived there, are mostly ignorant and their idea of Japan is a full phantasy.

[gizajob]

The UK is in the process of spending £100billion of public debt to build a “high speed” train line to connect the northern cities to London. Except it’s been shortened in length to not connect those cities and will instead run only to Birmingham less than 200km away, keeps getting reduced in speed, and can probably be guaranteed not to run on time. So for me it seems like any county could make the trains run with infinite money, but in the country which invented the train we still can’t.