ASSholebomber22You say all this then live in one of the most racially homogeneous and socially conservative 1st world countries on the planet that has a GDP per capita lower than Mississippi
And I'm absolutely the first person to call Japan out on it's shit... This country has some fucking problems. I was just going off recently about the idiots throwing themselves in front of trains again... The government here has to do a better job of reducing the stigma against seeking mental healthcare. Its ridiculous, but it's also a god damn cultural problem... People here are dumbasses in their own dumbass ways. Luckily they don't generally go on murder rampages.
Social conservatism here is wayyy different than that in the USA. It's an Apples to Acorns comparison really. Social pressures of keeping up appearances here are way higher, the bureaucracy means just a bunch of unnecessary busywork that's inefficient as shit, many people feel like they can't really let their hair down, and the reluctance to give up the fax machine is all a bit ridiculous but those are far different than the Guns, God, and toxic individualism of America... Governments also don't tend to get taken by a ride from corporations begging for tax dollars or from scammy real estate developers prying away prime land from the government.
As for the GDP... GDP per capita in a place with 3 million people can be heavily skewed towards the highly rich income earners who live there... Especially compared to a place with over 125 million people. It's a bad economic comparison in this case, as are most direct GDP comparisons. They also are a bad indicator of what the average citizen's living standard is like...
A better comparison would be to look at wealth gap statistics where the top 10% of Japanese income earners only make 4.5x as much as the bottom 10%. On the other hand, the top
5% in Mississippi make 14x as much as the bottom
20%.
I like comparing places with the GINI coefficient instead of GDP - where 1 is completely unequal wealth distribution and 0 is completely equal. The closer to 1 you get, the shittier things tend to be if youre in that bottom 10-20% of income earners.
The GINI coefficient of Mississippi is .49 where Japan's is .33 Meaning Japan is right up there with Canada, Germany, and Australia, and Mississippi is hanging out with Republic of the Congo and Guatamala. The USA on it's own is 41, by the way. About the same as Turkey or Argentina. Not great, not terrible. But it's more in the middle of the pack overall.
New York State for example, has a gini coefficient of .55, which is fucking disgusting, and a product of upstate being way different than the city. (New York state would be within the top 10 most unequal countries on earth if it was sovereign)
