The Borrowed Order: On Romanticizing Japan

If you spend any time on X, you've seen the posts. The trains are so punctual. Everyone is so polite. The streets are so clean. I felt so safe walking alone at night. Why can't we have this in America?

These posts are everywhere. They're their own genre at this point. The Japan reverence post, usually accompanied by some pristine photo of a Kyoto side street or a perfectly organized convenience store. The tone is always the same: a kind of wistful longing, as if the poster has glimpsed a better world and can't understand why they have to return to the fallen one.

I've been thinking about why this particular romanticization is so common among Westerners, particularly white Americans and Europeans.

I think I've figured it out. And it has less to do with Japan than it does with them.

What's Actually Going On

Japan has plenty of problems. The work culture is brutal. The bureaucracy is Kafkaesque. The conformity pressure is suffocating. Young people are opting out of relationships and reproduction at alarming rates. It is not a utopia.

But when you're walking through Dotonbori at 2am and nobody's yelling, nobody's hassling you, the streets are clean, and you can leave your bag at a table while you order coffee, something is different. The trains run. People queue. The baseline of public behavior is higher.

What Westerners are romanticizing isn't a perfect society. They're romanticizing a society where other people are less of a problem.

And here's the key: they're romanticizing it precisely because they have no responsibility for making it that way, and would absolutely refuse that responsibility if it were offered.

The Borrowed Order

When you visit Japan, or even live there as an expat, you're a consumer of Japanese order, not a participant in it.

You ride the silent train cars without having spent a lifetime internalizing the social pressure that makes talking on your phone unthinkable. You walk the clean streets without sorting your trash into fifteen categories for decades. You receive attentive service without bearing the crushing expectations placed on the workers providing it.

You get the functional society without the conformity. The peace without the pressure.

This is the borrowed order. You're wearing a coat someone else made, staying warm by a fire someone else tends.

But let's be honest about something: you would never tend that fire yourself.

What It Actually Costs

The order that Westerners romanticize is built on a level of conformity that would make the average American lose their mind within a week.

This is a society where you tilt your stamp at the correct angle on a document, not because it matters functionally, but because that's how it's done. Where blue-collar workers wear a full suit on their commute, change into work clothes upon arrival, then change back into the suit to go home, because public presentation matters more than personal convenience. Where hierarchy isn't a suggestion but the structure through which everything flows, and you don't question it, you don't push back, you don't "have a conversation" with your manager about your concerns.

You defer. You conform. You read the air and adjust yourself accordingly.

Now picture the average American, who can barely prevent themselves from yelling at the top of their lungs on public transit, completely oblivious to their impact on everyone around them, being asked to do any of this.

It's laughable.

The Responsibility Gap

In their home countries, Westerners are stakeholders. They vote, or they don't. They pay taxes. They're implicated in the dysfunction. The guy screaming on the subway, the trash on the sidewalk, the general sense that nobody gives a shit: these are their problems. They're supposed to do something about them.

In Japan, they're guests. The order is a product they're consuming, not a system they're maintaining. They don't have to subordinate themselves. They don't have to navigate invisible hierarchies. They just get to be there and enjoy the results of everyone else's effort.

This is why Japan feels so restful. Visitors have been temporarily relieved of citizenship. All the benefits, none of the participation costs.

But here's what the romanticizers never reckon with: Westerners would in no way be willing to sacrifice what they have (the lax work culture, the comparative lack of social obligation, the freedom to be an individual even when it inconveniences others) in order to build their own version of this order.

They want the clean trains. They don't want to be the kind of person who makes trains clean.

The Nonconformist Problem

Imagine telling an American that they need to:

• Stay late at work because their boss is still there, regardless of whether there's actual work to do
• Apologize for leaving "early" at 6pm
• Dress formally for a commute to a job where they'll change into different clothes anyway
• Tilt their stamp correctly on paperwork because that's the proper way
• Defer to seniority even when seniority is wrong
• Suppress their opinions to maintain group harmony
• Never be the nail that sticks up

Americans pride themselves on being nonconformists. On "speaking their truth." On not taking shit from anyone. On being individuals.

These are precisely the qualities that make ordered public spaces impossible.

You can't have both. You can't have a society where everyone feels entitled to take up as much space as they want, be as loud as they want, and express themselves however they want, and also have the quiet, clean, orderly public sphere that visitors to Japan find so intoxicating.

The Japanese understand this trade-off. They've chosen. Westerners want the output without understanding that the input is the very thing they'd refuse to give.

What They're Really Romanticizing

Those X posts asking "why can't we have this in America?" answer themselves.

Because they're not willing to be the kind of people who create it. They can barely manage basic public consideration. They yell into their phones on trains. They leave trash where they stand. They treat service workers like obstacles. They mistake rudeness for authenticity and selfishness for freedom.

And then they visit Japan and marvel at how nice it is when everyone else behaves.

What they're romanticizing isn't Japan. It's freedom from responsibility for order they'd never help build.

The question isn't "Why can't my country be more like Japan?"

The question is "Would you wear a suit on your commute just to change out of it at work, every single day, because that's what's expected?"

They already know the answer.