Shock of Western vs Japanese values

[Maciamo]

There are however, some truly good people out there. If you judge the people of a country on the "majority" of the actions of their population I think you would come up with every single country being full of absolutely cruel, horrible people.[/b]

I can't believe that you would go as far as comparing Japanese people with cruel and horrible people, if my I said were absolutely true !

In fact, being idealistic and moralistic can lead to some ugly situation where the that culture tries to impose its views on others because they are right (a bit like you know saying that if Japanese are as described above, they must be wrong !). Why do you think the West has led crusades in the Middle Ages ? Because they possessed the truth and the Muslims could only be wrong. What happened when the Spaniards and others colonized America ? They converted the locals by force to their moral beliefs. What is happening now with Bush and Iraq< Iran or North Korea ? Bush saw Saddam (and still see the 2 others) as evil because their values were different.

The advantage with non-moralistic countries like Japan, China or basically all East Asia as far as Indonesia is that they don'ttry to impose their values to others. That is why China has never tried to cololize the rest of the world to "civilize" them. When Japan invaded other Asian countries in the 1st half of the 20th century, they didn't try to civilize them or educate them, or convert them to their religion (although Shinto was state-religion at the time). They only cared about money (natural resources, forced labor, plundering of historical treasures, etc.).

[thomas]

Excellent post, Maciamo. Sad, but so true.

I would just like to relativise your legal examples. Judicial hypocrisy also exists in the so-called enlightened Western countries, in particular as far as monopolies (such as the Japanese tobacco monopoly you mentioned) are concerned. The West and its glorious ethical concepts are not immune to the filthy lucre. Also, I daresay that most of the jurisdictional action in Western countries is reactive ("Anlassgesetzgebung" in German) and not proactive too.