Today, I went to the post office near my house in Tokyo to sent back a confirmation receipt ("accuse de reception") in French. After that I went shopping and came back an hour later. My wife told me that someone from the post office had brought my card back to my house because I had forgotten to date and sign it. This is already incredible in itself that they went all the way to my house just to notify me of that, but on top of that the paper was entirely in French and they had taken the care to double-check everything against their bilingual model. I am still in disbelief.

This kind of service is unthinkable in Western countries, I think. I would never expect a post office worker in Europe to translate a document in Japanese just to make sure that the person hasn't forgotten anything, then walk to their house to notify them of something missing (especially that it wasn't such an important paper).

That goes on to show how service is important in Japan, and how people would go out of their way to make sure think go smoothly - it was not even a matter of customer satisfaction, as I would never have known I had forgotten to sign, and it didn't matter so much anyway. Great !