In a recent post I talked about how much you can tell about the difference between various world cultures by the way pedestrians respond to red lights. Japan is at the extreme of civic obedience, New York is somewhere in the middle, and a pedestrian in Mumbai wouldn’t obey a traffic light if it conked him on the head, dragged him off into a dark corner and threatened to put him in a Danny Boyle film.
But here’s one that’s even more extreme: Vending machines in Japan sell you beer and sake. Think about this for a moment. We don’t sell the hard stuff in our vending machines. We just take it for granted that it wouldn’t work out, that our teenagers would use it as an opportunity to get drunk.
Give a sixteen year old unchaperoned access to booze, so goes the conventional wisdom in the West, and that kid will keep popping quarters into a beer vending machine until her or she is too drunk to operate the coin slot.
But in Japan you can buy your beer straight from a coin op vending machine, any time of the day or night. And, needless to say, Japanese kids are not running wild and drunk in the streets. Some things may look similar between New York and Osaka, but if you look just a little below the surface, they couldn’t be more different.
“But in Japan you can buy your beer straight from a coin op vending machine, any time of the day or night. And, needless to say, Japanese kids are not running wild and drunk in the streets. ”
look carefully, at times, the adults ARE.
Ah, nice observation. I think you are on to something here! 🙂