A visit to Japan

Bookworm has just returned from a visit to Japan. She writes about it and supplies some photos. Her last two paragraphs:

Japan is such a high functioning society. It’s clean, well-organized, hard-working, polite, beautiful, productive, safe, and harmonious. In each of those ways, it really is an apex of civilization.

There are downsides, of course: A stifling conformity (or at least stifling by American standards), a high suicide rate, the seemingly sad and almost desperate lives of salarymen, the weird sexlessness of Japanese life, and, perhaps as a consequence of that sexlessness, a dramatic population decline. Still, comparing these problems to the poverty, dirty, despair, crime, violence, etc., found in so many other parts of the world . . . well, I think Japan comes off looking pretty darn good.

Read the whole thing here.