Keeping Singapore clean and safe, and enabling community action (How Singapore became the cleanest and safest city! Definitely worth a read!)

mse.gov.sg ^ | 4 March 2024 | Baey Yam Keng

[chajin]

"Nice, normal people" do very well in Singapore, and find it safe, clean, and enjoyable - and not in any way visibly oppressive.

You hear the same thing from Nihonophiles, that Japan is this wonderful country full of wonderful people who are never rude and produce perfectly clean cities, amazing convenience stores, and technology generations ahead of us. The funny thing is, all that is true, but there's an underbelly which is kept well hidden, and that is the continuous xenophobia. As long as non-Japanese are temporary visitors, they are treated like royalty, but as soon as they start wanting to BECOME part of Japan, living becomes increasingly difficult to impossible. And there's the dirty little non-secret, it wasn't all that long ago that the Japanese were horrible, disgusting, genocidal fascists who made the Nazis look like flower children, and it wouldn't take more than a generation and a sufficient world situation to turn them back into the same again. Confucianism doesn't have an answer for any of that; Judaism and Christianity do, which is why they are so rarely practiced in Japan in spite of the plethora of mission work over the last 170 years.

[Theoria]

I was with DoD, so I was an outlier, I treated the country as one should as a guest. I knew at anytime I was being monitored and collected on, that is a given.

Some of the oddest things in surveilance was the use of their cable company. I was visited mulitiple times in the evening, after I returned from work, to recieve a update on my cable box and such, which I never used. We are talking 9pm visits wondering why I'm not using the cable, etc.

There is hardly a wrong in the Strait Times, their paper of record, the government is almost always correct. There is no anger in opinion articles, there is no troubles pointed at. If you do, there is the option of sedition. In one such case a MRT station was built in a odd location, and a local gave the minister a stuffed 'white elephant', which is a common phrase in se asia. The minister said it was almost a seditious action.

[Jamestown1630]

'You hear the same thing from Nihonophiles, that Japan is this wonderful country full of wonderful people who are never rude'.

I worked for many years with a Japanese lady who disliked going back to Japan. She said that after years living in the U.S., she realized that they were actually quite rude. She especially disliked how they were always knocking into one while walking down the street, without apologizing...

[Jamestown1630]

You need to improve your reading comprehension. My post stated that information is plentiful about Singapore, and I don’t need to visit it any more than I need to visit North Korea to know that I wouldn’t want to live in that culture.

That isn’t comparing them; it’s comparing the need to visit them to know about them.