Agree with the points that you raised. Make sense. Thanks for taking time to explain.
I am still trying to find out what particular factor or traits drives the Japanese.Even before WWII and after the war, their attention to details, their craftsmanship, etc is hard to explain. And they apply it to food, their engineering products (Japanese Mitsubishi Zero to Lexus) their buildings. etc.
Not sure if their Shinto religion has developed a trait that drives them. Every time I go to Japan, walk an alleyway, the attention to details such as traffic signs, road quality, pavement , placing of crossing, the way the house and shops abuts the road etc. is striking. Now I see that in South Korea. In fact Japanese town planners and architects have been engaged the World around since the 1970s because of what people saw in Japan.
The other extreme is India. I have gone to the latest Technology hub where MNC bigwigs such as Amex, Citi, IBM etc have offices. If you leave the lift and take the stairs it is shocking. Anything that can be hidden, the work is so bad. For the Commonwealth Games, they were caught out.
I am still trying to find out what particular factor or traits drives the Japanese.Even before WWII and after the war, their attention to details, their craftsmanship, etc is hard to explain. And they apply it to food, their engineering products (Japanese Mitsubishi Zero to Lexus) their buildings. etc.
Not sure if their Shinto religion has developed a trait that drives them. Every time I go to Japan, walk an alleyway, the attention to details such as traffic signs, road quality, pavement , placing of crossing, the way the house and shops abuts the road etc. is striking. Now I see that in South Korea. In fact Japanese town planners and architects have been engaged the World around since the 1970s because of what people saw in Japan.
The other extreme is India. I have gone to the latest Technology hub where MNC bigwigs such as Amex, Citi, IBM etc have offices. If you leave the lift and take the stairs it is shocking. Anything that can be hidden, the work is so bad. For the Commonwealth Games, they were caught out.
My answers to your new questions are already contained in my reply - very much depends on history, size and population plus culture.
Again consider the facts :
1 Japan is basically a four island country with a population of only slightly over 100 million. Cannot compare to China with 1500. When you have more people, there are more diversity, more differences and people do things differently.
2 Japan has a few hundred years or can say even close to a thousand years, isolated itself from other countries. Physically, it is isolated with the islands buffeted by winds, storms and hurricanes, plus earthquake prone fault lines. Given this, it has more or less, after absorbing cultural ballasts from China, sets its own path culturally and socially for centuries, till the Meiji. It had and still is developing a very strong culturally, socially homogenous country, except in the last 50 years or so when westernised influence attacked the very essence of what constitute jappie culture and society.
China's history is more tumulous, with many peoples of different cultures and practices, separated by vast land distances, clobbered together. Many times in their history, the north and south were ruled by different dynasties at the same time. What distinguish them from other races is the fact that they share the same common writing language and nowadays, a common spoken dialect, Mandarin. Such differences of course lead to different ways of doing things - it is hard to be homogenous without raising a big hue and cry, except where there is a proper agreed system of behaviour or laws, example the feudal and Confucianism ethics.
3 Again, history told us China survived through a very difficult and disastrous Cultural Revolution. One of the greatest damages was the rejection and demolishment of the past, history, practices and culture, in particular, the more or less total destruction of the Confucian ethical system. People do not respect the elders, past practices and even the very leaders and system that it is contained in. People even question the Communist ideology, but managed to use Maoism as a base of its governance. But then, as historians said, it is incomplete and not totally ideal to govern China, such a vast diverse land as compared to the centuries old Confucian ethics built up.
Many people in China nowadays say they got no religion. Morals? maybe no, so we have businessmen who put poison into milk powder and food in order to earn big money. Money is the new ethos but if allowed to carry on will lead to disasters for the country and peoples, everyone for himself.
Somewhere in the next 50 years, China leadership will realise they need a ethnos system of governance - that is, a ideology that spells out clearly to the people, what they ought to do in managing the society and nation. Sun Yat Sen's san ming ideology is a great start, but much meat needs to be build up against the framework to enable the country to prosper in the right, morally ethical manner.
In a nutshell, such a ethos system says - here are the rules, each of you who has a role to play need to play the role properly, someone will take care of you and everyone can progress happily and prosper together. In other words, a replacement of the Confucian ethics that helped to develop Chinese Culture, but were destroyed during the cultural revolution.
4 Whilst African or European countries near to each other may share many similarities in terms of development, these again can trace back to a common history, not that they got governed by the same people. Just that they went through the historical periods together. But if you really take a closer look at each of them, they have many differences - this accounts for the diversity between the Cossacks, gypies, hungarians, blankans, polish, jews with each other. Such differences often were deadly leading to pogroms and ethical cleansing. In recent history, we see the breakup of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia - even after over 50 years of common communist ideology, once the binds are off, each race and ethnical unit went out of their way to fight their way to supremacy - resulting in genocides all over. Even now, the euro multiculturalism is a myth, and to hope to get it adopted by a united euro is a day dream....the euro is as good as dead, because no nation and ethnic group will be willing to give up the powers of governance to others, especially unelected governors in Brussels.
So I do hope with the above, there is a better understanding of why some countries and regions develop different or supposedly perceived similar patterns.
The purpose is to offer a different point of view from a broader perspective. One should not just be blindsided by mere supposed physical differences and place judgements on nations or peoples for differences and be puzzled. Such argument is just one point of view.
That is all. Cheers