Positives and negatives of Japan

Some of the people on the Maiotaku forums suggested that to better understand Japan one has to weigh the negatives and positive of Japanese society. This thread is made to do exactly that. Each person posts one positive and one negative about Japan and slowly we'll hopefully all learn something. Positive: Japanese reverence for nature evident in the Shinto religion. Negative: The Japanese treatment of the Ainu through the centuries. The Ainu were the indigenous people of Hokkaido and currently they only number between 25 000-200 000 people. To read more here is the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people

Positives: The country has a lot of innovative products and tend to aim for aestheticism. Negatives: They still haven't caught on to some of the technological advances of the world, wifi is rare and even more rarely free, and fax is still very widely utilized, they don't often do e-mails in respect to business.

Hmm, that's a difficult one. Positive: The obvious, anime, games, and also the food Negative: Its hard to find a good enough anime to like, finding new games that are in english, and a lot of places around where I live to get japanese food I like to keep it simple on these subjects

Positive: The people. Their degree of politeness, courtesy and consideration for others make the Chinese bow in shame. Negative: It's a bit of an irony here but because they can be too considerate for the other party and interpersonal relationships, they never truly say what they truly think. It really trains you to observe their actions and second-guess their thoughts accurately (see honne-tatemae debate)

Just going to sit back and watch where this goes... http://i.imgur.com/4UniP.gif

Positives: they're really good at assimilating outside ideas and doing it better Negatives: The incredible amount of racism that's still so strongly embedded in their modern society

Its really interesting to see these different aspects being discussed. Please keep them coming. http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs39/f/2008/319/7/0/701531c9cfff8b76b9fc8cdb1e752d6e.png

At least many different types of positives and negatives are mentioned by different people. Its not a one sided argument at least. My intention wasn't just to create a negative image.