Comment by arjie
20 hours ago
The local stores in Japan and Taiwan are really nice. 7/11 and Family Mart are these pleasant places where you can see schoolchildren sitting chatting and eating. That’s not something you’d see in San Francisco.
You’ll see adults with children sometimes at Whole Foods, which is nice, but unattended children not so much.
I’ve seen little children take the subway alone in Japan. Its a completely different environment
For what it's worth, this is commonplace in Australia too. I feel like you're describing a general safe country thing. I've lived in Japan so I know it's probably one of the safest places in the world, but I feel like what this thread describes is more US/Canada/some Euro countries being particularly dangerous, and not Japan being uniquely safe.
Canada is not particularly dangerous, but it has a horrible case of being drowned out by American culture (which strongly influences Canadians' subjective perceptions of their environs), and having the same kind of problematic urban planning as the United States.
I think it's more high-trust than high-safety. Most American cities (and certainly suburbs) are quite safe, and have only been getting safer over the past decades.
And yet we are constantly bombarded with fearmongering around children getting kidnapped on every street corner, every hour of the day.
I'll absolutely agree that a place like Tokyo is safer for a child on their own than NYC or SF, but the gap isn't as wide as the mainstream media would seem to suggest.
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Or walk home from school, or the playground, or wherever they are going from, through the middle of what in any NA city would be described as 'downtown', and would get CPS dispatched on speed-dial.
> but unattended children not so much.
But that's down to larger cultural differences. Japanese schoolchildren probably get less supervision overall than their US counterparts.