Yea, I think a lot of us love Japanese culture so much that we kind of hold Japanese people up on a pedestal and imagine they can do no wrong.

The truth is a lot of what's best about Japanese society (just like with anything else) is counterbalanced by really bad tradeoffs. For example, at least in Tokyo, I found people to be very cold and isolated, and this wasn't just to foreigners. And the work culture is incredibly toxic.

People that go there for two weeks interact almost entirely with staff in stores, see the employees treating each customer like they've descended from heaven, and assume that this is kindness or politeness. It's really an incredibly demanding standard that the employees are forced to adhere to.

I don't want to sound like I'm bashing the Japanese. I just mean to bring it back down to Earth in terms of our impression of it. Despite our love for it, it's really like any other culture with a whole host of negatives and a whole host of positives.