Denna artikel är skriven av en australier och belyser samma knepiga saker som jag erfar (och har svårt att smälta längre) då jag besöker Sverige. Alla svenskar jag känner som besökt Japan blir helt fascinerade av att allt faktiskt FUNKAR och skulle gärna vilja ha så också hemma.

Men, vad är det som hindrar oss?

Svaret är inte så komplicerat:

…precis samma saker som hindrar folket i Australien!

Japan, a model of a society that is working

TERRY MCCRANN

Business Columnist

Melbourne

Three — I must say, wonderful — weeks in Japan left me pondering a simple but doleful question: why are we, in Australia, so utterly and completely hopeless?

That is, completely hopeless at rendering simple, but effective, the basic functionality of day-to-day life. In the old saying, the trains run on time in Japan. And indeed, to extend the metaphor, so does everything else as well. In Australia, the trains certainly don’t; nor does much else. If indeed, they run at all.

Now, this is not an extended lament that we don’t have a Shinkansen — Japan’s quixotically sensational Very Fast Train network — snaking all over the continent.

Indeed, any move to build even just one VFT, between Melbourne and Sydney, would actually serve to emphasise my broader lament about dysfunctionality. It would make transport functionality worse by the wasteful diversion of both money and focus, especially if “built” on our population ponzi.

In assessing why Japan — at least to the short-term visitor — works so well at this basic but fundamentally important level, you need not understand and factor in the interlocking dynamics of three broad influences: culture, scale and common sense.

The first two are outside the scope both of this comment and the Australian reality. It is the all-too often absence of the third — our failure just to do things “sensibly” — that time in Japan so lamentably exposes.

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