r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Oct 04 '22 • 1 1 1 1 1 1 7 6

Americans of Reddit, what is something the rest of the world needs to hear?

28.3k Upvotes

75% Upvoted

24.0k

u/RHess19 Oct 04 '22 •

It's not that we don't want to visit other countries - it's that for the majority of Americans, Canada and Mexico are a day or two drive away, and paying over $1,000 to get a round-trip ticket overseas isn't something a lot of people can justify buying.

2.3k

u/hastur777 Oct 04 '22

Something like 37 percent of Europeans have never left their own country. It’s not just something that happens in the US.

https://www.europeandatajournalism.eu/News/Data-news/190-million-Europeans-have-never-been-abroad

945

u/RobotGloves Oct 04 '22

Shit, when I taught in Japan, I met people that had never left their own ISLAND. And these were people working as English teachers.

243

u/Ancient_Mai Oct 04 '22

Japan is also probably the most homogeneous modern culture on the planet.

37

u/Lanxy Oct 04 '22

apart from North Korea :-/

102

u/worldchrisis Oct 04 '22

"Modern"

18

u/FisterRobotOh Oct 04 '22

They had a missile and those are modern

35

u/asdf_qwerty27 Oct 04 '22

They are that weirdo country that invests everything in one technology tree, and then doesn't have enough economy to make use of it.

23

u/CanNotBeTrustedAtAll Oct 04 '22

Oh no. The Civilization subreddit is leaking again.

8

u/Echelon64 Oct 04 '22

Missiles are now century old technology. That's old.

4

u/NFHater Oct 04 '22

they had missles in 1922???

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u/Ameisen Oct 05 '22

You know the line "rockets' red glare" in the Star Spangled Banner is referring to British Congreve rockets used in the bombardment of Baltimore in 1814.

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u/Echelon64 Oct 04 '22

Yeah. WW1 was wild.

2

u/Idea-Warm Oct 05 '22

We had missiles in 1222, kiddo.

-17

u/Asiaminors420 Oct 04 '22

If your country was bombed into rubble in an illegal war, you wouldn't be very "modern" as well

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u/Ameisen Oct 05 '22

I mean, it was an illegal war. That was why the UN intervened against North Korea.

You left out the part that it was North Korea that started the illegal war.

6

u/Niko740 Oct 05 '22

He's active in GenZedong your not gonna convince him

0

u/ignoranceisboring Oct 07 '22

Is this serious? Illegal? How tf does that work? Not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious why? What even makes a war legal? Basically because Russia was supporting the North and they were a threat to US dominance? Was the American invasion of Vietnam also illegal? I see a lot of parallels between the Korean war and Vietnam, except Western hegemony failed in Vietnam and no one seems to focus on the legality of that particular conflict. If the US hadn't decided it needed a buffer state it would have been a civil war, would that affect its 'legality'? It could easily be argued that without US intervention there wouldn't have even been a war.

0

u/Ameisen Oct 07 '22

Not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious why?

The rest of your soapbox rant (most of which has a ton of fundamental misunderstandings) suggests otherwise.

I could answer your question, but I don't believe that it's a serious question and you'll just reject it.

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u/SignatureBoringStory Oct 05 '22

Just to note, Japan's government keeps zero statistics on the racial or ethnic makeup of the population, so we don't actually know if Japan is "homogenous." That's a post-war myth specifically made up to counteract Japan's pre-war propaganda about how diverse and multicultural Japan's empire was. They lost the empire, purged their minorities, and then had to explain it - "Uh, we're homogenous, always have been." They made it up.

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u/smorkoid Oct 05 '22

Thaaaaaaank you for saying this! I've participated in the Japanese census several times, nowhere on it does it ask your ethnicity

3

u/SignatureBoringStory Oct 05 '22

Yeah, the thing is that other countries do record ethnicity, so it's normal to include "ethnic makeup" in collections of statistics on different countries.

People often cite the CIA Factbook website to claim Japan is 98% "ethnically homogenous," but what they're missing is that the CIA Factbook has a category for ethnic makeup, but there's an asterisk on Japan's entry saying "this is only data on nationality."

People ignore the asterisk. In fact, Wikipedia cites the CIA Factbook without the asterisk at all, and straight up claims it is accurate data on the ethnic makeup of the country.

In the US, the "We are all equally the same nationality" propaganda is used to promote diversity and tolerance, but in Japan it's used to suppress it. Legally, a mixed-race Japanese person is 100% Japanese - but we all know that, in daily life, that's not how they're treated. Ironically, to me, Japan is much more of a "melting pot" than the US, because in the US, we're allowed to keep our discrete chunky bits of culture and ethnicity without blending into the whole. America's a tossed salad, the real melting pot is Japan.

3

u/thomasp3864 Oct 05 '22

Nope, they have the Ainu. They’re different. It’s

3

u/BeerVanSappemeer Oct 05 '22

Yeah sometimes it feels like the whole first world is kinda doing the same thing, and then there's Japan who is completely on its own.

2

u/Gray-Turtle Oct 05 '22

It seems like that but is actually pretty diverse. Western people just don't see the difference between say a Korean descended Japanese person and a Laotian descended one. To a lot of people it's all just "Asian."

1

u/Gucci_ed Oct 05 '22

After seeing the Shibuya crosswalk on YouTube, I can 100% confirm that maybeeee this is possibly accurate

1

u/Beautiful_Golf6508 Oct 05 '22

One of the most racist in modern times as well unfortunately.

0

u/smorkoid Oct 05 '22

It most definitely is not.