Foreigners have certain sayings about Japan that can help you to understand deep parts of the cultural iceberg that are normally hidden.

1. The Japanese would rather lose their way than win any other way.

Tradition and what the boss said to do is valued, at times, more highly than life itself.

This was apparent in the Pacific War.

In Papua New Guinea, the outnumbered, poorly trained and equipped Australians were nearly blown away by the the approaching juggernaut. However, when they adjusted their tactics to prepare for following assaults, they were confused to find that the Japanese forces kept on attacking in exactly the same way again and again and again, thus nullifying their otherwise formidable power and halting their advance.

The Japanese were unable to change right in the middle of things.

In another incident, the Emperor once asked his government why the Americans had been able to fortify captured Pacific islands so quickly compared to the Japanese who had held them for years. The answer was that the Americans immediately shipped machinery to each island for construction. This seemed an alien and scientific way of fighting to the banzai-charge preferring Japanese leadership.

I always had an image of Germans as hard-working, humourless bot-people, turning only from their toil on rare days off to listen to weird bands or attend pro-refugee rallies.

I now work with a lot of Germans and I’ve been surprised at how much I got them wrong.

Germans are one of the few ethnic groups Australians don’t already know well. There are many people with German ancestry in Australia, but it goes too far back to make much difference aside from celebrating Christmas a day early, making all the other kids jealous as they sleep that extra night waiting for those pressies.

To be fair, some of the stereotypes I saw busted may be recent innovations. Others might be regional – I deal mostly with the south, especially Bavaria. I’m already starting to see Berliners as other Germans do…

First, Germans don’t work long hours. They have some of the chillest labour standards in the world. By law, they are not allowed to work over ten hours per day. Companies will be in serious trouble if they get caught keeping people on longer than that, even if they pay them overtime rates.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is an ingenious cloaking device called an SEP field. People hide their spaceships by generating this field around the vessel. Everybody who sees it decides that, whatever it is, it’s someone else’s problem (SEP).

This seems to have been the case with the Trump shooter. Just about everybody saw him loitering suspiciously. Officials photographed him, warned about, watched him and so on, but nobody thought to go over and deal with him, or to at least keep Trump off the stage until he’d been rounded up.

Each culture has one concept that it cannot grasp.

South Koreans are constitutionally incapable of wrapping their heads around the law of diminishing returns. Two thousand years of Christianity have failed to leave any trace of forgiveness or peacemaking on Eritreans. Taiwanese will never apply their brilliant minds to their driving.

In the Philippines, the impossible concept seems to be ‘too much of a good thing.’

I’ve previously written about social manias throughout history.

We’ve discussed what gets them started, but how do they end? Is there a way we can cut them short?

Let’s examine some examples and see if any patterns emerge:

Economic bubbles

The commonest furphy in liberal democracies is that power comes from voting franchise and individual liberties.

That is, people are strong because they can vote and because they possess rights that are protected by courts and constitutions.

This is backwards.

People have rights and the franchise because they have power.

Voting

If the headline’s assertion is not already familiar to you, read this first.

I was once flying back to Sydney from Bangladesh and the flight was delayed by twelve hours – a common occurrence in those parts. The airline put us up in a nice hotel by the airport, twin-share. I was travelling alone.

An Aussie guy spotted me and suggested we share because he didn’t want to spend the night with ‘some random Bangladeshi.’ I looked him up and down, decided he was alright and agreed.

The night passed without incident.

I was younger and more pious then, so I thought we’d been a bit racist. Now that I’m older, I can see why it made sense.

When I see an Aussie, I can sum him up at a glance with a very high degree of accuracy. Toffy Poms sometimes complain that they can’t ‘place’ Australians in terms of class because we all speak the same, but we can tell who’s who.