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Methinks you are romanticizing a culture you don’t live in by only seeing the positives you like.

That's kind of an insulting assumption as I'm Japanese and live in Japan. So while I may have a biased opinion, I wouldn't say it's romantisizing.

In fact, I'd say you're the one that seems to be making assumptions based on snippets of our culture that you see on the internet. The weird vending machines that sell letters from your pretend grandma to used panties aren't found everywhere you go — they're in specific locations for the novelty.

Also having regular vending machines for drinks and food doesn't exactly contradict my point. The vending machines are more for the customers' convenience. They're not installed specifically for removing human contact. Yes, we lose human contact as a result, but it's a tradeoff to better serve customers whereas most companies that deploy AI support agents probably do so to save a buck.

Sorry about the rant.

I’ve heard\read there are many racist, paternalist, hierarchical and collectivist traits,

We definitely have all that!

Also, I found it interesting that someone mentioned how you used "collectivist" as a negative feature of Japanese culture. While it certainly could be, it's actually nice to see when people are genuinely wanting to help each other. The problem is our hierarchical culture where some shitbag on top takes advantage of our collectivist mindset for their own gains.

*Everyone else is working unpaid overtime, why can't you?! *Almost nobody being worked overtime is going to say that. Workers will take it for the good of the imaginary "team" because some manager convinced them it's the right thing to do. Luckily, probably thanks to my Canadian upbringing, I've always been able to say no to ridiculous shit like this. That, and I work for myself, so the only ones who boss me around are my wife and kids.

Edit: Whoops, maybe collectivism isn't the right word for what I found to be positive after reading your other comment. Sorry, but I hope you got my point.

It might actually be China. All the robots I see here are the one with the cat face and I'm pretty sure that's where they come from. We don have remote control robot cafes where people with physical/mental disabilities to serve you using avatar bots which is cool!

As a Japanese person, I find it really cringey when people speak like anime, but I do my best to applaud their efforts because no matter how silly it may sound, they appreciate my culture enough to want to learn.

Here in Japan, I used to use it to follow up and coming Japanese illustrators and webcomic artists, most of who tweeted fun, non-political, wholesome things. I got live updates whenever we had typhoons and earthquakes.

Obviously there's toxicity if you look for it, but I didn't really see it. Which is why I honestly didn't understand why so many people shit in Twitter especially on "tech/bologicallysocially-aware" circles like Reddit calling it toxic. The reason why I stopped was because Musk bought it, not because of the content I was seeing. Maybe I was just lucky.

Note: This is just a single old man's anecdote, so please take it with a huge grain of salt.

If he's still alive he hasn't changed enough imo.

Japanese people tend to make a big deal out of the "human touch," especially when it comes to service, so I can see how companies aren't jumping on to the hype. We're also pretty slow to adopt change.

Oh and maybe the shit exchange rate makes it expensive to use the service as everything is pretty much foreign tech.

Yeah, I'm appreciating how quickly the Switch games are loading. Smash, Zelda, and Splatoon used to frustrate me a bit with their load times.

As a Japanese person, I'd say this is pretty conventional. But manga panel orders can be pretty chaotic, just like our writing.

Do you mean from the panel where she's putting the mits on to the part where she's showing them? Then, yeah, since we also write top to bottom in a vertical line, we can also go from bottom to top when going to the next line.

Another commenter says the mangaka screwed up, but I don't agree. Japanese writing is chaotic, so this manga is pretty conventional. Here's what we have to deal with when it comes to reading the news paper.

The text within the fuchsia line is one article. You start reading from the green line — top to bottom, left to right. You'd think it would keep going that way until the left edge of the paper, but for some reason, they decided to put a second article, so the green paragraph's height is cut in half. Then we start the yellow paragraph and you'd think the article is done when it reaches the left edge of the green paragraph, but nope, there's one more paragraph starting from the blue arrow.

Poison the eggs, less demand, price go down... Right? Stable genius move.

Rapist tells group of mentally challenged people to forget about list of paedophiles.