This popped up in my Youtube feed today, so I thought I'd just throw it on the blog and give my two cents.

George Orwell once said "all writers exaggerate by selecting."  This is definitely true of most travellogues which seek to emphasize the exotic quality or strangeness of any foreign culture.  I'm certainly guilty of doing it a lot myself on this blog.
I don't think there's anything false about what he's saying here, but he is somewhat over-emphasizing some of the very small cultural differences between Japan and the West.

I will add my support to one thing he said, though.
When I was flying back and forth between America and Japan, it was weird because planes would always get delayed on the American side of things.  The American airline industry tried to get the customer to view airplane delays as an inevitable part of air-travel.  You just have to put up with it, because that's how it goes--planes get delayed a lot.  It's just how air-travel works.

But planes would never get delayed in Japan.  So travelling back and forth, it was always a noticeable difference between flying in Japan (where things would always run so smoothly) and flying in America (where things were practically guaranteed to go wrong).