McDonalds is disgusting everywhere else but in Japan – I don’t know why but McDonalds in Japan is really tasty. My husband missed American food sometimes and so every month, we would have some burgers and fries, milkshake and coke. Neither of us would ever think of eating fast food in America and we miss the food in Japan A LOT!

Anyway, none of the McDonalds locations would sell extra pickles on the burgers. You could have a burger without something, but you couldn’t have extra of anything. Even if you paid extra and insisted on paying a lot more for it.

And when we had pancakes for breakfast once or twice – they had meals already planned and you couldnt substitute something for something else.

It’s a small thing but it became very annoying.

That’s a new one I haven’t heard before. Lately I’ve been thinking about what appears to my Western brain to be the restrictive orderliness of Japanese culture. I recently wrote about the expectation that Japanese women quit work after marriage, whether they want to or not, so as not to disrupt the company with their pregnancies. It’s unfathomable in Canada, and yet here you have it.

Of course, your and my bias will be towards the way things are done in Canada. And we may point to things like high suicide rates and AKB48 as proof things are not working out so well for Japan with their “backwards thinking”, and yet us Westerners aren’t exactly in a position to tell people how to build a utopia.

Bah, just my two cents.