When I lived in Japan and was asked "Why are you interested in Japan?", I used to respond "It is the only non-Western country(at the time) where I have seen an extremely high level of technical/economic development and it is interesting to see similiarities/differences". (This is of course, long long before the rise of modern China)

The society is based so strongly on group cohesion and de-emphasis of the individual, the experience of living there is very, very different than the West.

I think that this "deep cultural difference" is what the original comment was trying to get at. Sadly the reference point of "American South" ended up triggering a different (less useful) trajectory for the responses.

Does the American South actually have that kind of group cohesion?

The kind of group cohesion you have in Japan tiday wasn't quite all there during the Meiji era (they'd just come out of a civil war, after all. Then there were also sporadic uprisings for decades after

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichibu_incident)

The following may help--- if you think of Othello as a kind of ideal southern gentleman, as the Japanese sort of did

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Othello-in-Tokyo%3A-Pe...

Now a Alt-Dixie readaptation of that adaptation must of course be the story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest

(Taiwanese would be negroes loyal to the Cause, and Ainu would be the native Americans)

When Japanese is written horizontally, it can be read either left->right or right->left. (occasionally, quite bewildering)

I have only seen right->left on signs; I have never seen it in books or magazines.

It's technically not right-to-left. It's columnar top-to-bottom (縦書き), with the columns right-to-left.

In signage you can have one character per column (kind of like one word per row on some English signs), making it look like right-to-left text.

Korea does this, also. Sometimes I'll get confused at a restaurant or other sign that is just 2x2 array of syllables. Is this horizontal or vertical? Even more confusing is when it can be sensibly read either way.

I've mostly seen it on the right side of vehicle livery.

Many comments point to "monoculture", but I think that a more useful lens to look at this is "the importance of maintaining society vs the importance of individual rights". In Japan, if you maintain society, my experience is that everyone is welcome (in my experience).

It seems like many times "society vs individual" discussion comes down to a cartoon like straw man discussion, but, living in Japan a long time, the difference in balance point feels quite tangible every day. I won't claim that this is a good tradeoff for everybody, but each society has quite serious benefits as (at times grating) restrictions.

It can be quite difficult to do something too outside the norm in Tokyo, but I am always surprised by the kindness, thoughtfulness and humane-ness I have been shown over the years. In places like San Francisco, a wild variation of individual expression is encouraged, but it sometimes interactions with other people can feel quite jarring and little recognition for simple, calm coexisting humanity.

It really comes down to personal preferences.

This seems little different from the Automated Parking Systems that I saw in widespread use in Japan from the 1980's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_parking_system

(The main difference being 3D in Japan and 2D at Gatwick)