It is my adopted country. I am a naturalized citizen and consider it my real home. It is perhaps, because of my background as a Westerner who settled in Japan, that I have been exposed to a lot of criticism of Japan by Westerners and noticed a pattern I find distasteful. There are absolutely real issues to criticise, of course; Japan is no utopia. But I have unfortunately noticed a very strong trend to misrepresent the truth in order to garner engagement, often portraying things in a very sensationalized and dishonest manner. Honestly, I've noticed the same trend about China and Korea -- perhaps the perceived exoticness of the Far East, from a Western perspective, lends itself to believing outlandish claims more easily, making such claims especially effective at achieving traction.

For example, there's a very persistent claim about Chinese culture being so morally corrupt that Chinese people are known to intentionally kill pedestrians after hitting them with a car in order to avoid lawsuits[1]. In reality this was distorted from a sensationalized report of a single video of a car running over a pedestrian again, and then extrapolated as a fundamental truth about a culture of 1.4 billion people, cementing the perceived inferiority of Chinese culture to Western culture in the minds of readers. I could name literally dozens of cases of stories like these about CJK culture/governance that went viral in mainstream Western media.

I feel very strongly that this story fits into that genre. I do apologise for how strongly I reacted, but it's this kind of slander that really pushes my buttons and makes it hard for me to moderate my tone in the heat of the moment.

[1] "In China, drivers would rather kill you than injure you" -- Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/in-china-drivers-would-rathe...