> My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are closer to China in terms of both geography and culture without having problems with corruption. It's almost as if 400 years of history has very little to do with it.
Hong Kong was long a British colony. Taiwan and Singapore are tiny island nations, with founding generations small enough to retool the culture and institutions. The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, was deliberate about reshaping the country’s culture because he was adamant that “culture is destiny.” https://paulbacon.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pd...
So was Afghanistan. But a short duration of military dominance and writing words in paper can’t change the culture of the people. Colonization, as with Hong Kong, or a generation of top-down rule over a small population, as with Taiwan and Singapore, can. Again, read Yew. He was deliberate and methodical about all this, and has written and spoken widely about what he did to transform Singapore.
I dunno. That suggests that it's not culture and it's not geography... So what's left? Genetics and history? I'd pick history, the accumulation of aggregate choices.
I don't understand the premise, where Japan is supposedly uniquely high-integrity. It ranks around the United States in metrics of corruption, sometimes higher and sometimes lower over the last 20 years, and historically was significantly worse than it is now. It's about as corrupt as any of the many countries on this planet that have the rule of law.
