What Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Shapiro Get Wrong About Japan

The phenomenon of American pundits who know very little about Japan has been a recurring problem.

Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Jimmy Kimmel by shooting him at point-blank range in the head, throwing his body into a ditch, dousing the remains in gasoline, burning the evidence, and evading police capture.

Another week, another period of social media discourse where Japan is at the center of arguments between people who know very little of what they’re talking about.

Earlier this month, the subject on Twitter (which I refuse to call X) was the film Oppenheimer and Japanese war crimes. A feature that was little more than thinly-veiled anti-U.S. propaganda appeared on Al Jazeera, making the bizarre claim that America never considered its role in dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 80 years since. The response from the other side of things was equally false claims that Japan never apologized for its crimes during World War II.

I plan to address this latter point in a future article, but in the meantime I appeared on my friend Austin Petersen’s show to discuss some of these issues. You can watch the full interview here:

As how things typically go on social media, this topic soon died down, only to be replaced with yet another Japan-related subject to light the torches and ready the pitchforks. American comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel recently visited Japan with his family, coming back with nothing but high praise for the Land of the Rising Sun. Addressing his audience of millions of viewers, Kimmel stated:

"Not only did I not encounter a single dirty bathroom, the bathrooms in Tokyo and Kyoto are cleaner than our operating rooms here.”

He went on to compare Japan to Disneyland, while likening the United States to Six Flags, which for my non-North American readers is an amusement park notorious for poor upkeep and customer service. While it’s understandable that Kimmel is prone to overstate things for the sake of comedy, if you can call most of his trite material that, what I found more interesting was the response from conservative pundit Ben Shapiro.

Being more of a politically right-leaning individual myself, I technically have more sympathy to Shapiro’s side of the argument. Yet a large portion of his “takedown” of Kimmel relies on similarly incomplete information, which compelled me to write this piece. Normally I would care little for what an American comedian has to say about Japan, but both Kimmel and Shapiro have a combined audience of millions of people. This speaks to a larger problem I’ve noticed of Western pundits waxing on about Japan despite having very little real knowledge about the country, and I think some corrections are necessary.

Starting with Jimmy Kimmel, one needs to address the elephant in the room: he’s one of the richest entertainers in America with a net worth of $50 million. He can afford to stay at ritzy places that the vast majority of his viewers never will, which means that when he travels, he does so in luxury. When one visits Japan as a short-term traveler, they tend to only see and remember the good parts because there’s not enough time to really see much else. For a celebrity like Kimmel, it’s not surprising that what he personally experienced was the best of the best.

I think we can assume that American celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel stay at the Ritz-Carlton and not your average APA business hotel.

To be fair to Kimmel, I agree that Japanese restrooms are on average much cleaner than American ones. Most mid-range hotels and restaurants will aim to have a basic level of cleanliness that will probably come as a surprise to most people from Western countries. But go to a dive restaurant or small izakaya (Japanese pub) and you’ll find plenty of restrooms that definitely look like they haven’t been cleaned in ages. These places also tend to be very cramped owing to how much of a luxury space is for dining establishments throughout Japan.

And despite Kimmel’s praise of Japanese toilets, he either ignored or never had to deal with the inconvenience of squat toilets. While the government is pushing to phase them out, you’d be surprised how they’re still sometimes the only ones available, especially in the countryside.

Kimmel’s other bit of praise comes from Japan’s seeming lack of litter on the streets. Again, likely owing to intentional exaggeration, he claims that there are “no garbage cans in Tokyo,” but this isn’t entirely true. Trash cans can be found in every major train station and convenience store, while large public parks will also tend to have them. His general observation that most Japanese people take their trash home, however, is largely correct and something unique to this country. Neighboring Asian countries like China and South Korea are much dirtier, which often shocks Japanese tourists when they visit.

This is a relatively common sight on Seoul streets, less so in Tokyo. Though South Korea is still cleaner than most of the United States.

There are many theories as to why Japan appears to value cleanliness more than other cultures, but one of the more plausible ones is the belief that the it’s historically tied to Shintoist and Buddhist practices. It’s been largely exaggerated how unhygienic medieval Europeans were, but the level of cleanliness in those societies largely varied depending on the social class and availability of public bathhouses due to changing perceptions of sexual mores and the risk of plague spreading.

It would of course be inaccurate to say that all Westerners are unwashed heathens and all Japanese are squeaky clean, but their respective histories and cultural attitudes are clearly different. Centuries of tradition have resulted in Japan being a country which values personal hygiene and America being a country where people have debates if they should wash their legs. Even if you argue that the latter is just Twitter nonsense, one would be hard pressed to find similar discussions in Japanese online circles.

Back to the subject at hand though, is there anything really that notable about a rich American celebrity going on vacation in Japan and coming back with a positive experience? Not particularly, but because everything has to be a battleground for American culture wars, it’s the ensuing discourse that followed which is what I take issue with. Like Jimmy Kimmel’s observations on Japan, Ben Shapiro’s thoughts have some grains of truth, but he ignores some important things that are pretty major oversights.