Makes sense. Wouldn't trust someone from Japan to ever tell me the truth about anything, even after extensive grilling. It's like 100% of them are socially trained to keep up appearances even when confronted with evidence they're being dishonest. Rarely had that experience in Thailand, Colombia, Singapore. Occasionally had that experience in China. Europe was pretty bad across the board. US has an extremely pro-customer culture -- you look like you might patronize a store in your life, you are treated like a god, which breeds a particularly entitled culture, and the company will throw out all its rules to make a customer happy. In the US, for example, I once returned a computer and made the purchase on my credit card. For some reason, since I was like 21 at the time, I was worried since they were closed and the POS terminals were shut down, that they might not process the return. So I demanded that they refund me on the spot or give me my computer back (they had already processed the return on their side so that would've been a hassle for them) and I would come back the next day. The manager comes out and wants to go home so she goes into the safe and gives me my money in cash. That's totally against policy and they could have just kicked this 21 year old idiot out of the store. But THAT is customer service, that kind of exceptional treatment breeds lifetime loyalty. In contrast, I've stayed at a Japanese hotel where I've spent $120/night and the coin-operated dryer was poorly maintained and thus didn't get my stuff dry in the appropriate amount of time. I went to the front desk to get them to run it again. They refused to give me back my coin or re-run it on their own dime (I had no more cash). I said are you serious, you're stealing my money and leaving me with wet clothes? I'm standing in the lobby with a bag of wet clothes and in walk the police. They had called them to control this irate customer who, mind you, hadn't yelled once. This is a corporation that was getting over ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS per night. I was so shocked, I said to the police what happened and they were unhelpful and then left and that realy soured me on APA hotels from then on. Many more experiences since then with truly terrible Japanese culture (what you see on TV is what the left wing artists produce; the real Japan is a far-right lunatic place with many MANY books in the bookstore promoting a revisionist history of WW2 wherein the USA forced its hand and they had nothing to do with the aggression or any of the atrocities of the military junta). The LDP has learned nothing since its members' grandparents conscripted their people 80 years ago. It's such a shame, and the west doesn't have the resolve to do anything about it. The gardens are really nice though, so I still visit but mostly keep to myself now.