The post is wrong though. Tokyo isn't a nice city because Japanese people are mystically polite to each other, it's nice because it has good policies which you can copy yourself.
It is because of the culture of the Japanese people. In the World Cup and other stadiums they pick up all their trash when they leave and leave it pristine. They don’t have to worry about fines in the stadium.
They are rather polite, but they also have good residential trash pickup.
In this case, anyway. It's actually pretty difficult to get rid of some things, so people can build up a lot of junk at home - Marie Kondo's books in Japan actually have extra sections on how to get rid of it.
Maybe. It's equally possible that any particular policy won't stand by itself. That for the garbage policy to work you also need some large number of other policies that are endogenous to Japan.
