That is some bizarre obliviousness of privilege. I thought all of the more-equal-animals knew to keep quiet on the implicit bribes and other luxuries of their station.

It's rather quite the opposite in Japan. The "more-equal-animals" consistently make public completely oblivious remarks, only to apologize the following day and then (often) just go back to business as usual.

I think this is driven by the fetish to be extremely apologetic in Japanese culture.

I don't think the grey-haired dinosaur politicians are sexist, classist (is that a word?) and racist because they love to apologize.

Yeah, their imperviousness to either progress or consequences is kind of incredible. An entire nation of collectivist, rule-following tendencies with a scummy layer of cartoonishly evil folks at the top, who for some reason seem immune from having to be decent people.

And yet, somehow, it's a generally pleasant country to live in with happy healthy people and opportunity. Though, that momentum Japan's been running on seems to be running out.