On my first morning in Tokyo, a barista in a café near Ueno Station served my coffee with a big smile and two short bows. The cashier was just as kind and patient, though I do not speak Japanese. There was no tip jar or prompt to tip on the credit card screen, as tipping isn’t part of the culture in Japan. I thought that perhaps these young ladies were on some happy pills or that their behavior was an aberration. But I had the same experience in Tokyo and in other towns and cities across Japan this past summer: excellent service, outstanding food at bargain prices (thanks to the historically weak yen), and no tipping whatsoever.
I think we have more to learn from Japan than American elites acknowledge.
When I was a business school student in the early 1990s, my professors often held up Japan as a model country. But Japan’s economy crashed that decade, while China’s took off, and today, Japan is somewhat forgotten. To the extent that American media do notice it, their coverage is often negative or disapproving, with headlines complaining of overtourism (largely a phony narrative designed to discourage travel and “save the planet”) and the burden caused by Japan’s aging population.
Japan doesn’t get the respect it deserves in the American media for several reasons. For starters, it lets in fewer immigrants than other rich countries, though it is admitting more than it used to. America’s net migration rate is 3.01 migrants per 1,000 residents, while Japan’s is less than a third of that, at 0.74 per 1,000, according to the Migration Policy Institute. In 2017, Japan received 20,000 asylum applications and approved only 20. Last year, it granted refugee status to a record number, but that amounted to just 303 out of 13,823 applications.
Japan isn’t “woke,” by Western standards, though private citizens cannot own firearms and abortion is legal until 22 weeks. There is no legal gay marriage. I visited during Pride Month and saw almost no Pride flags or mentions of the occasion. Nor is DEI a thing in Japan. Though Tokyo’s governor is a woman, just 9 percent to 13 percent of management positions are held by women, compared with 41 percent in the United States.
The conviction rate of criminal suspects in Japan is 99.85 percent, according to Pico Iyer’s book, A Beginner’s Guide to Japan. And Japan still hangs convicted murderers, albeit not many—just four since the start of the pandemic—because the crime rate is so low. (Three people were killed with guns in the country in 2022). A 2019 government study concluded that only 9 percent of Japanese support abolishing capital punishment, which many see as a strong deterrent for criminals. My wife and I felt so safe on our visit that we allowed our teenagers to take the subway in Tokyo on their own at night, something we wouldn’t do in big American cities.
Let’s come back to the riddle of how Japanese restaurants offer great food and service at reasonable prices with no tipping. The American Left has pushed hard for higher wages for hourly workers, particularly for fast food and other restaurant workers in recent years. And wages are rising rapidly. According to Square’s Payroll Index data, the average hourly wage for restaurant workers has grown from $10.96 in 2017 to $18.18 in April, a 66 percent increase; retail employees have seen a 40 percent wage increase during that span.
While the U.S. federal minimum wage is just $7.25, many states have much higher minimum rates. Illinois stipulates $14; New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts are at $15; California is up to $16, Washington State $16.28, and Washington, D.C. $17.50. California also now requires quick-service chain restaurants with at least 60 locations to pay employees a $20 minimum wage. And many Americans tip 20 percent even for mediocre or bad service, even at fast-casual establishments where we have to bus our own trays.
Japan’s minimum wage rose modestly from 961 yen ($6.31 an hour at the current exchange rate) to 1,002 yen ($6.58) in 2023. Restaurant staff in Tokyo, with its 88,000 restaurants and a world-leading 239 Michelin star restaurants—more than double that of Paris, its nearest competitor—make an average of 1,154 yen ($7.58) per hour. Perhaps these wage disparities partly explain why we could feast on sushi in Tokyo for less than the cost of fast food in the U.S.
How do managers get staff to work hard and provide excellent service for the equivalent of seven bucks an hour, with no hope of tips? An article in Tokyo-based SoraNews24 explains that restaurants offer their employees free, high-quality food, but it seems the more important factor is the Japanese work ethic and culture. “The (generally accurate) assumption is that workers will give a 100-percent effort, not some lesser amount that requires a potential financial bonus in order to boost it to maximum,” explains Casey Baseel. “That work ethic is such a part of Japanese society that if you don’t display it, odds are your boss can easily find someone else who does.”
So here we have a prosperous country with a declining population and a comparatively low immigration rate, where you typically get superior service from people who earn relatively low wages and have no hope of obtaining tips. And it isn’t just at restaurants. I also went to two baseball games in Japan, at Hanshin Koshien Stadium and at the Tokyo Dome, and was astonished by how friendly and chipper the young female vendors were—again, with no tipping. Carrying heavy kegs of beer and other snacks on their backs and chests, they marched up and down the aisles, smiling and engaging in friendly banter with the non-tipping fans.
Can Americans emulate the Japanese model? It wouldn’t be easy. Try asking an American Gen Z barista or beer vendor in a ballpark to smile at customers and see how far you get, especially if you take away their tip jar. The difficulty in finding hard-working, friendly staff willing to work for low wages is the main reason why so many American employers are addicted to foreign labor. True, Japan is now employing more guest workers, but it’s far less dependent on them than we are, and many of its guest workers come from countries like Nepal, culturally compatible with Japan. I’m told one major reason why Japanese employers can keep their wages relatively low is that housing remains affordable, even in Tokyo, once regarded as the world’s most expensive city. The average rent for a studio apartment in Tokyo is currently the equivalent of about $607.
Rather than continuing to import legions of guest workers almost exclusively from poor countries, we could establish a bilateral open-work program with Japan, whereby any American or Japanese citizen under 40 (or perhaps 30) can work in either country for a year or two. America’s youth could learn a lot from the Japanese. At the very least, they might gain a new appreciation for their own country, where even the surliest among us get tipped just for showing up.
Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images