Confucius Lives Next Door

Confucius Lives Next Door

        Confucius Lives Next Door follows the lives of a man, (author and American reporter, T.R. Reid) and his family as they get acclimated to living life in Japan after he is asked to run the Washington Post’s Tokyo location.  I have to say that throughout this entire book, the one thought that kept running through my mind was how it sounded so wonderful to live in Japan or even Asia in general.  The way that T.R. Reid has written this book paints such a wonderful utopian picture of life abroad.  With the way that life is here in the United States of America these days, this book makes you wish we were more like Asian countries, with their phenomenal educational system, their morals, and the seemingly almost nonexistent crimes.

In the beginning of the book, Reid speaks about how in East Asia the rates of crime including rape, murder, kidnapping, assault, and robberies are lower than the rates anywhere else in the world, including here in America.  While crime still happens in East Asia, the rate at which it occurs is significantly less.  There is no need for alarms, locked doors or to be afraid to walk the streets at night.

 I was just as shocked as Reid was to learn that children take trains on their own to visit place such as Disneyland.  I could not imagine letting my own son go off with his friends to a theme park without an adult.  After all, this is the day and age when parents don’t even want to allow their children to play outside alone or ride bicycles through their neighborhood streets with friends for fear of someone kidnapping them or worse.  It makes you wonder if the world is really that bad of a place or have we as a society put these thoughts into our own heads and created this incessant fear?

How wonderful would it be to be able to sleep at night knowing that you can leave a window open for the fresh night air to blow through your home and not worry that someone may crawl in through that very window and harm your family or steal your belongings?  In East ng Asia you can do that if you so choose.  However, I would advise against it, here in a town as small as Spring Hill, Florida.  Reid writes about how the crime rates have been kept at these low levels all while having a low police presence within the countries.  This fact alone astounds me.  Low crime rates, low police presence, more lenient sentencing, less people in prisons – how do they manage this?  The moral code within the East is clearly much more ingrained in their people than it is here in the United States.  As the years go on, you see people here in the United States becoming more and more barbaric, disrespectful, and selfish.  People over here lack morals; everyone is for themselves and seems to care for others less and less.  It seems this is not the case in East Asia.  Drug use is also lower in East Asia which certainly plays a huge part in their lower crime rates.  Meanwhile, here in the United States, it seems that illicit drug use is at an all-time high.