Sometimes you get a better view of your own society from the outside than the inside, where the steady, daily drip of declining standards can inure you to what’s going on. A recent trip to Japan demonstrated that there are still societies where honour and integrity matter, they’re just mostly not in the Anglosphere.

In Japan a school principal, 59, was recently fired for repeatedly helping himself to larger coffees than he had paid for at a store; he had his retirement pay of around AUD$180,000 cancelled and his teaching licence revoked. His offences had cost about $5. A council employee elsewhere also lost his job for paying for a $1 coffee and serving himself a $2 coffee. Harsh? Yes. It is a shock to lax Westerners to see honesty and laws taken so seriously.

In case you think these offences are trivial, here’s a serious example. When former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated in July 2022, the Nara police chief apologised copiously for security failures, head bowed in shame, in a public press conference the very next day. He admitted fault both personally and corporately. One month later both he and the national police chief resigned over the matter.

Contrast this with the infamous Uvalde school massacre in Texas, which occurred two months before. The disgraced school police chief, whose forces waited over an hour to engage the shooter, neither apologised nor resigned, defended his indefensible actions and had to be sacked three months later. His men had been clustered in the corridor outside the killing field of the schoolroom, cravenly killing time, checking phones and applying hand sanitiser as the killer executed 19 victims, most schoolchildren.

Pundit Mark Steyn has taken to commenting that countries become more Western the further east you go, which is to say, Western in the old sense of abiding by Judeo-Christian values. I can’t vouch for that, but I do remember when Labor Minister Mick Young stood down from the Hawke ministry over failing to declare the import of a Paddington Bear, a high bar for a sackable offence if ever there was one. These days, PM Albanese takes no responsibility for the failed Voice campaign, although we all know he would have crowed from the rooftops had it got up. Former UK PM Boris Johnston partied willy-nilly with staffers during Covid lockdowns and failed to even show shame at being found out, while in the US Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have ever heard of the notion of accepting blame or responsibility. Did US heads roll over the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, where civilians fell from aeroplanes and terror groups looted an army’s worth of abandoned military hardware? Is anyone responsible for the many millions of invading illegals at the US border? What about the secret Washington censorship campaign revealed in the Twitter files, any apologies or sackings? Has Biden junior or senior apologised for the litany of debauchery emerging from Hunter’s digital devices – images of himself cavorting naked with prostitutes, weighing drugs with a hooker and far worse. No apologies or jobs lost over the Russia collusion hoax that the Democrats and the intel services perpetrated on Trump, and the dirty dealing with Chinese labs that saw gain-of-function funded by US monies, despite Covid supremo Tony Fauci’s denials. Instead the Biden regime continues the Uvalde police chief’s tactic of deny, dodge and delay.

Japan seemed exceptional in other ways, not only in honesty and integrity. One day in the Ginza, we ran into some acquaintances who were starry-eyed at what they had experienced. ‘Our first trip but it won’t be our last,’ they said, joining the surging throng of Australian tourists to Japan, it now being our third-most-popular destination. Apart from a plummeting yen and top ski fields, Japan also offers an exemplary cultural homogeneity, a society that prioritises beauty, order and politeness, spotless and quiet streets even in the midst of a 37-million strong city, no graffiti, no hobos, no litter, the locals trim, relaxed and well-dressed. The Ginza has been greened, with newly tree-lined streets, walls and balconies; gusts of jasmine-scented air greeted us in one main street. That’s climate action we could all get behind. Compared with Bourke or Pitt streets, this is an urban paradise.

Of course, Japan has its problems, such as its plunging fertility rate, and a hyper-ageing society where 29 per cent are already aged over 65. The Ginza is an upmarket area and hardly typical. But on the question of values, it is clear that Japan’s leaders still believe in and uphold the Japan project.

In his book 1984, George Orwell listed ways in which societies could collapse; one was when elites lost faith in their own society’s core principles. Christianity, the rule of law, our British-derived institutions, equality not equity, a justice system blind to special pleading, even the idea of men and women, few of these are defended by our current crop of politicians.

Free speech is now our latest casualty, with eSafety Karen, Julie Inman Grant, demanding Twitter/X censor a video of a Muslim youth stabbing a bishop, and Australian media incomprehensibly piling on to attack the hated billionaire, Elon Musk and by extension, free speech. That the offending video was pulled down in Australia, that an infinite number of other violent videos such as the George Floyd incident can be seen everywhere at will, that other platforms such as YouTube were not prevented from showing it, and that the video itself showed little that was graphic, seemed not to matter.

In an essay, Orwell talked about generations of Western intellectual ‘destroyers’ who fought to overturn religious belief. ‘For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.’

Australia’s elites, following the US and UK lead, seem to have lost faith in their nation’s values.

Japan shows us what we have squandered.