In the popular western media, Japanese society is presented as formal, rigid, conformist and law abiding.
There is a large English sign above passport control at Narita airport that reads:

WELCOME TO JAPAN. WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY, BUT PLEASE FOLLOW THE RULES.

Anthropologically speaking, this is a very interesting sign.   Who are we? And what are the rules? I assume by ""we" they mean the Japanese authorities, and not the entire population of Japan. And I assume by "the rules" they mean the rules of Japanese law and not how to cut tuna for sushi.   Reading that sign for the first time, I remember thinking about that western media image, and worrying how long it would be before I did something against a set of rules I could only guess at, rules that probably banned a lot of things I'd enjoyed doing only hours before.

In my own society you can fart at the theatre, burp loudly at a restaurant and walk down the street bare foot if you wish.   People will look at you strangely, but you won't be arrested, or deported if you're foreign (although the home secretary is probably working on that). 

Likewise in Japan, you can poor soy sauce all over your rice, sprinkle salt on your sushi, and walk down the street bare chested (males only, I'm sorry to say), and similarly people will tut and stare but you won't be brought up in front of a judge for it.

You may also run every red light you please (the driver behind is expecting you to, so it's more dangerous to stop!!), drive under the influence, use your mobile phone whilst driving, not fasten your seat belt, and drive into the mountains with a bus load of heavy duty kitchen appliances/motorbikes/cars/pornographic manga and toss it into the valley if you like.   No one will stop you.

One reason for this is that the police force here is reactive not proactive, something that was written into the constitution.   The most proactive I've ever seen them is standing by a main road looking mean and getting ready to do nothing.   My one encounter with the cops was when I was hitch hiking in the wrong place.   They put on their siren, sped across the central divide of the highway and skidded to halt in front of me.   They then leapt out of the car and yelled "You can't hitchhike on the highway.   This isn't America you know!!"

On mountain bike rides, myself and a friend play a game we call "gomi hunt". Gomi in English means rubbish, trash, or garbage and in Japan there are two main kinds:   Burnable and non-burnable. The non-burnable is sub-divided into recyclable (PET, glass, steel, paper etc) and "large". The burnable is everything else (hence recent? dioxin problems).

There are different days of the week/month for collection of these different kinds of gomi, and the majority of my neighbours go about dividing up their rubbish like botanists labelling specimens.   (last week I was scolded for putting my burnable gomi bag with the house next door's.   The right place for my apartment block's gomi was approx 2 metres to the left of that).

Large gomi is anything that won't fit into a bag or into any of the above categories. For example, furniture, bicycles, futon and so on. 

So the game we play on these bike rides is "who can spot the most outrageous gomi in the mountains". So far, the strangest thing we have come across (ridden around) is a smashed upright piano, its body crushed, its ivories strewn across the road, so alien to their new mountainous surroundings.

So this is what I've learnt:  there are rules that few people break, and if they do they are severely punished if caught.   These might include commiting burglary, car theft, rape (although I've read it's often unreported because it's not taken seriously here) and murder (sometimes punished by hanging).

Then there are the rules that the majority of the population at one time or another have probably broken, for example, riding your scooter without a helmet, or letting your kid stand on the passenger seat of your  family Subaru whilst sticking its head out of the sun roof as you drive along the expressway.   All of the above are against the law in my part of the country (kansai) and some are nationwide (e.g zero blood-alcohol level whilst driving) but are rarely punished.   In fact the zero blood-alcohol law has always been a point of amusement tinged with horror for me, since I learned that the police actually publish in the local newspaper the location of their breath test point every week, so that drivers know to avoid that particular route home from the pub. 

The point of this piece is that I find it so interesting that in a country portrayed as so straight and lawful (one whose people love to watch horrifically graphic TV shows about how crazy and unlawful the rest of the world is and how lawful they themselves are by comparison), there are a set of norms that blatantly break the laws of the land, and no one thinks anything of it but foreigners, the ones who are told to follow the rules when entering the country. 

Comments and questions please.