Japan's customer service?

Legendarily good, yes?

Partially!

Japan has extraordinary amounts of customer service since a large bulk of their belief and daily practice is based around duty-based ethics. This is a rare thing to most Westerners - in the West, we're very willing to fudge the rules to provide a better outcome. It's expected, even.

In Japan, the ethical systems are more along the lines of rules than outcomes. We're generalizing, of course, this isn't everyone. But it's most people here.

In Japan, duty is taken really seriously. If someone has a duty to you, they'll work their ass off - especially if they've fallen short of that duty. If your air conditioning isn't working in your hotel room, you might get a manager and an engineer coming to check it out and fix it. Seriously.

The flipside that people don't talk about is when there isn't a duty to you. In situations where you're trying to get an exception to the rules that seems like it'd be common sense, you're kind of hosed. Because in that case, you're now asking for good/utility/whatever, but remember - everyone has a duty to the rules, and this is a duty-based society.

So something that might seem to make sense, won't happen. You might get a hotel room that's $250 per night, but the cost for an extra bed is listed as $300. Yes, $300 for a cot when a whole new room would only be $250. Obviously that's a mistake or stupid or something, but frequently it can't be changed.

Why would this happen? Who knows, maybe the prices are based on people occupying, not rooms... and the undiscounted rate is $300 per person. So the computer says that the price of a cot is $300, and the hotel staff quotes it to you.

Obviously this is just ridiculous and stupid, an extra bed should never cost more than an extra room. In the West, you'd expect someone to sort that out. But in Japan, asking for that will be seen as asking for special consideration - and for asking for the rules to be broken.

So you get into situations where stupid things are happening, but no one can fix them because there's a duty to the rules and no superseding duty to give you "special treatment" (even if it's common sense).

It's a marvelous society. There's basically no crime, it's ridiculously clean and hygienic, and the service is out of this world incredible... when it's within the duty-bound context.

This comes largely from the duty-based ethics, which are fantastic. The strict adherence to the rules is great too... most of the time. But a serious downside is the lack of an "escape hatch" when the rules require something totally asinine - they still must be followed here, because, of course, those are the rules.