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Most (literate, educated) Indians have been trained the same, and it has very little to do with religion. When you do accidentally step on a book though, each religion has their own format - Hindus touch the book then touch their head then chest in penance, Muslims lightly kiss the book or touch the book/bag and kiss their hand, Christians touch the book and cross themselves.

This is something I've noticed is uniquely culturally Indian, and transcends all religions. Which is beautiful.

I was once whacked in the head by a teacher for throwing a book onto the shelf, and rightly so.

TBF getting shoes on and off is literally 2s.

There's photos in the article, those aren't dress shoes with laces to be done and undone, they're fit for the purpose.

Also in cases where it's really dire they'll just step in with shoes on, it's just extremely rare and it might actually be another team altogether, operating under a different protocol.

I also take my shoes and off and find it gross when people don’t.

That said, I don’t think it’s really rational. Our houses are full of bacteria and dirt one way or another anyway. It’s impossible to avoid that without having some kind of airlock equipped with a shower in your porch.

>No, water damage

That's what we learned in fire fighting training. Everything that doesn't get destroyed by the fire and smoke will get destroyed by the water you use to put the fire out. A house on fire is lost. You just save people and animals and then you do whatever you need to protect the neighbouring structures.

> “No, water damage”

Bob should have used some of his Fuji 9, that fixes everything!

I've known enough people who worked in EMS to know that it's very common for there to be little alignment between 1a)what the dispatcher is told 1b)what comes from dispatcher 2)what they see when they walk in the door and 3)what the person actually needs.

Also in the Netherlands, doctors / nurses in my local hospital wear things like crocs and other slip-in type shoes - don't think paramedics do, just something I noticed.

Most shoes have rubber soles, to do damage to the floor it would have to be softer than rubber.

Obviously, it depends on the context once the front door opens to you

if you do need them you're not going to have time to go get them as an Emergency Responder. I think the pragmatic course then is to disregard etiquette and tradition for safety and practicality in a general sense.

Where I grew up (suburbs in the Midwest in the US) no one took their shoes off, ever, until it was bedtime. I cannot remember a single time taking my shoes of at a friend's house, or when visiting somewhere with my parents, or going off to see family. I guess the only exception would be if the shoes were exceedingly dirty, like you'd just stepped in mud or such.

Similarly in the military. We got un-booted at bedtime, and put them back on when we got up the next morning. Even in the barracks, including the nice ones that were reasonably nice apartment buildings, I never took off my shoes to walk around my room or when visiting someone else's (and vice versa; no one took off their shoes to visit me).

The first time I bumped into that rule was when I met my wife, who'd moved to the area from New York. I was quite confused when she asked me to take my shoes off at the door, and more than a little anxious. Sure hope I'm wearing decent socks and my feet don't stink, lest I be traipsing dirty feet around her apartment. To this day, I'm not convinced that hardsole shoes that haven't walked through wet messes are substantially dirtier than a damp sock that's been inside a shoe all day long.

Is this how most of the world operates? :-)

um, pretty much, yes.

Even when it looks like a laced up tennis shoe, closer examination of an 'outdoor' shoe will show that it has been stomped into and slipped out of many times.

If it is a sports use, i.e. basketball or other gymnasium, or indoors in a professional setting like at a busy office there will be a changing area and people etiher change into provided slippers (town hall and community centers, schools, and other public spaces have many cubicles and slippers) or will change into 'indoor shoes' brought for the purpose.

There is a strong cultural 'habit' that can be interpreted as 'manners' such that when visiting someone's house and switching from outdoor shoes the host will then either turn the shoes toward the outdoors such that they are easier to step into on the way out, or will arrange them facing out but no longer in the main path of the entry way.

It is this 'manners' which the EMT is requesting to stop. The indoor slippers are used for hard floor and rug covered areas, but not tatami mats. A quality tatami mat can be damaged and require actual replacement if stepped on with a hard soled shoe even once.

So the 'taking off of shoes on the way in my EMT is quite appropriate, and the time to 'unshoe' and reshoe on the way in and out is cumulatively not more than 5 to 7 seconds total - if the emergency case is that close to failure, the low speed ambulance ride through narrow streets is going to be the failure, not the shoes. But rearranged and relocated shoes becomes much more complex when the crew have a person in a stretcher (which is faster AND safer than a rolling gurney) - they can step into their own shoes without really even looking if the shoes are left exactly as they were placed on the way in - and this is what the original article is requesting.

The intent of the article in original Japanese is: "Don't slow down the exit process by moving our shoes in an effort to be 'mindful of good manners'. We really wont think poorly of your manners if you neglect this small gesture"

I have seen in Switzerland that people leave their shoes at the entrance and switch to house shoes. Or they use a shoe cover when they enter house with shoes. Probably because houses are mostly wooden floored.

So shoes on is not universal in the West.

> when was the last time you stepped on feces?

Try this , when was the last time you stepped somewhere that had previously been stepped on by someone who had walked on a spot which had been stepped on by someone who may have stepped on a spot trod on by ... go far enough back and it's all had feces on it to some small degree.

An easy way to keep this concept clear and understand the reasoning behind a 'leave the outside shoes out of the house' is something learned as a child.

Just like there is a Law of Conservation of Mass, and a Law of Conservation of Energy, and these two are the same law as defined by Einstein, there is also a Law of Conservation of Filth. The law may be stated as: "A spoonful of wine in a barrel of pigshit is a barrel of pigshit. A spoonful of pigshit in a barrel of wine is... a barrel of pigshit."

Taking off the outdoor shoes to come indoors changes the "is there trace amount of feces on my dining room tatami floor?" risk from "I cannot be reasonable sure," to "I can be reasonably sure that there is none." If guests find that too much friction to understand and accommodate, one might argue for a different set of guests who are less accepting of an allowable amount of pigshit in their wine.

Nothing like that.

Most prople I kmow live in appartment and take off shoes. It does not take much space.

It civilized to live in a clean home instead of a dirty mess. Life is not just about maximizing your survival rate.

I’d say it’s a good way to tell when you should have swept up a few days ago.

An indoor cat would still be consistent with this philosophy. They do their business indoors, but so do humans.

Anecdote, I recall reading about older family members being disgusted by the removal of outhouses and the idea of shitting indoors.

That's the whole function of shoes though. If outside was as clean as my floors at home, I wouldn't need shoes.

I have to imagine the person who leaves their shoes on either never goes outside, or just has filthy floors.

Like outside? It's so wild to me how some can step into their living space (or even bedroom) with the same shoes they use outside.

I've lived in both shoes on and shoes off households and I'm sorry, but shoes are filthy. I wipe my dogs paws when they comes in from walks and their paws are filthy and I wipe them every single time they come back in from walks. Shoes are never wiped.

Take a second, get a tissue, and go wipe the bottom of your shoe.

> incredible development of the aesthetics of simplicity and emptiness compared to the ostentatious and sometimes baroque western aesthetics

We're just going to pretend that Japanese web design is identical to the rest of the world's, and that Japanese homes aren't half the size of elsewhere such that every horizontal and vertical service is commonly used for storage.

> neat and tidy compared to cluttered

People who think this have actually never been to Japan, most Japanese homes and offices are incredibly messy.

Sure, but there are a lot of non-western cultures out there. What's surprising is the prevalence of posts regarding Japanese culture.

Having been to Japan several times… and actually studying Japanese studies… I can see why you're saying this but it's very superficial. None of the southern "essence" that caused the split & war is there in Japan at this point. Or do you mean it's as if the South seceded, then proceeded to lose anyway due their policies being a natural disadvantage, and then developed, out-northing the North?

What is characteristic of "the American South" here?

You may think that because of the nationalism, but that's a superficial similarity. Outside western europeans, almost everyone is nationalistic, so that's not a useful characteristic in comparing societies. Aside from that, the American south is more like the Arab world/India--disorderly, combative, face-saving culture, and food-, family-, and faith-centric. The Japanese are much more like Mormons.

The “became technologically advanced” part of this hypothetical is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Yes and no.

The biggest historical commonality between the American South and Japan - or, at least, the Tokugawa shogunate that was ruling around the same time as the South - was that both of them were at one point ruled by a cabal of essentially feudal lords. There is a lot of convergent social evolution that happens when your country's economic elite all make their money by owning land - lots of strange social titles, honorifics start floating around, people start talking around problems, and the like. However, this comparison is only skin deep, and there's plenty of things the Tokugawas did that have no parallel, or even worked backwards, to what happened in the historically contemporaneous American south:

- Sakoku (the policy of keeping Japan completely closed to trade and immigration).

- While America generally has had a long streak of veneration of the police, they never reinvented anything close to the samurai in terms of being a hereditary warrior class with a tax stipend.

- Likewise, the American South did not have a caste system; Japan did (and so did France?!?)

This makes more sense when you remember that the Tokugawa shogunate itself is the time reversal of the American South: the Tokugawas were born out of a long civil war and ended with a foreign invasion (from America) while the American South was born from foreign invasion (of Americans) and ended with a civil war.

The American South is also, interestingly enough, a mirror of Japan in other dimensions as well. The reason why the Tokugawas shut the country's borders for hundreds of years was because they understood that Christian missionaries were a front for a larger invasion force that would pillage the country's resources and abduct people to become slaves in other countries. Of course, the South was buying slaves abducted in other countries in massive quantities.

Going back to the convergent social evolution I mentioned before, you can see some of this in Japan today. Kyoto is notorious for doing exactly the same kind of backhanded compliment bullshit the South loves doing. But even then, that's one part of Japan, that was formerly the capital city. One stop on the Shinkansen takes you to Osaka where people are about as open and outgoing as Americans are.