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How Pax Britannica causes me to walk into Japanese people
🕑 Added 2025-02-05 13:29:10 +0000 UTCFor those that don’t know, Pax Britannica refers to the relative peace between the great powers in the time period roughly bounded by the Napoleonic Wars and World War I (1815 - 1914).
During this time, the British Empire became the global hegemonic power, and adopted the role of a "global policeman". The name is Latin and modeled after Pax Romana (Rome) and now Pax Americana referring to the period of peace after WWII where the USA acts as the world police.
During the Meiji Restoration in Japan from 1868, the new emperor saw how the great western powers were carving up the rest of the world and colonizing regions closer and closer to Japan. He knew they were behind technologically, and couldn’t win a war, so he decided to emulate the leading power at the time of Great Britain.
The reasons for this made sense. They were both island nations near larger land masses with large populations. Japan wanted to be the Great Britain of the East, so they hired and consulted with them and modeled their new navy fleet off of them, built rails, roads and infrastructure in the same way, and unfortunately, also colonized and invaded neighbors in the same way.
Many people don’t know this, but it’s why the Japanese drive on the left side of the road and their trains run on the left side as well.
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Since arriving in Japan a few days ago, I find myself constantly running into Japanese people on the street and it took me a second to understand why. Downstream to driving on the left side of the street is walking on the left side of the sidewalk. This is reinforced by escalators being aligned that way, as well as arrows in subway floors directing the flow of pedestrian foot traffic that way:
It’s at the point where the people are conditioned to default to being on the left. So the typical flow of foot traffic looks like this:
Now I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m in their country so I’m trying to adapt to their ways. I just find it fascinating that in 2025, the 130 million Japanese people subconsciously walk on the left side because the British on the other side of the world were so dominant in the 1800s.
