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"Dont know if Japan has been infiltrated by generations of ineffectual liberal educatots and hordes of illegal aliens.?"

It's in progress. More and more schools are doing away with uniforms, and they've forbidden teachers to smack the little sh@ts when they need it. This has had a disastrous effect on classroom discipline in the public schools.

Many students, in fact, consider time spent in public school classrooms to be wasted; their real test prep comes after school in the juku.

You can pretty much toss any stereotypes about Japan that have been popular. The ravening beast of PC is devouring Japanese society. It may not be as far down the road as in the US, but it is advancing at full gallop.

Japanese TV is pretty much nothing but propaganda pushing promiscuity, perversion, and divorce. The tobacco nazis roam the country seeking whom they may devour. Crime rates are several times higher than the government admits. Juvenile delinquency has metastasized.

Having had children in the Japanese public school system since 1992, my conclusion is that most Japanese public school teachers are the next thing to useless.

On the other hand, they do give kids a better background in math and science, which is important. Until college, at least, let kids do their independent thinking on their own time. All the independent thinking in the world is useless if you don't know squat. The job of the schools is to give them something to think about.

When the yen peaked, there were many, many, many illegal IRANIAN overstayers in Japan. There are still some, but not nearly like in the mid-1980's. They would sell counterfeit phone cards (which entitle the user to make phone calls from pay phones), and they would deal the small amount of drugs in Japan.

I found Iranians very nice, and I found that they had a hard time obeying the law.

There is currently a crack-down against visa overstayers in Japan.

Suddenly, ordinary street policemen will stop people who do not appear Japanese, and they will ask to see your gaijin card, or your passport.

As compared with the general pattern over the past 20 years, this is unusual, but now suddenly not uncommon. Since I am physically huge and rollerblade aggressively (something faily unusual in Tokyo), I am stopped very, very often compared to others.