Exactly correct..!
And here’s the super weird thing —Japan isn’t really LAW abiding, per se.
Yes, the laws end up obeyed, sure, but that is NOT it.
It’s a tribe, mostly, they have a keen sense of being Japanese. They don’t have lots of people who just blew in from out of town and somehow get the passport (I see this all over the place in California). It’s a shame culture, not a guilt culture, mostly not riddled with arcane laws, and the idea of outing one’s self as a thief is so frightening that most people just won’t do it.
It’s NOT actually the law, it’s a very strong sense Shame Conventions that *could* be undone if you brought in enough scum-sucking, crotch-grabbing modernity-haters.
If I may add to this...
"Rule of law" is an Aristotelian concept, and Japan is a Confucian-ethic society, where the integrity of the group, whether the family, school, neighborhood, workplace, or nation, is more important than the negative rights of the moral individual.
Honor and shame both accrue to the group because of the actions of the individual, and the result is that groups police themselves based on the mores of the group, which subsume to the mores of a larger group.
Every sempai is responsible for the well being of the kohai, and every kohai must follow the dictates of the sempai. The proof of this is in the language itself: in Japanese, there are at least three ways of saying anything, the way a superior says it to an inferior, the way an inferior says it to a superior, and the way relatively equal people say it to each other--along with three levels of politeness, the vulgar level, the common level, and the mannered level.
The reason Japanese is a difficult language to learn is that it cannot be parroted: e.g., if your superior says something to you, you cannot answer in the same way, because that would make you sound like you are the superior.