I suppose I wasn't clear, but I am referring to media coverage. What's weird is how people continue to view East Asia as some exotic strange place. We're all human and we should be promoting more cultural understanding. I'd love to have the power to affect that through my posts but I don't. I am not a member of the media! This article is published by the LA Times, which has enormous reach. Reach I think is wasted on yet another post on Japanese convenience stores (seriously, go look at how many of these there have been)

just the fact that Taiwan compares is almost certainly less known to Americans than the contents of this piece