Japan more flexible with alcohol usage

Neighbor A isn’t free to get a good night’s rest because Neighbor B parties till dawn. And B isn’t free to sleep off his hangover because A is making all that racket with the power tools.

Personal freedoms will always bump up against each other like this, meaning that any two people in sufficient proximity will have to give up something they’d otherwise freely choose to do.

Increase the number from two to a country of hundreds of millions, and it becomes clear that we all must be constantly sacrificing simple freedoms to keep society moving along.

To reconcile our competing freedoms, we look to the government. They make laws that elevate some freedoms over others, usually curtailing the free choice to host an all-night rager.

As time goes by, a country will generate a huge number of laws, ultimately striking a balance and providing its people with a limited batch of government-sanctioned freedoms. I think the phrase “It’s a free country” should be replaced with “It’s a country with a limited batch of government-sanctioned freedoms,” but my ideas rarely catch on.

(Legendary American journalist Ambrose Bierce shared the limited-batch idea, once defining freedom as “exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint’s infinite multitude of methods.” He cracks me up.)

It’s interesting to compare freedoms between your own country and another to get a sense of where you stand, freedom-batch-wise. Since this is the Japan column, let’s start there.

Take alcohol, for example. Japan, for my money, is the freer booze country. For one, there aren’t open container laws. Buy an adult beverage at a convenience store, open it in the parking lot, and drink it on the walk home. Any street, any time. No problem.

The lack of open container laws goes for vehicles, too, meaning passengers in a car are free to drink as they wish. I’ve certainly finished off a beer or two in the car without a worry in the world.

What’s more, the legal drinking age in Japan is 20, which is a full year of alcohol freedom over what the United States offers.

Japan is less free when it comes to drunk driving, however. The United States generally sets a driver’s blood alcohol content limit at .08, whereas Japan effectively has a zero-tolerance policy. The BAC limit in Japan is .03, meaning even a single drink before getting behind the wheel can earn you a DUI. The punishments are also harsher, with prison time in the years and fines in the thousands.

In the aggregate, though, I’d say Japan is freer than the United States when it comes to alcohol.

You don’t have to agree that “freer” means “better,” of course. You could and should see freedom as bad in some cases. James Madison mentioned this concept in “The Federalist No. 63,” writing that “liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty, as well as by the abuses of power.”

To his point, imagine a country with maximum alcohol freedom: no drunk driving laws at all, no age limits to purchase or consume, vodka vending machines in every elementary school.

Given a choice between the two extremes, I’d rather live in a country that bans alcohol outright. At least then I’d be ensured the ability to send my kid off to a dry elementary school with a sober bus driver.

This is what I mean by personal freedoms bumping up against each other. In the maximum freedom scenario, other people’s blanket freedom to drink and drive would greatly reduce my freedom to drive with an expectation of safety, to the point that I’d choose absolute government control (an alcohol ban) over total alcohol freedom. And that’s coming from a drinker.

I agree with James Madison that it can be liberty gone too far that endangers our liberty.

You’re free to hold any opinion you like on your freedoms. Maybe you think the U.S. batch of alcohol freedoms is best, or maybe you agree with the Japanese batch more, or the total ban, or the schools full of pint-size drunkards.

What’s important is to be mindful of the trade-offs. Often, gaining a freedom means waving goodbye to several others. The ones you lose could be less tangible, like a sense of safety, certainty, peace of mind, or a bit of extra time. Never lose sight of the ones going out the door, and never stop weighing them against what you supposedly gained.

So are you an Ambrose Bierce, angry about the size of your batch of freedoms? Or are you a James Madison, recognizing that efforts to increase the batch might actually shrink it?

Have a government-sanctioned beer and think it over.

Justin Whittinghill is an Owensboro native who works as an assistant professor of English at Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. His column runs on the last Sunday of the month in Lifestyle. He can be reached at justinwhittinghill@gmail.com.