This is something I've noticed is uniquely culturally Indian, and transcends all religions. Which is beautiful.

I was once whacked in the head by a teacher for throwing a book onto the shelf, and rightly so.

That's what we learned in fire fighting training. Everything that doesn't get destroyed by the fire and smoke will get destroyed by the water you use to put the fire out. A house on fire is lost. You just save people and animals and then you do whatever you need to protect the neighbouring structures.

Bob should have used some of his Fuji 9, that fixes everything!

Similarly in the military. We got un-booted at bedtime, and put them back on when we got up the next morning. Even in the barracks, including the nice ones that were reasonably nice apartment buildings, I never took off my shoes to walk around my room or when visiting someone else's (and vice versa; no one took off their shoes to visit me).

The first time I bumped into that rule was when I met my wife, who'd moved to the area from New York. I was quite confused when she asked me to take my shoes off at the door, and more than a little anxious. Sure hope I'm wearing decent socks and my feet don't stink, lest I be traipsing dirty feet around her apartment. To this day, I'm not convinced that hardsole shoes that haven't walked through wet messes are substantially dirtier than a damp sock that's been inside a shoe all day long.

Even when it looks like a laced up tennis shoe, closer examination of an 'outdoor' shoe will show that it has been stomped into and slipped out of many times.

If it is a sports use, i.e. basketball or other gymnasium, or indoors in a professional setting like at a busy office there will be a changing area and people etiher change into provided slippers (town hall and community centers, schools, and other public spaces have many cubicles and slippers) or will change into 'indoor shoes' brought for the purpose.

There is a strong cultural 'habit' that can be interpreted as 'manners' such that when visiting someone's house and switching from outdoor shoes the host will then either turn the shoes toward the outdoors such that they are easier to step into on the way out, or will arrange them facing out but no longer in the main path of the entry way.

It is this 'manners' which the EMT is requesting to stop. The indoor slippers are used for hard floor and rug covered areas, but not tatami mats. A quality tatami mat can be damaged and require actual replacement if stepped on with a hard soled shoe even once.

So the 'taking off of shoes on the way in my EMT is quite appropriate, and the time to 'unshoe' and reshoe on the way in and out is cumulatively not more than 5 to 7 seconds total - if the emergency case is that close to failure, the low speed ambulance ride through narrow streets is going to be the failure, not the shoes. But rearranged and relocated shoes becomes much more complex when the crew have a person in a stretcher (which is faster AND safer than a rolling gurney) - they can step into their own shoes without really even looking if the shoes are left exactly as they were placed on the way in - and this is what the original article is requesting.

The intent of the article in original Japanese is: "Don't slow down the exit process by moving our shoes in an effort to be 'mindful of good manners'. We really wont think poorly of your manners if you neglect this small gesture"

So shoes on is not universal in the West.

Try this , when was the last time you stepped somewhere that had previously been stepped on by someone who had walked on a spot which had been stepped on by someone who may have stepped on a spot trod on by ... go far enough back and it's all had feces on it to some small degree.

An easy way to keep this concept clear and understand the reasoning behind a 'leave the outside shoes out of the house' is something learned as a child.

Just like there is a Law of Conservation of Mass, and a Law of Conservation of Energy, and these two are the same law as defined by Einstein, there is also a Law of Conservation of Filth. The law may be stated as: "A spoonful of wine in a barrel of pigshit is a barrel of pigshit. A spoonful of pigshit in a barrel of wine is... a barrel of pigshit."

Taking off the outdoor shoes to come indoors changes the "is there trace amount of feces on my dining room tatami floor?" risk from "I cannot be reasonable sure," to "I can be reasonably sure that there is none." If guests find that too much friction to understand and accommodate, one might argue for a different set of guests who are less accepting of an allowable amount of pigshit in their wine.

Anecdote, I recall reading about older family members being disgusted by the removal of outhouses and the idea of shitting indoors.

I have to imagine the person who leaves their shoes on either never goes outside, or just has filthy floors.

Take a second, get a tissue, and go wipe the bottom of your shoe.

People who think this have actually never been to Japan, most Japanese homes and offices are incredibly messy.

We're just going to pretend that Japanese web design is identical to the rest of the world's, and that Japanese homes aren't half the size of elsewhere such that every horizontal and vertical service is commonly used for storage.

What is characteristic of "the American South" here?

The biggest historical commonality between the American South and Japan - or, at least, the Tokugawa shogunate that was ruling around the same time as the South - was that both of them were at one point ruled by a cabal of essentially feudal lords. There is a lot of convergent social evolution that happens when your country's economic elite all make their money by owning land - lots of strange social titles, honorifics start floating around, people start talking around problems, and the like. However, this comparison is only skin deep, and there's plenty of things the Tokugawas did that have no parallel, or even worked backwards, to what happened in the historically contemporaneous American south:

- Sakoku (the policy of keeping Japan completely closed to trade and immigration).

- While America generally has had a long streak of veneration of the police, they never reinvented anything close to the samurai in terms of being a hereditary warrior class with a tax stipend.

- Likewise, the American South did not have a caste system; Japan did (and so did France?!?)

This makes more sense when you remember that the Tokugawa shogunate itself is the time reversal of the American South: the Tokugawas were born out of a long civil war and ended with a foreign invasion (from America) while the American South was born from foreign invasion (of Americans) and ended with a civil war.

The American South is also, interestingly enough, a mirror of Japan in other dimensions as well. The reason why the Tokugawas shut the country's borders for hundreds of years was because they understood that Christian missionaries were a front for a larger invasion force that would pillage the country's resources and abduct people to become slaves in other countries. Of course, the South was buying slaves abducted in other countries in massive quantities.

Going back to the convergent social evolution I mentioned before, you can see some of this in Japan today. Kyoto is notorious for doing exactly the same kind of backhanded compliment bullshit the South loves doing. But even then, that's one part of Japan, that was formerly the capital city. One stop on the Shinkansen takes you to Osaka where people are about as open and outgoing as Americans are.