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Hello again! A few in return:

Re credit cards: Well, you saw what you saw; I can't make any claim about the specific stores you visited. But just for the record, cards are accepted as a daily norm in large swaths of the retail sector. Quite possibly less so than in the US, but still very commonly. 

A tangent: Over 20 years ago, I had a prof tell me that credit card usage was low in Japan – and would never become the norm because of "cultural differences" regarding "view of debt", and how it was "shameful to the Japanese" to have debt...

Credit card usage may have been quite low then, but I didn't believe his "cultural difference" explanation a bit; I figured that time, if anything, would mostly explain different levels of usage. And nowadays, what do we have in Japan? Not only credit cards accepted by retailers in general, and card offers coming in by mail and phone, but even public service announcements on TV to battle the growing problem of credit card users going in over their heads. 

No one's saying this is a good change, of course. : /

Re toilet paper: If we did the research, I wouldn't be surprised if we found that public WCs without paper were more common here in Japan. But again, it's just a matter of wanting to set the record straight for readers: Many WCs here do have paper. Certainly in most retail establishments!

(As for tissue paper handed out at stations: One main use for it is simply as regular tissue paper. Blowing the nose, the kids' noses, and all that.)

While on the topic, one more tangent: Some writers on Japan love to play up the "everything is so spotless" meme, but for the record, I've seen public toilets here that would make a cockroach's skin crawl. Some involving... let's just call it 'collateral damage' from off-target 'bombs'. Sometimes cleaned up quickly, sometimes not...

And there are also plenty of nice, clean restrooms. Overall it's not bad!

Re writing things correctly: Yes, penmanship lessons in the US may stop with elementary school. But with block handwriting, stroke order/direction truly doesn't matter for the ABCs. (It would matter with cursive, but I'm not sure that you can fiddle with the stroke order/direction of cursive, other than the choice of when to dot i's and cross t's. Cursive is inherently restrictive.)

Writing lessons do continue past elementary school in Japan, as you say – but that's primarily because the characters still haven't all been taught! So we can't draw any conclusion on cross-cultural importance of proper strokes from a comparison of the number years of penmanship lessons.

The point remains: true, no one cares that you draw your English e's differently from other people, but no one even has a way of knowing how you draw them. Whereas when you "draw a box" in non-block handwriting in Chinese/Japanese, stroke order/direction does make a difference in the outcome. If you don't write the languages, please take my word for it (or ask others who write them).  

A cultural difference in "desire to regulate" is arguably real; like anything, it needs to be proven. But before that, there's a simple practical difference that explains the "regulation", and it's easy to demonstrate on paper.

Re discrimination: I don't doubt that you read something that says Japanese who travel overseas face discrimination. (I wouldn't doubt that there's a book claiming the Japanese have six kidneys and breathe methane. : /  )

But if your book does claim discrimination as you say, I'd like to ask its author for an explanation of the many Japanese students willingly studying abroad in the US and Europe, the company employees who take postings overseas or go to the US for MBAs, the countless tourists flocking to Hawaii and New York and Venice and... (Japanese are among the world's most active overseas tourists.)

In closing, all I can offer is my standard advice: be very, very wary of "understanding the Japanese" books; so many of them are so bad. Take any claim within as interesting possibility, but don't believe it until it's proven.

And the same, of course, applies to anything I say.  : )

Thanks again for the comments! Come visit Japan for another eight days (or longer if you can!)