Japanese people are insanely good at standing in lines

Twice a year, Tokyo holds a massive comic book convention called Comiket. 

Over the course of last year's three-day event, more than 550,000 people showed up, nearly three times the number of people that attended last year's Comic Con in San Diego.

Normally, those kinds of numbers might send an event planning team into a frenzy. But as the video below illustrates, Comiket's crowd control was flawless. People waited patiently no matter how far the line snaked or how many times it wrapped around itself.

But it's not anything unique to Comiket that allows for such calmness. It's Japanese culture.

Japan's love of line-forming begins with the lessons kids learn as early as kindergarten: self-discipline, cooperation, and respect.

For example, it's not uncommon for Japanese nursery and elementary schools to host group performances of more than 100 students. While one age group plays an instrument, another sits quietly and listens. The kids that are playing learn to keep time with the other students. The ones listening practice patience and restraint.

Now fast-forward to young adulthood. Japanese teenagers have started interacting with society-at-large. And since Japan's population lives in tightly-packed cities, people learn very quickly that in order to get something, they'll have to wait.

After many years of learning this behavior — showing respect for the group by waiting quietly — the end result is a cultural custom that spans nearly all circumstances, even disaster.

In the wake of the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan's response wasn't to loot or steal. When the opportunity finally arose for people to pick up basic goods like fruit and clothes at local stores, throngs of Japanese citizens dutifully lined up, single file.

The virtues of standing in line aren't universally recognized. 

As author Tjaco Walvis explained a few years ago on LiveMint, traveling in Japan is nothing like traveling in, say, India, where custom dictates people bite their tongue when line-cutters jump ahead.

When this happened to Walvis in the airport one day, he asked the man ahead of him, who had just been cut in line, why he allowed it.

"'Some people are really offended when you tell them to wait in line,'" the man told Walvis.

In Japan, the opposite is true. Lines are seen as sacred because they embody the values preached early on.

It's no accident, in other words, that a massive gathering like Comiket looks more like a military operation than a disordered mess. There simply is no other way.