Are Japanese peoples a lot more relaxed than others?

[Nyororin]

I want to emphasize the "normal people" bit.
No matter how they look, or what they do, almost everyone is a "normal person".

When it comes to fashion - no matter what the fashion is, it is only fashion. In the west, there tends to be a tendency to link certain fashions very strongly to a specific lifestyle. In Japan, in most cases you can subtract the lifestyle and any stigma attached to it.
People dressed in western "gang" style, people dressed like serious goths, people in leather and spikes, skinheads, etc etc... are 99.99% of the time totally normal people who have no links to that sort of lifestyle other than thinking the fashion is cool. (This can lead to some shock on their end when visiting other countries, where certain fashions do represent certain types of people...)

The "normal people" thing stretches far beyond just fashion.
In my 10+ years of living here, I have had some sort of contact with people from most facets of society. I have had the opportunity to talk to the most extreme styled people, yakuza / gang members, government big shots, famous musicians and television/movie stars, etc...

And they`re pretty much all normal people. There is an extreme feel of something I can only refer to as "accessibility".
People in certain careers don`t live behind some sort of weird curtain of protection, cut off from the rest of the world. A famous former actress sends her kid to the same kindergarten as my son. There is no particular secrecy about it, and she is a totally normal person. There is no strange cloud of secrecy, I guess. Instead of being "someone famous and special" - it`s "a normal person who works as such and such (musician, actor, actress, politician, etc)".

[markspencer]

I think you will find that even in the western countries are people who dress up different, the thing is to know when & where. If in Japan the percentage is a bit bigger, so what ? That's cool