Think about it, all the hallmarks of Japanese society, tradition, respect, how will those survive if there's a relentless onslaught of foreigners who do not understand or believe in those values. Part of what made Japan was their ability to guard themselves from foreign encroachment and only incorporate elements of western culture that worked for them.
I'm talking about skilled workers that are willing to assimilate. I haven't taught myself Japanese for nothing. I'm not going to go over there and turn it into Texas.
But that leniency only comes into effect when you prove without question that it's near impossible to source local talent to fill a job, and the Japanese are extremely educated, so you're usually going to find companies will hire domestically before gambling on someone from the west who's used to superior salaries in USD.
Even if you're the world's best, your salary will drop to about 1/2 or 1/3 of what you can make in the US.
So, the problem is the homogeneous white rural population. Immigration is the ideal solution. They are the least susceptible to evangelicals.
Japanese schoolteachers and the Japanese school curriculum spend a lot of time drilling correct social behavior in the classroom. You are socialized to obey the rules. You are socialized to think its bad to not follow the rules. You are socialized into being cohesive with the group.
I mean there is more to this. Their society as a whole has decided this is an acceptable task for schools to undertake and participate in it actively. But it’s the machine that keeps it going.
Also bullying is a feature not a bug, despite all modern attempts to squash it.
Is this a typo?
Look at it as an experiment. See what happens if you allow mass immigration. If you don't like the result, do what you'd do with any other policy - change it. ...Although I guess you'd be stuck with the immigrants you already imported. And they'd probably vote to continue immigration, as they have in the US.. in that sense, this is one policy choice that is largely irreversible.
Sweden, Canada and others have already done that experiment.
Sweden, constant riots and exponential increase in crime...
Edit - Canada is an OK place to live, it's definitely become far worse in my lifetime though (mainly because of affordability). The plus side is tons of nature, if you're into that (I live in a mountain town but if I leave this town it's for Europe, not anywhere else in Canada).
Heterogeneity is not a homogenous quality, it can vary with spikes or with smooth curvature of slow population inflows over decades.
How stringent can these rules be, when the US has 13.7% foreign born population (counting only 1st generation immigrants)? And how stringently can they be enforced, when 11.4 million of those immigrants are there illegally?
Source: https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/immigration/
This is xenophobic at best and borderline racist.
The US govnt is fraught with disfunction not because people look different, but probably because it's a highly capitalistic society that limits the hands of government control over its citizens, which in turn cause the "poorly run" state that you're observing.
Japan is many things.
Not cutthroat is not among those things.
Sure, we have a better choice of who we see and when as it comes to doctors, but you're also footing the cost more for that privilege.
The only mind-boggling thing about their system is that hospitals close on the weekends. Like…???????
Yeah healthcare is great in Japan. Almost to the point where it’s not an active concern on trying to obtain it. It exists and you pay for it in the way the fire department exists and you pay for it (via taxes
The more layers you put in between a patient and a rendered service, the more money you're wasting at each tier. Insurance doesn't make sense for anyone except the people selling it, and they've gotten so rich now that they're entrenched and won't dare let that change.
Obviously, there are pros and cons to this. Cheap housing, but no transfer of wealth to later generations through housing. Even if your parents die, the estate they leave you is subject to a death tax, so you lose even more of what wealth they might have built for you.
I think the biggest factor to do with the decrease in birth rates is that school and work are so demanding over there. People can't relax well enough unless they find themselves in the graceful employment of western-style companies. Not everyone is a salaryman, but enough that it makes family life challenging.
Aside from that, you've also got the brain drain of urbanization, where most rural villages are outright dying as people migrate to Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto/Fukuoka.
All this said, I'd still live there in a heartbeat. You will never live in a more affordable, safe, convenient city as Tokyo. No other city even comes close.
Do you live there? Why not?
Many people will take a crap English teaching job to land there and then interview on that visa to land a job in their desired sector, but knowing the language is crucial. This kind of visa abuse is also highly frowned upon.
So, who knows. I might still end up where I want to work in time, but right now it's been crickets between emails with the founder.
8-10 billion people are taxing the planet. Climate change, plastic use that ends up everywhere, …
Just last week, I was told that if we were to place the entire human population next to each other, we would take this and this insignificant space on just one continent.
Apparently, overpopulation is a myth perpetuated by a shadowy group championed by Bill Gates himself, and they are the ones responsible for my disagreement with the fact that "they" (said group of global elite) are trying to reduce the population in order to control the world.
Without elaborate socio-political analysis, falling back to simple biology, one model says there are "K"-type populations and "N"-type populations.. it explains a lot right there.
But 50 years ago someone could say (and it’s virtually guaranteed someone did say) that 4 billion is too many. Because 4 billion at the time was the largest number of people simultanously alive on our little planet. It was twice as many as there were just 50 years before.
And I bet in 1922, people were thinking that 2 billion is to many. We had just left behind a devastating war and an even more lethal pandemic. It mustve appeared that the planet just cannot bear 2 billion of us.
So, when you say the world population should go down a bit, do you mean down to 7, to 5, or to 1 billion? Why not 200 million. We were about as many during the Roman Empire and still perfectly capable of astonishing feats of war and devastation.
Look at all the coal we burn,
Climate change is unavoidable at this point…
pollution of the oceans, encroachment onto wildlife, etc.
Humans have done a lot of damage.
also, we grow chickens in cages, overfish the oceans…
Anyway, I’m really amazed that I have to go into detail… I thought we were all on the same page for the “human footprint “ on the planet
We are on the same page on the some things, but not all.
You say we burn too much coal. I say that too. We are on the same page.
I say we need to burn less coal. You say there need to be fewer of us. We are not on the same page.
The thing is, we already are burning less coal. Much less. The US has burned 1 billion tons annually between 2000 and 2010. Now we burn half of that.
We did not need to reduce our population by half in order to achieve that.
We can achieve lots of similar things without reducing our population.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-coal-pla...
40% of electricity globally is generated with coal.
US per capita CO2 emissions are still high. If all 8 billion people got to live like the average American, we’d have an even bigger problem.
That does not mean we need to be fewer. Just like the US could reduce its coal consumption by a factor of 2 (and more will come), the rest of the world can do that too. The technology is here. Everywhere you read, they say it's more economical to build a new solar power plant than to operate an existing coal plant. That may be an exaggeration, but solar is getting very competitive. Coal is on its way out.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265507/global-coal-consu...
Solar is 3% of electricity
Why is third world brain drain the only palatable solution to population decline? What about programs that encourage native reproduction?
Obviously, this problem is more systemic than what immigration outright fixes. As to what steps are needed to rectify it, I couldn't say, nor would I dare to as a third party gaijin.
> native reproduction
You really are a piece of work!