Japan’s business owners can’t find successors – one man is giving his away
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
He took a ~25% paycut, he works harder and longer than he did before (as a chef, mind you, regularly known for 100+ hour weeks), spends close to half of that time driving, and often sleeps in the office. He went from probably being a few years away from running his own three star restaurant to running an unsalable, shrinking business, owns 400k worth of similarly unsalable equipment, in a slowly dwindling industry (dry cleaning).
His marriage has fallen apart (did I mention he moved 3 hours away from his wife + children to run the business), his mental health seems atrocious, and the only thing the future seems to hold for him is a piece of a slowly shrinking pie.
His father built a burgeoning postwar business that gave his family a good life, but markets change, and businesses that once made sense no longer do.
FWIW: “…running his own three star restaurant…” often has just as fraught a story attached to it.
I spent some time over the holidays clearing out stuff and, even though I don't still own a lot of suits and jackets these days, I still have a lot of "business casual" I bought because I would "always use it some point." I'll probably donate a lot of it even the stuff that's never been opened.
This isn't true everywhere of course but a long time ago I worked at a company that had dry cleaning collection of premises. This was a computer company. That would be laughable today.
People have been wearing wool for thousands of years.
Or even just doing regular laundry…
Worst case turn the business into a laundromat in the right area…. (Though it might not be possible with that location).
In some areas laundromat are basically cost/revenue neutral and inly make sense as a service to the community and keeping the light on.
It's not just a "service", it's vital for the community.
I do know of a few, but as someone said, I think they're in neighborhoods with old buildings where not everyone might have their own.
Which is why laundromats / launderettes (as they're sometimes still called in the UK) are the stereotypical example of a type of business providing a very different kind of laundering service.
To be precise, nearly all hotel-like or hotel-connected business, attract services like laundromat, restaurant, parking, supermarket, delivery, etc.
- Mitch Hedberg
A modern dry-cleaning business is typically not just consumer dry cleaning. It's a whole host of B2B "make various dirty textiles not dirty anymore" services.
In Ukraine, to be precise, ex-USSR, just ~10 years ago, most restaurants owners where relatives of criminals, trying to make something legal with crime money.
Now things changed - large restaurants networks are daughters of Western restaurants networks (like mcdo), small restaurants mostly ostarbeiters, made start capital working abroad.
But anyway, this business tends to become harder.
I was not in a position to take it over and no-one else in the family wanted it. It was a very successful shop with a built in client base and hugely recognizable name in that community.
Culturally the lack of children means there are fewer chances for someone to want to take over a family business, so the likelihood of someone taking it over drops every generation.
The family is very well off by Japanese standards but they all work.
Now it can go to all sons and daughters. That means that the one best suited can be chosen.
But all the children will have to build a career. And none of them feel particular responsible for continuing the business.
No matter what you’ll lose clients, but lose a lot less than if Alice disappears one day and Bob magically appears the next with little handover.
Dunno if that could work in Japan.
I know a printer right now where the owner has been working towards retiring and selling the business to his now-manager eventual-successor for a few years. The owner has reduced his work responsibilities to sales only at this point, and the goal has been to make his networks comfortable with his successor as he slips away (to live closer to his grandchildren, I bet.)
So it's still the same family!
> "In Japan, 98% of adoptions are actually adult men, aged between 20-30 years old — not children."
> "In Japan, there is a several-hundred-year-old tradition in which businesses adopt their executives so companies or institutions are "family-run" groups. In other words, bosses adopt their employees."
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/japanese-adoption-r...
The incentives for clicks are just too great.
The bit that is misleading is that adopting or even fostering children not related to you is vanishingly rare in Japan, nearly all orphans end up in orphanages instead.
So, daughter marries son-in-law, who is "adopted" into the family and carries on the family name.
[1] https://archive.ph/20220707002423/https://www.thetimes.co.uk...
Certainly there are highly-motivated foreigners who would migrate from places like Africa, Eastern Europe, and SE Asia who would leap to "rescue" a viable business in some manner.
The business afterwards would not be the same, but it would be better than destroying all that hard work (and value) and the customers' delight.
The culture and language would need to be learned and customers' convinced of the new owner's business skills, but these are not impossible barriers.
I hate to see value thrown away, be it small-time manufacturing of specialized art, food, or equipment or even a corner grocery store... value thrown away is setting fire to money.
...I would put it in the realm of pretty unrealistic.
Curious if you're fluent in Japanese and familiar with Japanese culture or not?
This is really the key part. A business can be successful yet soul crushing or not making financial sense compared to other jobs. In France bakeries are facing this same issue: one can support the whole community and be wildly popular while being a losing proposition for the owning family, and it’s becoming a real issue to find a better balance and people to keep the traditions alive.
My sense is that most of these family shops were started during the mid-20th century when the economy in developed countries was more accommodating to small business. Through decades of ever-increasing pricing pressure from giant multinationals, the most successful family operations could still keep their doors open because of the trusted reputation they had earned in their communities. But even that lifeline is increasingly imperiled as their best, longest customers age out and die, and are not replaced by younger customers because of constantly falling wages in real terms.
They didn’t enjoy it, oh no, and we saw the endless battles to get rid of dangerous and body crushing jobs, all the fight for unions, workers getting shot during strikes etc. And many traditional jobs were just a step below in terms of pressure and work hours.
In a way, their wish for a better future for their children mostly got realized, and a lot of traditional occupations didn’t or couldn’t adapt to that mindset.
The family business in the article is a farmer in the north, and by today’s standard it’s usually a brutal job, “work life balance” is basically an imaginary concept, there’s little leeway for error (forget to turn some knob just once in the dozens of time you do it in a day, and you have a month worth of production gone away), and you’re facing enough natural and economic odds that investment is basically akin to gambling.
On the transportation business, it has a reputation of being cutthroat, and bigger national players like Yamato / Sagawa have had a lot of trouble recruiting despite the booming business coming from e-commerce.
It’s kinda tough any angle we look at it…
Small business struggles when people can't afford more than the cheapest as the cheapest usually comes from the big corporates.
but the price was so much higher than amazon for the same product that it didn't make sense... I asked the owner and he complained about rent.
It obviously looks good from far, but if you know you're running a business at a negative to the customer fewer and fewer will show up year over year.
But yes, few people think like me, and probably every neighborhood business that isn't a service or a chain restaurant will be gone in a fairly short time.
The thought just horrifies me.
What are all these people going to do?
Adults who are making a good living, who have no skill sets other than dealing politely with humans and helping them? They aren't going to retrain for an STEM position. Their jobs are going to be replaced by nothing at all, just like we did with instrumentalists, just like we are doing with artists, just like we will do with drivers as soon as we can, which seems to be a bit slower than anticipated, but is inevitable.
optimizations in the system always lead to general improvements for everyone involved. it just might get ugly in the meantime while it's happening.
and ask yourself what if the city center stops being outlets for all those things that you can find online how many different ways can that space be used that might have positive impact (more yoga studios, more art exhibitions, more workshops places, more ....).
- Many people in europe don't pay for Prime, so for them shipping costs aren't free. Then many shops also don't use Amazon's delivery, and won't be free for Prime members
- Deliveries were a real PITA in dense neighborhood before covid. Perhaps it's better now but I doubt it's completely solved.
I once got a call from a driver that got lost in our neighborhood and was expected to do something while at work. And leaving packages on your doorstep isn't an option. They introduced lockers, so uou take it at some train station, but otherwise you'd need it delivered to your job and bring it home from there (carrying the package in public transport usually), or go line up at some random shop dozens of kilometers away from your home.
- You aren't guaranteed it's actually the same item you saw in shop. It might be the same brand and type, but acually the size or color is different. Perhaps the saler put the package size everywhere instead of the actual product, or they replaced the product and didn't update etc. You easily get a exchange or refund, but go through the return and delivery process again. It happened a lot with small vendors, especially for high rotation kitchen items.
However, many on the smaller side go the way that the old 80+ generation keeps on micromanaging decades after their children have taken charge - a real problem in the German Mittelstand, because these fossils grew up with faxes and simply don't get the requirements of the modern age. They simply can't accept the idea that they have done their part once they reached retirement age and it is a natural requirement for them to actually retire so that the younger generations can learn and rise!
"Clogs to clogs in 3 generations"
One of my parents manages and also own a part of a century old company, I’m sure must be one of the oldest continually running companies in my country.
After a century though, the percentage of the company that we actually own is smallish, perhaps about 20%, and the rest is owned by more distant relatives not involved in the administration.
One part of me would like to continue running the company, even though I’d have to take a pay cut. But it would only make sense if I owned a larger part of the business, which would be by its own an expensive thing to do.
Co-owned companies are not easy to run, but when You have more than 10% of shares, You already have hard matter, which You could use as foundations for future grow of Your shares, if other coowners are not smart/experienced enough.
And You don't need to make deal with daemon, in most cases You just need to know very well, what You really want in Your life and what You want to pay for it.
Despite lots of political kerfuffle a few years ago immigration has been a huge boon. I can't tell you how often I've personally heard how people were ready to close down long existing family businesses because they had nobody to take over until they got immigrants into vocational programs who now look like they may continue the business in the future.
It's not just numbers either. A lot of domestic younger people were so set on going to uni and going to work for large firms that they just didn't want to take over their parents agricultural, trades or crafts business. In particular talking to Syrians this always stood out to me. A lot of them just seemed thankful for the stability and security that comes from our Mittelstand that we tend to take for granted.
A lot of those professions became way more complicated in the last years (smart homes, computerized appliances, …), and many people who stepped up their career from being craftsmen have trouble running those businesses nowadays.
My plan is to turn off the fax machines, start using email and see if I can automate parts of it or combine with another similar acquisition in a couple of years.
Just beware that buying a business is complicated and you need to keep your end clean, legally speaking.
Maybe I am unclear on what electrical engineers learn when studying.
I would seriously expect a certification to be based primarily on the electrical safety/building code, possibly with some fault diagnostics stuff and basic theory of operation of the circuits involved mixed in.
I would expect little if any of the practical skills to be tested in most such certifications, so the required studying would mostly be about what the safety/building code required.
The regulators really won’t care about your skill at snaking wires through walls, ability to bend conduit into a nice curve, etc. Most practical skills needed fall into this category. If you are bad at those things, it might slow you down, require you to redo things more often, or even require you use more expensive parts to avoid needing those skills, or whatever.
Lacking such skills mostly just means you won’t be price competitive with others, which is your problem, not the governments. The government just cares that the result (and possibly intermediate steps) is safe and meets code. The fact that it took you longer than most competitors, and you made a much bigger mess than most of them isn’t really a major concern.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/ecu/ecu_testinfo.htm
A lot of the exam questions relate to safety issues and building code requirements. Very little of that would be covered in typical BS EE coursework.
I would not expect it to take too terribly long to study up for the safety/building code portions enough to pass, if already familiar with how electricity works.
I would find a 2 week course entirely plausible to get up to speed enough to be able to pass such a certification test, if you already know the basics of how electricity works, which makes some of the safety rules relatively obvious, and should make learning the remaining rules easier.
A lot depends on the jurisdiction and what they want to test. For example some jurisdictions might want to test all electricians on the >600V stuff rules, but since many electricians will never touch that stuff working is residential or non-industrial commercial, other jurisdictions would omit that from the certifications, or have a sperate certification for that part of code.
A lot of complexity of the code comes from the code laying out general rules, and then some exceptions. While I'd expect such a test to cover some of the more commonly used exceptions, and exceptions that are more restrictive than the general rule, some jurisdictions probably won't test about less common exceptions that make rules more permissive. In those scenarios knowing the general rule is probably good enough for safety. Applying the more restrictive general rule when an exception was available often won't harm safety.
There are a lot of older people who used to own businesses, and are looking for something new to run in their semi-retirement years. Once they find one, he helps them complete the sale.
I wouldn't have thought there was a business there, but apparently there is.
Getting started in business can require finding a niche that no one else is serving, and "not minding working 26 hours a day" is one of them.
Now I just work for other people for salary and have very little stress in my life.
I didn't see details, but I would guess the new owner probably is required to wait a certain period (of years?) before liquidating the business?
It seems that sometimes clients who have enjoyed the business for a long time will offer to take it over. But they usually need to have that "passion" to do it.
I wouldn't discount us from finding a solution, but looks like a tough one.
I say this as a dad: having a kid, especially the first few years, is like having the world's worst second job.
You get paid? No, you pay to have the job! Set hours? No, you're always on call! You might get an occasional break for a few hours, if you pay up for it! Decent working conditions? How does constantly cleaning up shit and piss sound? Ah, but you could get out of it if you change your mind, right? Sure...after your 18 year long contract is up.
Obviously I'm glossing over the emotional angle, but yeah, from a material perspective having kids is fucking dumb, and for all you know spending that time and money with existing friends and family would've actually left you happier overall. It's a big irrational gamble in a lot of ways.
Anyway, you can't fix all of that, but it would be possible for society, via the government, to fix some of it. For example, you could implement subsidies to the point where having kids had a net zero impact on your finances, so that you wouldn't be looking at lowered standard of living or reduced retirement savings from having children.
Of course many would object to this, because culturally we believe that parents should be people who accept a worse standard of living with a smile on their face. That's stupid, of course, which is exactly why birth rates are below replacement in pretty much all the developed world, and beyond. People may be okay with the emotional effort involved in raising children, but telling them to throw away going out as a couple, abandon most of their nicer vacations, blah blah blah isn't gonna sell the idea.
Aside if wealth is a negative for evolutionary fitness then humanity won't stay wealthy for long.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Global population is growing at an astonishing pace, and Malthus continues to be very popular (even here on HN, where people should know better).
> if wealth is a negative for evolutionary fitness
Wealth will eventually take us to other planets, which is arguably the pinnacle of evolutionary fitness.
How are these nations supposed to develop when we lure their best of the young away every year, and lots of them don't even make it but die along the route in the Mediterranean or end up in a slave camp in Libya, Italy or Spain?
The same way other countries did it (and still do): remittances.
Now, I'm not saying the current state of things is acceptable (it isn't), but it's not about stemming the flow as much as allowing it to be a net positive for the source countries.
That said, many of these countries have issues with hilariously poor governance and civil society which handicaps growth and strangles the young's ambitions, so I don't blame anyone for leaving and not coming back either.
These days, the cultural pressure is to have 1-2 kids, not a whole bunch.
So, with the people who do sign up for this "world's second worst job" only having 1-2 (occasionally 3), and a bunch of others refusing, we end up with birthrates between 1.2 and 1.8, roughly, which isn't enough to sustain the population (this would require a rate of 2.1).
People still want to have kids, but how many people want to repeat all the worst parts of childrearing 3-8 times? Most couples do it once or twice and they've had enough.
>you could implement subsidies to the point where having kids had a net zero impact on your finances,
Honestly, I don't see how this is possible without severely taxing people who don't have any kids, and that's not going to go over well (plus it would screw over all the people who haven't had kids yet, so they're unable to save any money for when they do).
I think the ultimate solution to this is going to look like the novel Brave New World: we're going to have to resort to raising the next generation in institutions.
One set of data points to look at might be the relative stress levels of new parents who have given birth to the child versus ones who adopted an infant. The act of childbirth is exhausting, and then you’re sent home with a tiny lizard full of self destruct buttons that you have to take care of. Showing up on day one well rested has got to be a factor.
We’ve increased parental leave in parts of the first world but I think we are going to have to increase the deductions for dependents and may have to make childcare expenses tax deductible, because otherwise you have people working for essentially no net income just to stay relevant in their career and funneling all of the money to daycare.
It's a country with 92% of people living in cities, despite government intervention to support rural areas. People keep making the choice to leave.
If politicians are conditioned like this (and I believe this has to be the situation for most developed countries even if it's with different topics), there is no way we can work well in the long term. This is a massive problem with democracy...
I want to clarify that I'm not advocating for dictatorships at all, period. I think that democracy is actually the best system that mankind has had so far.
Electoral college votes for a state are senate seats plus house seats. House is roughly population based.
Senate is 2 per state and constitutes half the legislative branch. So it very heavily favors representation for low-population states.
House has significantly more seats than senate (4X), so electoral college only slightly favors low population states.
My issue with electoral college isn’t the weighting but the voting. First past the post is idiotic; every democrat in a red state gets their vote ignored and every Republican in a blue state gets their vote ignored, meanwhile purple states are chucked marketing funds by the boatload. It’s inherently divisive because there’s no political reason for a candidate to unite a state that’s already won or lost, like California or Texas.
We name this trend - non-system business, when business closely tied to owner/founder, so it will disappear when for some reason owner/founder will not work.
And in many cases I seen, these ties are not naturally defined by market or other natural causes, but are integral part of behavior of owner, mean, he made this business defective.
For example, in ex-USSR countries, MOST businesses intentionally made non-systematic, because our law enforcement is not working good, and owners are fear, if business will not closely tied to owner, some criminals will take it away.
And other must say, there are also many cases, where it is too expensive, to fix such business. Just, it's owner gather all cream in past, and have not bother about make healthy systematic business, and now cry.
And finally must say, I know many cases, when LOCAL community depend on such non-system business. What to do? Unfortunately, it is problem of this local community and this community most probably, will be subject, deeply interested to solve problem (nobody else). In such case, local community must be ready, and take over business if owner give away, or do alternative quickly, to fill market gap, if owner will decide to just close business.
Because of the working culture, many of the younger generations are reluctant to have family, apart from that the stagflation is getting worse and hardly solved.
I'm not really sure what to do as a leader of Japan as well tbh, hopefully they find out what to do before all is too late
The upside is that almost everything is run by people who are not old, hence not stuck in the past. Also, gravitate towards hiring instead of famity ties, and towards horizontal growth instead of forever keeping a single store or eatery.
I don’t know which post-Soviet reality you come from but the one I live in has a reputation for miraculous economic recovery. And even here most people aspire to leave and succeed elsewhere.
1) the owner is absolutely integral for day to day ops. These businesses in all practicality are people who are self employed at a high level (if owner isn't there, the place doesn't run).
2) the asking price for some of these businesses can be absurd, mostly due to the Boomer needing it to fund retirement, or a large injection of capital late in their life. They have a mentality that this is America, and it's our god given birth rite to grow indefinitely, etc. they've put their life and soul into it and sometimes don't see economic realities. Also, they cook the hell out of their books. A lot of this passes through the cracks because no accountant or tax person even understands the business or expenses.
And there is no bargaining with them, their way or the highway. They especially don't want to hear cost versus ROI based on profits of the past 5 years. So honestly, in my experience - start your own small company and keep an eye out for when their business folds because no one will buy at inflated prices... Then buy what you need from the auction they eventually have to recoup some money from their shuttered business.
"But you can make money look at all the money I made in the past" while you look at their last 3 sales years and it was abysmal because they started to slow down / retire themselves.
Society at large benefits from a stable, ongoing population. But the burden of keeping that going obviously falls much moreso on parents than non-parents. You can try to even things out more via subsidies, but non-parents will quickly start objecting, even if they're materially still better off than parents.
It used to be cultural pressure, combined with kids being not as materially demanding, meant that people had kids anyway. Obviously less true today.
As much as they are a great country, there is a level of xenophobia there still. Even in the major cities. To clarify, if you are not Japanese they will be courteous to you but you will still be classified as an other. Take this however you will, but I have a sibling who works there, has a wife (Japanese citizen) and two kids there, and it is definitely one of the aspects that sounds the most grating. Especially when it comes to the potential, but subtle, ostracization of the kids when they are going through school
This does not change any citizenship status on either side.
Yes[1], and this becomes even more complicated when these baby boomer small business owners are/were planning on the sale of their business as a way to (partially) fund their retirement, whether in future cash flows as a residual equity owner or lump-sum with (too) high valuations.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2022/01/25/unsexy-but-...
The people who have means to buy such a business (like the bay area tech people), don't want to buy such businesses, because there is no upside. The people who want to run such a business (say, a security guard working for Pinkerton), don't have the means to buy such a business.
This is in strong contrast with medium or large businesses where a professional management layer exists. Thus allowing the owner, even if nominally the CEO, to relax and ignore day to day operations.
Thus small business are best through of as a job, not an asset.
He owned a food truck that was grandfathered by SF - sometime in the 70s he parked on city property (the government area) and ended up squatting there so long the city let him stay. His closest competitors were two blocks away. You'd think that business would have premium value - no one can get a permit or permission to setup a similar business in that area and anyone working in the area had to walk several blocks to find competition. He parked the truck in his mom's garage in SF until we rented the house (free enclosed parking, with charging, water tap and drainage!)
Instead he retired and shut it down because no one would make enough money operating the business to want to take it over. Driving your food truck 2 hours every day was just not enticing and most people wouldn't be able to find a safe place to park the truck with electrical and water access.
The only people capable of operating that business were old people who bought their property cheap in the 60s/70s or children who inherited property for free.
It isn't always that no one wants the business... sometimes the personal economics make it impractical.
On top of self-selection, they are also selected by the immigration system, which is... not a neutral force.
It's hard work ending up in Europe. You have to be driven, one way or another, to endure that journey.
Refugees are at a disadvantage in terms of employability, capital, and in academic capital, while the European labor market has high unemployment, few low-skilled jobs, and high educational demands on most jobs.
They may be driven, but the deck is stacked against them, which is why we aren't seeing more impressive outcomes for these groups.
By education I don't even mean they're undereducated - for example over 40% of Syrian refugees here in Ireland are college educated, comparable to the overall level nationally. But their educational institutions are unknown here, and not necessarily trusted - and a limited grasp of the language is always going to hold you back. We have a significant shortage of medical staff here but Ukrainian doctors have so far been unable to enter the workforce because it takes about a year to go through exams to verify their qualifications.
Plus asylum seekers in many countries are banned from working at all - hard to have a good economic outcome when you're not allowed to earn an income, sometimes for years.
> There are increasingly fewer young people and a lot of them are first or second generation immigrants, that are lacking the needed skills/knowledge to run a business.
That reads to me that immigrants are less likely and don't have the skills to be entrepreneurs.
> But their own children have now mostly moved to cities in search of higher-paying, less onerous work.
Perhaps they have plenty of skills, look at the rewards, and "Nope" right out.
Running a small business is ferociously hard, and you are almost always better off taking a nice, cushy, well-paying salary somewhere if you have the option--in spite of the general HN zeitgeist, advice, and bias towards startups.
They're not going to make it illegal to build housing in places where people want to live; that would require a huge change to the national zoning law, which would never happen. The current law works extremely well. Other countries really should learn from Japan's example, as urban planning here is fantastic compared to anyplace else I've been.
No, they're not. Immigration laws were reformed completely in the last decade, and it's extremely easy to immigrate here if you have valuable skills. Lots of service jobs are also being filled by immigrants from SE Asia now.
I know very few successful businesses here. Believe you me, those are not lacking suitors, inheritors, successors or what have you in Portugal. There's a sad story of economic opportunity between the lines.
Of course it's not just about visas. If there is a way and a reason to immigrate, people will do so, even illegally. Japan can't even benefit from illegal immigration because its geographic properties isolate it so well.
This is the exact reason they desperately don't want immigration.
So, I do not live in Japan, but I've visited multiple times now. I don't speak Japanese more than a few words here and there and mainly get by usually with Google Translate.
I've had a not-too-difficult time making friends (who I even stay in touch with from here in the US) by finding people there who participate in the same hobbies (car culture and baseball, specifically). Generally, most people I've met in those communities are very friendly. Not everyone enjoys the Google Translate back and forth but many still do.
Anyway, like I said before, I don't live there so it may be different as a long-term resident. But I just feel like based on my experience so far, the "way in" may just be a matter of finding people with similar interests, much like I would here in the US.
Most of us quickly made casual friends as you described, but are yet to make many close friends. As for integrating into society, most of us found society quick to help and welcome us, but struggled to move on from "the foreigner that needs help and teaching" to "the person with ideas and opinions as valid as an equivalent Japanese person", this is irrespective of Japanese ability.
Perhaps that is why many people says it's difficult to integrate, what we immigrants want from integration and what Japanese society wants from integrated immigrants is fundamentaly different.
As a person who lived in many countries I felt the same in almost every english speaking countries, they could be welcoming but making friends isn't that easy, maybe easier in NZ and OZ than the rest. In Latin countries I felt it was a lot easier, especially coming from one myself.
This isn't true in my experience. The wages for IT work are much better in the US, but that's it. Tech salaries in Europe are just as bad as in Japan, AFAICT, but housing costs in Europe are worse.
>Aside from the language issue, it is also difficult to integrate socially if you are a foreigner.
This is true everywhere. Talk to anyone about their experiences of emigrating to Germany, for instance. Or someplace in middle America like Iowa. From my experiences with immigrant friends in the US, their social circles are mostly other immigrants or expats from their home countries.
Shortage of labor is a definite problem in Japan, lack of progress or flexibility is another one. Both can be helped by immigration.
Aside from skilled workers, they've eased up a lot on the unskilled workers, so there's many from SE Asian nations like Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam working in service positions. Of course, westerners who come here probably don't notice this because they think all Asians look alike...
What I have noticed is internet commenters who have never even been to Japan, let alone lived here, talking about the "casual racism" that they think is so common here just because they read someone else on the internet make that claim. I see this in probably every discussion about Japan either here or especially on Reddit.
Question: Could this be a path to a visa for someone who wants to immigrate?
>If say, blue deep state dysfunction keeps getting worse, and it ends up couped by reds who purge & reform the federal government along the lines of less handouts, more guns, and set up the system so that political power of unproductive classes is minimized, woke may just die out.
Wow.
I have heard this before, I kind of think that there is a nontrivial percentage of people that hope or believe that we will solve aging within their lifetime and that having kids isn’t necessary.
India's population also continues to explode. We've been very successful assimilating Indian immigrants in the US.
This blog post is a great read on the importance of institutions and how assimilation has succeeded with past immigrant waves: https://anowrasteh.substack.com/p/review-of-the-culture-tran... The tl;dr is that in principle, it's possible to imagine a South Korea in the year 2100 which is 80% descended from African immigrants and functions more or less the same way it does today. The immigrants just have to come at a slow enough rate that they adopt to the local way of doing things instead of overwhelming it. Probably would work best with a points-based immigration system similar to what Canada has. Also getting the host country to accept the new arrivals would also be an important challenge. In my opinion, more countries should follow France's lead and establish a foreign legion, so even right-wingers have to acknowledge that immigrants are helping the country out.
I don't see any reason why anyone should take those projections seriously. Countries went from booms to baby busts in the span of few decades.
The criteria for what makes a country "developed" will shift: at the moment, it's stuff like 24/7 reliable electricity and communications grids, fresh water and sewage grids, transportation infrastructure, access to healthcare, affordable quality housing and food. As a result of that being available, particularly healthcare, food and water, reproduction rates will fall as you don't need six children to hope one makes it to an old enough age to be a caregiver. We're seeing this pattern already with first and second generation migrants from countries with high reproduction rates.
> Immigration as a solution to population decline seems like a temporary fix.
It doesn't need to be more then a temporary fix: those countries who are rich at the moment will still be rich in the future and continue to invent stuff - the new marker for "developed" may then be "basic labor is done by robots", so there won't be any more need for more immigration. The crucial issue is that Western societies are hard-wired on judging people by their employment - my fear is that in a world with declining employment rates, we'll end up with a small caste of ultra rich elites, and a mob of people who may enjoy what we call a "high standard of living" in our standards, but still fighting for status aka the few jobs that will exist, and there will be lots of people blaming immigrants again.
Most online descriptions of Japanese people appear as caricatures, but from the few who I know who live in Japan, they are like any other human group: if some form of continuity or success is the only form accessible they will accept it.
In this regard it would make sense to eat it up and accept population decline. Japan of 50 million Japanese is still Japan. Japan of 40 million Japanese and 40 million Filipino is no longer Japan. May still be passable country, though.
The US currently gets more Asian immigrants than Latinos.
That plus rigging the statistics to display much more favorable numbers.
These people are already there and decline rate seems tragically unsustainable.
Shrinking population would be somewhat OK if it would be organic.
2. This shrinking will be painful as our current structure relies on young caring for old, either directly as part of families or indirectly via tax-funded social programs. If there are not enough young people to pay taxes for the welfare, what should we do about the old ones? Let them die? Let them rot away in loneliness[1]? Force them to work till they die[2]? Or nudge them towards euthanasia like Canada does[3]?
[1] another recent NYT article on this subject: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/health/elderly-living-alo...
[2] see the debate about raising medicare age to 67
There is all the reason to believe that. In the past few years, Japan took in a record number of immigrants, and yet they still werent able to stop the population decline. They lost ~600,000 people/year in total or during that time period, if i remember right. 'Some adjustments' wont fix that. A total overhaul of the society is necessary.