Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past | Hacker News Reader

Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past

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245 pointsZeljkoS508 comments

These Japan threads are always so fascinating to read. When pressed, everyone seems to roughly agree on two main ideas:

1. Japan has extremely low levels of many of the problems that we have in Western nations.

2. The reason WHY they're so unaffected by problems that arise in racially-divided societies with fluctuating gender roles, is because they are a deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles.

#1 plays into the common impulse on HN, Reddit, etc to dunk on the U.S. and the West in general. But #2 undercuts that, because Japan is far WORSE than us on many of the factors for which people dunk on us. They're MAGA Republicans with Pokemon!

People tiptoe around this without really engaging with it in depth. Either because the cognitive dissonance is too strong, or else they're afraid of what people will think if they look at it directly rather than askance from the corner of their eye.

For what it's worth, I'll take the messiness of modern Western society. Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy or misogyny cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.

> because they are a deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles.

I think far more people than you’re probably comfortable with would say that’s a feature, not a bug.

Like, perhaps, Japanese people?

> 1. Japan has extremely low levels of many of the problems that we have in Western nations.

> 2. The reason WHY they're so unaffected by problems that arise in racially-divided societies with fluctuating gender roles, is because they are a deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles.

I agree, mostly on 1, but 2? I don't think many people would say their misoginy is in any way responsible for e.g. the order and low crime rates. Xenophobia maybe - it's easier to keep everything clean and orderly if everyone who lives there was born there and was indoctrinated in school to be a good orderly citizen.

However, one of the problems they share with many "Western" nations but much worse, is the birth rate. They're looking at a massive demographic crisis because of their misoginy, and not helped by their xenophobia (e.g. some countries are relying on migrants to "fix" the low birth rates).

> Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.

That is the impression I get frequently too, especially when it's put in a "it's clean and there's no crime because they're racially homogenous" way, which is quite disgusting. Singapore and Switzerland are also clean and with low crime rates, yet they're quite diverse in every possible aspect (cultural, ethnic descent, languages, religions). Haiti is in anarchy, yet relatively culturally, ethnically and religiously homogenous.

> However, one of the problems they share with many "Western" nations but much worse, is the birth rate. They're looking at a massive demographic crisis because of their misoginy, and not helped by their xenophobia (e.g. some countries are relying on migrants to "fix" the low birth rates).

This argument about misogny being the cause of low birth rates kind of falls on it's face when you go back in history to when these countries had higher levels of misogny yet much higher birth rates. If you're JUST looking at the correlation, misogny rates correlates with HIGHER birth rates, not lower ones. (Correlation does not necessarily imply causation and all that, but there's a possible argument that could be made here but I won't make it.)

Low birth rates the world over have a much higher degree of correlation with urban versus rural living ratios rather than anything else. When property costs per square meter/foot are high and you can't use your children to help your business there's a VERY strong incentive to not have children for economic reasons. (Historically most Japanese either had children working with their parents on farms part time or children helping run the family shop part time that was underneath the living area. That changed with the post-war economic boom.)

>This argument about misogny being the cause of low birth rates kind of falls on it's face when you go back in history to when these countries had higher levels of misogny yet much higher birth rates. If you're JUST looking at the correlation, misogny rates correlates with HIGHER birth rates, not lower ones. (Correlation does not necessarily imply causation and all that, but there's a possible argument that could be made here but I won't make it.)

Not that I agree with sofixa’s reasoning, but I also do not agree with this reasoning.

It is possible to have different levels of misogyny. Less misogyny can dissuade women from having children, but they still have the right to not have children. More misogyny could be women do not even have the option to not have children.

I think the OP is making the point that mysogyny is good for birthrates, which seems to be what you are saying too?

> They're looking at a massive demographic crisis because of their misoginy, and not helped by their xenophobia

Japan now has highest birth rates out of all developed Asian countries.

TIL, thank you. Korea is astonishingly low! 0.84/woman in 2020.

Correlates nicely with their location on the economic parable. Korea started to grow later than Japan (because of the civil war) and is now where Japan was about 30-35 years ago: still booming, with insane real estate costs, etc. Japan has had 20 years of stagnation - people got poorer, so now they're making kids again.

> They're looking at a massive demographic crisis because of their misoginy, and not helped by their xenophobia

I’m not sure we can attribute it to either. They were arguably more mysoginistic and xenophobic in the past, and they didn’t have any issues keeping population levels up.

It seems much more likely that the driving factor behind their low birth rate is their very high rate of overwork. There have been a number of articles about how impossible it is for a typical salaryman to have enough free time and energy to even care about sex, let alone find a partner.

As someone who has traveled many places, and also an American.. I have no loyalty to America and would leave the moment my career allowed for it; straight to Japan.

They just have higher standards.

An extreme but mean't in good faith question: would you fight for Japan if asked? assuming you lived there.

I would. My family is there.

Not OP but I wouldn’t fight for any country. I’d fight for my family and close friends.

It is an extreme, but it's fair. I would not fight unless I was forced to fight. I am quite passive even though I own guns for sport purposes. If I was forced to enlist because of something traumatic, I would have to be in a indirect combat position(drones, communications,etc).

The crux of what I was trying to say is that Japan, with all of it's modern cultural failings(harder life for women, heavy drinking culture, endless work hours) is still much closer to my idea of a modern utopia than anything else the world has to offer.

This is 100% an opinion.

> They just have higher standards.

To me it’s amazing how much people will contort themselves to find disqualifying fault in Japan or Singapore, etc but not also hold their own Western country to a standard. It’s line no one is saying Japan is perfect in every way. But if you’ve been there then it’s plainly obvious how much higher their standards are and their expectations for each other.

It took about a day of being there to see they have the most fundamental quality any decent place has - order. And this is why their society is much nicer because from a foundation of order you can build amazing social systems. Look to Norway for a Western example. Or even a place like Denmark who accept the anarchists but keep them cordoned off and made into a tourism curiosity.

I think this is a false equivalence as result of the attempt to fit what's happening there in Western mental models. I don't know anything specific about Japan but I see it happening all the time with Middle Eastern or Eastern European nations.

The problem is, when you say something like that you start attaching other features of the western version and that often doesn't reflect the reality and doesn't have the historical context of the western version.

For example, Turks are much more openly homophobes and antisemitic than people in the West but at the same time Turks were not exterminating the Jews and were not castrating the homosexuals a few decades ago. If anything Turkish academia was practically founded by the Jewish refugees when the west was busy fighting world wars.

The same goes for the Eastern Europeans, a typical Eastern European would be much more racist and macho that a westerner but Eastern Europeans don't have a history of colonisation and slavery. Also, women have much older history of workforce participation and equal rights with men so for an Eastern European men the western culture wars and attempts to "make it right" through affirmative action don't rhyme at all(They are like "Men and women have equal rights? Duh? What's the fuss about"). You will also not find anti-abortion politics, gun rights stuff or anti-tax, anti-government libertarian stuff which you might attribute to typical right winger in the US. The similarities are very superficial.

Just because you can identify a characteristic or two in a foreign person, doesn't mean that they are the same as the group of people from your society who have those treats.

What’s even funnier is that western right wingers sometimes will mistake these things as Eastern Europeans being fascist and will preach how Eastern Europe is the land of the free speech. I attribute their affection for Russia and Putin to this. I had a smirking smile when one of the Chan board admins was disappointed when found out that Russia is not a free speech land, he was able to act however he likes only because it wasn’t bothering the Russians. The moment he touched a local hot button he leaned about the free speech in Russia.

I get the feeling you are trying to simplify the world so massively it ends up being non recognizable. Colonialism brought oppression, but oppression isn't necessarily colonialist. Only some countries has been colonial powers, but Turkey certainly was one of them.

The holocaust was a specific event and not directly taking part doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Still, thousands of jews were deported to death camps. Wikipedia, as can be expected, has an article on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_and_the_Holocaust . But every minority has their own story. There are yezidis, kurds, armenians and others.

It is far beyond simplification to say that eastern Europe did not have colonialism and oppression. I don't think I need to go into details. The events of the past century are well documented.

Turks are by no means a saint, after all they used to run a hugely successful empire for centuries but the way they governed was much different that the western ones and that's why doesn't translate 1 to 1 at all. Many of that culture was transferred to modern day Turkey and many was lost and changed but the gist is that it was very different(not better or worse). When France finally let the women elect and be elected, that was 30 years after Turks did it. In the 50s Turks were like "Those French showed big progress in women's rights, good for them!". Turks were over the women's political rights since generations but Turks had very different problems than the French.

It's simply impossible to think in analogies when thinking about nations. It's not even misleading, it's completely wrong.

Eastern Europeans were a part of the Ottoman empire during the colonial age but feel free to point out about that African country which used to be a Bulgarian colony for example. I think you should go into details, I'm very curious about the colonies of Easter European nations.

Polish Haitians ? (edit: for your curiosity only)

Is this a question or are you trying to claim something? Why are you talking as if we both know something and you are trying to make me spill the beans?

> a typical Eastern European would be much more racist and macho a that a westerner

How do you know that ? I think that what you say is racist and it's oposite, as they

> don't have a history of colonisation and slavery

to see others as resources, to justify it and use that if convinient, or enough of them to make such opinions - but see just other people.

Edit: Ok, what you say is just self-attribution (" would be ").

I'm born in Eastern Europe, our ways are perceived as very racist in the West. Quite a minefield trying not to offend someone but it's also easy to learn because in the west people are still racist but they distilled it to some forbidden keywords. Like Kanye West crossed the line when said the forbidden words and Musk closed his account but before saying the keyword, he was the same guy expressing the same opinions for a long time and everyone knew what he was talking about.

This comment itself is an example of the western "keywordiness". For some reason, attributing national characteristics is considered racist in the west(Spanish are easygoing, Germans are polite and distant but once you crack the surface they are friends for life, Brits are easy to chat hard to form deep friendship - we have all kind of attributions about other nations and we talk about it openly. According to us, this is not racist because we judge the individual and these attributes are just expectation, not judgements ). Also for some reason if you are from the group you are talking about your are exempt.

Funny stuff really. Whe in the UK, I offended so many people that they decided to leave the EU :) JK - not observing political correctness is our national trait but doesn't mean that Eastern Europeans are your average American right winger.

> to see others as resources and to need justify it and self, or enough of them to make such opinions - but see just other people.

Can you write this sentence in a more legible way please? I don't understand what you are trying to say?

>Spanish are easygoing,

It depends. Mediterranean, Atlantic and Continental people can be very diverse. Rural Basques are pretty close compared to the cheerful and jolly Andalusians. The Castillians are kinda like Basques with a bit on openness, but reservated in lot of questions. 50/50. Spain can have weathers from rainy climates (even more than London across the year, trust me, the North it's like that) to literal desserts, from -30C in top of the mountains in Winter to 45+C in the Southern places. Hitting negative temperatures in Winter on non-coastal regions it's the norm.

> Eastern Europeans don't have a history of colonisation and slavery

...except full-blown in Russia, which perpetuated slavery until 1861.

...except serfdom Poland (and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) until 19th century.

Regarding anti-abortion politics, see modern Poland :(

I guess the Eastern Europeans are not all the same and don't have the exact same history. Almost as if the point of the post :)

Then you really shouldn't start paragraphs with:

> The same goes for the Eastern Europeans, a typical Eastern European...

no, that was serfdom too, and it's obscene to compare that to slavery practiced in the west. For starters, it had nothing to do with race.

My ancestors in Eastern Europe were usually attached to the land and belonged to the landowner. They had no rights: they owned no property, they could not move, and their owner could treat them any way he liked, including unrestricted violence. They could be bought, sold and inherited as any other property. How is this not slavery?

> Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy or misogyny cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.

You're not wrong about the xenophobic tendencies and obvious monoculture, but the situation is far more complicated and nuanced that you're allowing.

An example: I have a black American friend who's lived in Tokyo for 30 years and plans to be buried in Japan. He lives in Japan because he never has to fear for his physical safety due to the color of his skin, like he does in America. While he will never be seen as "Japanese", for him your xenophobia is more typically represented as wariness or caution around foreigners, people not sitting next to him on the train because he is tall and looks different, versus in America having to contend with actual white supremacy, racist police, and hate crimes. His story is far from unique.

(As an aside, I think this is part of why these discussions about upsides/downsides of Japan are so interesting - it defies any simple explanation and the closer you look the more nuanced it becomes)

I'm a visibly nonwhite minority here in the deep south of America with friends of every skin tone, including those who are black. Not once has anyone younger than 40 been afraid of his physical safety due to the color of his skin, other than being in places where physical safety was questionable to begin with. Perhaps the true point here is that in Japan it is very rare that anyone has to fear for his physical safety for any reason.

I'd much rather live someplace where "actual white supremacy", to the degree it exists, is denounced by polite company, than a place where it is accepted in polite company that you're avoided for looking physically different and "no foreigners allowed" in businesses are common.

As one who only came to the States as an adult, it's really confounding to me the degree to which it's understood that America is a racist and white supremacist country. I just don't get it at all.

I'm not american so I have no experience with it myself. But I thought for example the birth of black lives matter movement was directly linked to black people feeling physically unsafe.

Yes, from the police and police interactions. American police are unusually brutal anyways.

Per capita, American police kill 3x more than Canada's police, and 60x times more than England's police.

Right. So doesn't it make sense for someone to move to a different country where you don't have to fear the police?

Aren't Japanese police just as likely to target "the foreigner" in the neighborhood anyway? They're not going to shoot on sight the way an American cop would but their ability (and legal leeway) to extract confessions is infamous.

Maybe, but that's an irrelevant metric. I'd still expect the absolute percentage chance of becoming a police victim to be much, much smaller.

Everytime I talk with other non-Americans about traveling in the US one of the main fears that comes up all the time is fear of the police. So I can't imagine the Japanese police being nearly as much a cause of concern and or fear.

I think people should have a rational fear of police everywhere, including Japan. Police have a state given power over you, and that can be abused no matter where you are.

Japan isn't perfect here. Your rights when dealing with the police here are different (and not in a better way). You do not have the right to remain silent, and your silence can be used against you. They can keep you in jail for ~30 days without charges. It's an open secret that the police can and do beat prisoners to get confessions out of them.

That said, if I had to chose an interaction between the Japanese police and the US police, I'd take the Japanese police every single time.

Yeah, interesting!

Police interactions are quite infrequent among non-criminally adjacent people. Keep in mind lots of those policing minorities are minorities themselves. Police kill thousands of white people too. So in a sense your question is why doesn’t everyone leave America because of fear of police?

Only if you are a criminal. Don't point a gun at a cop and you won't get killed by one. If you don't break laws or speed you will not actually interact with cops in the US. I'm 45 and the only times I have ever interacted with police is when I got pulled over for speeding, or something wrong with my car.

the very first time i am going to bring race in a hn comment.

you are not black or a minority, are you? systemic targeting is a thing. exarcerbated by media portrayal. it is a real mess that affects real people.

If you are trying to argue that a person's behavior has no effect on how likely they are to be killed by a cop then you are just completely wrong.

Without putting words in their mouth, I think they are arguing that in the US, one’s skin color plays a larger role than their behavior, when it comes to whether their interaction with the police results in brutality or not. While they are both factors, one is a stronger predictor than the other.

If I’m pulled over while being white and I cooperate, I’m probably getting the ticket and going on my way. Worst case the cop is having a bad day and wants to escalate, they arrest me for something. If I’m black, worst case I’m going to the morgue. Average case is going to be worse if I’m black, all other things (including my attitude) being equal.

"one’s skin color plays a larger role than their behavior"

When it comes to actually getting killed by cops I don't think this is true. The vast majority of people killed by cops are doing something very foolish like pointing a gun at them or rushing them with a knife.

Please do a few google searches on this topic so that you can change your worldview. I know it's tough to challenge your core beliefs, but part of intellectual curiosity is also personal growth, especially around topics that you have an emotional attachment to.

I actually did, a few months ago. In my state, out of the 10 non gun-carrying people killed by the cops in the past 10 years, 2-3 were Black, 5 were White, the rest Hispanic and 1 Asian (matching the racial makeup of US).

So the statement by the poster above holds - if you don't point a gun at a cop (figuratively), your chance of surviving contact with police if you are Black are no lower than other races.

What exactly are you trying to say, that the majority of US cops are eager to randomly kill black people for no reason?

This is horribly reductive.

Put aside the sample size of one for a moment. The fact you've only dealt with the police when genuinely committing crimes, and their response was proportional to the crime, is most likely down to your skin colour.

> and their response was proportional to the crime, is most likely down to your skin colour.

And also due to the fact I was calm, reasonable, cooperative, and didn't point a gun at them. If you are trying to argue that a person's behavior has no effect on how likely they are to be killed by a cop then you are just completely wrong.

Do you mean like the way Philando Castile was calm, reasonable, and cooperative while being executed after being stopped for a break light issue?

What about Charles Kinsey who was as cool and compliant and non-threatening as possible,

What about Donovan Lewis? Is it reasonable to execute a sleeping man?

What about Erik Cantu? I guess eating a hamburger in a parking lot is a capital offense?

BTW, the number of cases like the few I mentioned are FAR too numerous to even keep track of.

If you think that a persons skin color has no effect on how likely they are to be killed by a cop then you are just completely wrong.

Those are 4 people out of many thousands that have been killed by police in the US, they are hardly representative. A persons actions have hundreds of times more impact on how likely they are to be killed by a cop than his race.

Are US criminals also 60x more violent? I feel like these stats are related. You can probably correlate them with guns and economy in some way as well.

According to various statistics, crime rates in the US are between 25% less than England, and up to 20% more.

An incredibly massive distance from 60x.

Do those Canadian police killing numbers include the 75 or so indigenous people that they intentionally dumped outside to freeze to death?

https://allthatsinteresting.com/starlight-tours

reflexive shame towards the nation is the only cultural practice americans are still taught. in contrast to japan who have pretty much eroded their past atrocities from the public consciousness, the intelligentsia seem fixated on wallowing in ours. i leave it to you to decide which strategy has created a more cohesive public.

> Not once has anyone younger than 40 been afraid of his physical safety due to the color of his skin, other than being in places where physical safety was questionable to begin with.

It's hard to take you seriously here. I've met very few black folks who would agree with you on this. Have you directly asked a black person how they feel about encounters with the police?

> I'd much rather live someplace where "actual white supremacy", to the degree it exists, is denounced by polite company

It's not denounced by polite company. I was recently in Louisiana where someone was talking about why they don't go into New Orleans anymore (because of black people), and about how we have an incorrect history of the civil war because "winners write the history" ("it wasn't due to slavery").

> than a place where it is accepted in polite company that you're avoided for looking physically different

I'm not saying this doesn't happen at all, but I think it's often mistaken for "I don't want to sit next to a gaijin", when it's really "I don't want to sit next to someone really tall because I'll have no room" or "I don't want to sit next to the gaijin who smells like they haven't showered in a week".

I know this is one of the more common complaints on japanlife reddit, so I won't discount it completely, but even there it's a pretty controversial take.

> "no foreigners allowed" in businesses are common.

I've been living in Tokyo for the past 3 years (and have traveled around Japan a lot) and haven't seen a single "no foreigners allowed" sign. I have never been rejected for being foreign. I'm sure you may run into this on rare occasion in the countryside, but this isn't anywhere near the norm, even there.

I've heard this is still the norm at places like soaplands, oppai bars, and such, but that it's not enforced for folks who can speak enough Japanese to clearly state they understand the rules. I haven't gone to any so can't personally verify that (and my spoken Japanese isn't good enough anyway). These places have strict legal requirements to keep their licenses, so this is a case where I at least understand their rationale. I'm sure there's some xenophobia baked into this as well, as it's a common (stupid) stereotype that foreigners bring STDs into Japan.

> As one who only came to the States as an adult, it's really confounding to me the degree to which it's understood that America is a racist and white supremacist country. I just don't get it at all.

As someone who grew up in the south, and who has mostly conservative friends and family, I absolutely get it. There's degrees of racism, but I've heard the phrase "we should turn the middle east into glass" more times than I'd prefer. I know lots of folks who moved away from the New Orleans area so that their kids wouldn't go to school with black children. I've been in situations at work where people would be in a 1-1 with me and be complaining about black people being hired, and how they don't allow that on their team. I know property managers that only do word-of-mouth advertising for rental openings so that they can only rent to white people.

All of those things are just direct experiences I've personally witnessed. It doesn't take into account the historical racism that continues to affect the black community today, like redlining, white-flight, systematic police targeting and imprisonment, the war on drugs, etc.

I'm glad you haven't personally had that experience, but you shouldn't downplay the situation that others less fortunate than you experience often.

> Have you directly asked a black person how they feel about encounters with the police?

Comments like this seem to ignore the fact that a good number of law enforcement officers are black. I guess one could ask one of them?

I’m also a black American who lived in Japan and who frequents Japan for business and vacation; in fact, I just returned from my eighth trip a few days ago. I feel an indescribable feeling of freedom and even acceptance in Japan that have eluded me in America. By “acceptance” I don’t mean being accepted as a Japanese person; I mean being accepted as a person. I gladly prefer the treatment of being a “gaijin” to the treatment of being black in America.

That's great that it worked out for you but ask mixed-race Japanese folk like Ariana Miyamoto what it was like growing up (or Naomi Osaka what her Japanese grandparents had to say about her mother loving a Black man), they will tell you eerily similar tales and are quite the opposite of being treated as a person despite the fact they were born there, are culturally Japanese, and have spoken Japanese their entire life. You can also check out Yuya From Japan's channel on Youtube where he interviews mixed-race Japanese folk.

Foreigners likely don't realize they're participating in the same near/far dialectic that informs the way Black American comedians since the 90s have noted that white folk in America treat people from Africa better than they do the people of African-descent who's ancestors were already here well before the the ancestors of most whites in America.

I think OPs and parent posts are more content with the fact they will never be Japanese, and feel comfort in that they still get treated with more dignity and respect than in America.

Your examples are of mixed race people who strive to be Japanese, but are denied due to their mixed heritage. Apples and Oranges. One group cares about integration, the other doesn't.

You really can not simply categorize asking people to do good work/not legalizing drug/keeping a valid border as MAGA.

"I'll take the messiness of modern Western society" until you get pushed into train tracks or become a victim of fentanyl overdose, you are actually not taking it, sitting somewhere in Colorado typing these thing is not part of the messiness.

describing a highly competent, domestically popular & highly trusted government as 'MAGA' is perhaps one of the most pro MAGA statements i have ever heard. the fact that in spite of all of it's problems and what is essentially at this point a whole generation of recession, japan continues to be a high trust society with civil services and infrastructure that is the rival of the rest of the world speaks very highly of the japanese system's integrity. consider that at the peak of our prior recession, many us state & local governments essentially ceased to function.

> highly competent, domestically popular & highly trusted government

Current approval rating of the Kishida cabinet is about 25%. The disapproval rating is 50%.

To be fair, people are never happy with the government here, and come election time they’re always happy enough to not bother voting at all.

Japanese people complain about everything, especially when it's anonymous. Just look at Google maps reviews, or product reviews on amazon.co.jp: you'll see 1-star reviews for stuff just because something wasn't quite perfect. It's probably the same for the politicians; they complain, but the alternatives are worse in their minds.

Plus, much of the population is elderly, and their preferences are quite different than the younger people you hear more from.

> become a victim of fentanyl.

Fentanyl poisoning is >99.9% a result of the war on drugs. If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.

> If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.

I had a big post here comparing the black market for marijuana here in Oregon (spoiler: it’s larger than ever, half the cost of retail, and now largely run by cartels) but ultimately the larger issue society seems blind to is that addicts don’t think rationally about their addictions.

So yes, opioid addicts absolutely will risk their lives to get a hit that costs half as much.

Right, that's why I said a "fair market price", not "heavily regulated and taxed to pay for facilities for junkies and pay for drug education". My understanding is that opiates can be produced dirt cheap.

Also I have absolutely no clue, and I doubt there is really even data on it, but there are a lot of people who are dying from fentanyl who aren't opiate addicts at all. One person I knew who died last year couldn't afford healthcare, bought their anxiety meds online, and died in their room from fentanyl. Another person I knew died from ectasy, and having talked around it's a common story.

> virtually no one would risking their life on dodgy street drugs.

Only when you are sane. Did you know addicts are willing to walk on street @20F to get some money for drug instead of going shelters?

This is quite common and not hard to observe once you are willing to explore a bit beyond your regular happy life.

Yes. I actually knew and frequently talked with many of the homeless people who lived near me when I lived in downtown SF. The thing is that opiates are naturally cheap, and most of the current cost comes from heavy regulation.

If an addict can be high all day for a quarter the cost of a meal, say $1, and can purchase said from a safe, reputable drug store in their chosen location, rather than trekking across town to a shady area to buy illegal drugs from a outlaw dealer, they’ll do that. If only because they can spend more time begging and less time walking.

You have a very skewed view of addicts if you think they are that deranged. A good illustration of that is clean needle programs that provide orange safety tips for used needles. If these addicts were so completely deranged, those tips would end up in the trash not on the ends of needles in the streets.

> If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.

I feel like this rings the same as ‘unrestricted gun availability is good for people’.

1. Is verifiable from data, but 2. Isn’t obvious. It’s also a bit of a leap to equate Japan with MAGA, or at least in totality. Stance on immigration sure, but other aspects not really. Japan isn’t trying to ban abortion, or make a push for laws based on religion for example.

Most of all, it isn't part of the global populist, reactionary conservative movement.

> They're MAGA Republicans with Pokemon!

... and without all the war stuff ;)

That's just because America castrated their war machine.

MAGA Republicans were always anti-war.

#2 undercuts #1 because what’s the point of all of it then?

> deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles

Keep in mind that this doesn't just describe the modern Japan, it also describes South Korea, North Korea, China, and Japan of the past (with various militant/feudalistic governments).

Just like any other region of the world, East Asia has a long history of unrests, rebellions, caste systems, and civil wars going back to the dawn of history. If your thesis is that a xenophobic monoculture society with traditional gender roles prevents "Western problems," maybe you should be more explicit about these Western problems and examine if the evidences really support that.

The argument that Japan is successful because its a monoculture is absurd. Some of the most corrupt or impoverished countries are also monocultural.

> Some of the most corrupt or impoverished countries are also monocultural.

Which ones are you talking about? Are you sure they just didn't end up being monocultural ones just because their impoverishedness contributed to a former multicultural country disintegrating along cultural lines?

Not a historian, but that would make sense to me.

Roundabout white supremacy? They are asians.

Why are western media and people so infatuated with Japan? They admire it from far but as soon as they land in Japan, they criticize it. Japan works for Japan, it doesn’t need to try to pretend to be like another western country. That is what I took away from this article and the past musings of this writer.

For some people, the existence of a parallel system with significant differences that works very well for the people who live in it is the source of fascination.

Don't think much evidence is provided that it's working very well for them. Certainly it worked better in the 80s. Having to work with low pay to support a giant population of elderly people is not a great economic position.

> Certainly it worked better in the 80s.

This is such an American/Chinese perspective. Both countries where the growth and promising future gets people excited. You are being dazzled by the growth and bubble. Bubble era Japan indeed had that same appeal.

In 1980s Japan young families were worried about ever being able to afford homes. Land and houses had been exploding in price since the 1970s. Yes everyone felt they were getting rich, but assets went up in price faster than wages.

Japan now is indeed the anti-thesis to the bubble era you are glamourizing yes. Now homes are affordable. Jobs plentiful. Overtime has decreased massively. The 1980s had overtime common which would be illegal now. Train lines are plentiful. The bullet train network built, and paid for. You can get a taxi ride at anytime without the need to bribe drivers.

The flash and dazzle of the bubble was fake. The practical affordability and livability of Japan now is real.

> "The 1980s had overtime common which would be illegal now."

Despite being illegal, it's seemingly still quite common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japanese_term)

Well, can you ever really solve societal ills like this or just move the needle?

It’s not as if our war on drugs has solved the problem.

Japan somehow has an unemployment rate of 2.5% and barely any wage inflation. They do everything right, it's clean and safe, and yet they're time and money poor and earn less than the UK.

Also I don't think the Shinkansen is doing that well atm… it's mostly for business trips, since it's pretty expensive to use, and those are down a lot since we all discovered Zoom calls.

The reason it’s so clean and safe is that everyone is paid so little. So many positions can be filled.

It doesn’t work that well for Japan. Having spent some time working there, the economic stagnation and inverting age pyramid really weigh on the younger generation. There’s a general feeling of decline that’s hard to put in words

Good job there's no feeling of decline in Western Europe

Thanks to immigration, young generations have all they need and there's plenty of optimism

Errrr no, there really isn’t? And yes, immigration has helped us keep relatively strong economies and filled positions that natives don’t want to do anymore

I live in Western Europe and immigrants make up most of our bus drivers, trash collectors, store assistants, nurses, taxi drivers, builders and basically anybody who has repair skills (clothing, tech etc). Also, many of my colleagues in tech came to this country to work. So it's a mix, because immigrants also take jobs that the natives aren't qualified to do. And that's a good thing.

*Don't want to do for low wages anymore

Of course, so let's close the doors and magically I'll get paid £30/hour to collect trash off the street, because there's no competition with the immigrants. Simple as.

We've tried that in Britain. Come see how's that worked out for us.

In this country those are municipal jobs that give you a pension. One could do worse.

So it’s ok if it’s some immigrant who gets the shit pay without any chance of a career, got it.

well we can employ robots to do these low qualified tasks, if you think it will help those poor immigrants. I guess their jobs taken by robots is better option for you

That's some dishonest retort right there. It's not so black-and-white. I never said people getting paid below minimum wage to collect trash is a good thing, you just assumed I did to take my argument down.

I just pointed out that removing the layer of population that has no other choice than working below minimum wage will not solve the economic and social stratification. The point of my comment is that immigration and low pay are two completely unrelated phenomena that some loudmouths want us to believe they're correlated. The average voter, then, goes on to believe closing borders magically means they'll finally be able afford a mortgage and a better life while doing unskilled work. Less immigration, fewer candidates, they'll have to pay us more, no? If only it were that simple.

For any hard problems, there is a clear, simple and wrong answer, which usually works quite well as a slogan for a political campaign. "Immigration" it's a classic example.

This leads to everyone getting poorer, as there are no more immigrants to exploit. People no longer can get their houses renovated on the cheap, municipalities don't have cheap labor to pick up the trash and clean public toilets. Of course, since the immigrants come from even worse conditions, actually being economically exploited in the UK is a great deal for them. A win-win.

> This leads to everyone getting poorer, as there are no more immigrants to exploit.

I'm an immigrant to the UK. No-one exploited me. I had a choice of lots of countries to go to (EU passport) and chose the UK voluntarily.

Not every immigrant is doing hard labor for minimum wage or less... Those are the exploited ones, not people hanging on HN.

I worked as a barman, a shelf stacker, a fruit picker, a stock picker (I mean the guy at the back of the warehouse stacking trolleys with orders) before I transitioned to software.

I was on minimum wage. I wasn't exploited, it was a means to an end.

I don't think you would really care about me as an individual. I think you just didn't want my type here.

>We've tried that in Britain. Come see how's that worked out for us.

With Brexit? The UK ended up replacing EU nationals with non EU nationals. Not much changed. Nobody is getting the kind of wages you'd get in Norway or Switzerland for picking trash off the street.

Its amazing how much people thinks economics and the capitalist elite are just supposed to magically align with their phantasmic vision of an ethnic monoculture purged of all otherness

I see you are not British.

That’s entirely self-inflicted

I take this as sarcasm. Inmigration is trying to solve social policy failures of the government.

Only among "racial purists" is immigration seen as the drive force of pessimism.

Most of society view politicians and the failed project of neo-politics responsible for this development.

Are you another one of those that think everything is going to shit because of immigration?

What used to be something only old racists and simpletons would loudly declaim 30 years ago, now it's become a common, yet still utterly moronic, party line.

But it's so easy to blame everything on the brown and the gaijin, when thinking hard about a hard problem takes too much effort.

Your diatribe seems based on a projection.

The implication I glean of namdnay's point is that woes could be alleviated by immigration, and the responding user suggests that it's not a silver bullet. That's different than saying "everything is going to shit because of immigration".

Also, being critical of immigration policy is not tantamount to criticizing the immigrants themselves. That's another projection.

There are surely advantages to immigration, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest it has zero potential downsides especially with higher rates as other policies and structures don't necessarily shift in tandem to accommodate it.

For example, wage suppression - it's just simple supply and demand, which should be uncontroversial. But maybe one that might speak to some people more: everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint, and no one moves here to consume less. The things we enjoy and take for granted are what make it a better life. So any conceit of potentially lowering waste/emissions qua consumer choice is wholly undermined by the fact that it is a matter of policy to increase consumption - with more bodies - to boost the GDP. Rates of global emissions are growing not just through growing economies like China (which is probably the largest factor of the last 20 years), but immigration.

I also read the comment as blaming Europe's ills on immigration.

It's possible they meant that, but it wasn't explicitly said. I just put it in the context of the response to the other user.

> Are you another one of those that think everything is going to shit because of immigration?

Not everything, but Paris isn’t what it used to be.

> Not everything, but Paris isn’t what it used to be.

Yeah, now there are bike lines and it isn't suicidal to bike here. Or do you mean something else?

There have always been poor people in Paris, and there have always (ok, not always, but since France has been a colonial empire and since it has been the preferred destination for Portugese and Spaniards to come work here for better wages, so for multiple generations now) been immigrants.

You started your irony well, then had to blame immigrants and ruin your point.

No, they blamed immigration, not immigrants. Stop using people who are hoping to improve their lives as a shield.

Immigration or immigrants, doesn't change the point: blaming immigration for Europe's ills.

> Stop using people who are hoping to improve their lives as a shield.

I'm taking the side of those people, and against the old racist/xenophobic canard that seems to be on the rise again, sadly.

Inverted pyramids don't last, and growing GDP at this level serves to benefit the rich, not citizens. If the Japanese don't struggle to find jobs and afford cost of living, if they have quality of life, what is the significance of a stagnant GDP?

Why do you believe inverted pyramids don't last? They last for a long time after you get the birth rate back up. And Japan's not gotten the birth rate back up.

Indeed, it seems like the drag from having an older population does a lot to keep the birth rate down.

Our best forecasts show Japan's population pyramid as still markedly inverted and still shrinking in 2100.

(I don't agree with your other point either, necessarily, but I chose to ask about this one).

> Why do you believe inverted pyramids don't last?

Death. And there are trivial ways to keep fertility at replacement level and not negative, on par with most other 1st-world countries.

A perpetually inverted pyramid would require that fertility rate shrink even further, until it approaches 0 - do we have a reason to believe this will happen?

Notwithstanding, in 100 years the entire global population growth is projected to stagnate, which will make this a moot point. No one will be able to rely on immigration to grow perpetually.

> A perpetually inverted pyramid would require that fertility rate shrink even further, until it approaches 0

That is incorrect.

Given a constant fertility rate over time any inverted pyramid would eventually straighten out.

If you take a constant fertility rate of 1, you'll always have an inverted pyramid, until there's no more pyramid.

(I'm assuming that the life expectancy does not change significantly)

A sub-replacement fertility rate will worsen an inverted pyramid situation, until the population eventually reaches 0

> A perpetually inverted pyramid would require that fertility rate shrink even further, until it approaches 0 - do we have a reason to believe this will happen?

Any fertility rate that's below replacement maintains an inverted pyramid, if you don't have a lot of death before old age. (Until the very last person dies, in a long long long time).

Each person in the current breeding population produces fewer people in the next breeding population; this produces an inverted pyramid.

> And there are trivial ways to keep fertility at replacement level and not negative, on par with most other 1st-world countries.

No country that has fallen into population decline has found these "trivial ways" in modern times. (Not sure what you mean here by "negative")

The trivial way is an enforced two child mandate. To be provided at 25 years of age with a selected or assigned partner.

It’s like mandatory military service, except for women.

I don’t feel like it’s that bad? People are worried about jobs and housing, but compared to the rest of the world it’s all still pretty affordable.

Preach. I was gonna click on comment and type the same thing. Stop trying to change Japan (by all means discuss it for all we want). The entire system, the one author referred to as 'traditional', is based on racial purism and while you and I are disgusted by it, they are perfectly fine with it. It sucks but it is their land and they don't try to enforce it outside their border.

Well, not in the last 80 years at least.

How many "this is what's wrong with America" articles do you see on HN written by non-Americans? The compulsion to judge others is universal.

He's lived in Japan for a decade, been married and divorced to a Japanese national, has several kids there, and speaks Japanese pretty well.

I experienced it the opposite way. When they’re in Japan they love it (except for the bitter people who hang out at HUB every weekend who refuse to learn Japanese).

It’s the ones who have never been there that talk shit the most.

>Japan works for Japan

The Japanese people that I follow on Japan seem pretty critical of Japan, so I'm not completely sure if Japan actually works for Japan.

I initially agreed with this sentiment but I’m pretty critical of the US yet would (mostly) accept the statement “the US (mostly) works for the US”. Otherwise probably nowhere works for everybody in the given nation.

I also wouldn't accept the statement that "the US works for the US" when the country has such differing opinions on where it needs to go that people, including elected politicians, are floating the idea of a "national divorce".

It does and it doesn't. To them it's a trade-off and they're pretty aware of the upsides and the down. They really like the upsides and they all complain the downsides, but they kind of accept that to have the things they're really proud of as Japanese that in part stems from doing all the things that grind on them.

One of the best examples of "Japan works for Japan, except when it doesn't" is the intersection of mental health and the Japanese way of solving problems. It's important to keep the peace with people, even if you're only pretending to, and that's a higher value than determining what's actually true in a given situation. So, whereas Western people try to get to the bottom of things and figure them out which requires ruffling some feathers, Japanese people very often simply ignore problems in the short term because it keeps the peace while accepting the long term outcome will blow up into a much bigger problem, but oh well because "there's nothing we can do about it". This kind of behavior is super perplexing as Westerner until you grok how it works on a fundamental level as you try to solve problems in a Western way and people wind up getting upset with you, though they often don't say it directly to you. The mental health situation there sucks because they don't know how to help family members who are experiencing difficulty, so the situation goes from bad to worse but of course "there's nothing we can do about it" and "there's no point talking about it" and this is the best thing to do even if it's all just to pretend everything is fine right. There's a reason they have hikikomori phenomenon. And sadly around half of those in mental hospitals could have avoided it if their family simply helped support them properly during their time of difficulty.

Source: watched my sister-in-law who was by all accounts a normal, and amazing human being, legit be driven insane by Japanese society.

Japanese who speak English well are minority and perhaps have more knowledge about foreign countries, so it could be biased compared to average people

I don't think these guys speak English.

They aren’t really. Very few media is devoted to Japan in the west, this is just one article out of a sea of not much.

It's more or less been that way since the colonial powers first encountered Japan. European powers found Japan to be something of an outlier to other East Asian territories. Many early European accounts of Japan found the social order fascinating and often regarded as comparable with their home countries. Early British visitors wrote something like "Japan is one of the civilized nations of the world". These same powers had starkly different opinions on nearby Korea and China.

Because of the Dutch port at Nagasaki, there was also a steady stream of Japanese goods into Europe and informed art, fashion, pottery, and other things. Europeans found analogs with their native stories of Kings and Knights, and the militarism of the colonial period was found and reflected by the Shogunate and Meiji governments.

As Japan opened up, Europe found a country that had long been absorbing Western ideas in technology and medicine, but with an entirely different philosophical worldview -- challenging European cultural centrism that Western culture was the secret to its relative global power.

By the mid 1800s Europe was so full of Japanese cultural influence that terms like "Japonism" were formed to reflect daily fashion trends that people wore on the street, and decorated their houses with. Van Gogh famously went through a period attempting to mimic Japanese art he found in news print and posters used to wrap pottery shipped from Japan.

https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-jap...

At this point the West has a few hundred years of this kind of connection and reflection with Japan, and to be fully honest, Japan kind of finds the West as interesting as well.

On a similar note, this cross cultural infatuation bothers my Korean wife to no end. But I have to remind her that we've really been dealing with her people en masse for under a hundred years, while we've been trading, teaching, learning, and fighting the Japanese for almost half of a millenia. It doesn't make her any happier ;)

> ...this cross cultural infatuation bothers my Korean wife to no end.

I've had conversations with Koreans who look with envy at the favorable attention Japanese culture gets. I was many years with Japanese and now many with Koreans, so maybe my perspective is reasonably well informed. My theory is that the main reason is the Japanese focus on the presentation of things. I don't think any other culture in the world puts as much focus on making a good impression. When you come into contact with Japanese culture, the full force of it hits you immediately. Thus, I think it's exceptionally easy for people to be impressed despite very superficial acquaintance with the culture.

i think a big part of it is that they are an industrialized nation that seems to have modernized in a positive way and without losing all of their uniqueness in pursuit of becoming another utterly bland and inoffensive global commerce hub. i personally have a great deal of admiration for the japanese because they have managed to embrace & preserve their traditions and artisanship across centuries

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC1-sTIbDQc&

while also leading the world technologically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AiYirZPwIs

and not to mention they are still building giant cool things, a style of monumentalism which the western world seems to have largely abandoned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIucUB23zZ4&

It's that Japan is so advanced, but different. Most other countries are either less developed or similar to the west.

They are works of art. But each one costs up to $900.

Well, yeah, it's a completely domestically designed and produced item.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9OYPWgzDBxE

The manhole covers in my Oregon city are boring and say "made in India". I'd bet their per-unit cost is still in the several hundreds of dollars.

Japan's "lost decade" is a myth:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/08/11/now-...

The examples given in this article are a bit silly. In Japan, the land has value, not the home. The examples in the article compare prices during an insane bubble to present-day prices. You could do that with any free-market county to make things look bad, except I don't know if any county has ever experienced a real estate bubble on par with Japan in the late 70s - 80s.

The only part that's a myth is that it's only a single decade. Japan's GDP has been flat for over 30 years now. USA's has tripled during the same time period.

Do some research.

Japan's population in 1980 was 116.8 million. 126.3 million in 2020. That's an 8% increase.

The USA experienced nearly a 50% increase over that same period.

Meanwhile, Japan's GDP went from 1.105 trillion to 5.04 trillion, all while reporting greater well-being among the population.

It's a myth.

Some research.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263596/gross-domestic-pr...

Blimey that was a sombre read. I thoroughly like Japan, the impeccable cleanliness and politeness, stiff and formal on the outside, but on the inside quite caring.

I haven't spent nearly as much time there as I'd like. 3 weeks/year or so for the last 10-15 years. But this article is not wrong on at least some accounts. The one super obvious thing is their aging population, and shrinking farming life. Towns are shadows of their former selves, and outside of tourism, you ask what people do, and you get mumbles about "not much", vague gestures towards the farms, or simple silence.

What can a country do to get birth rates up? I'm sure there are analyses out there about why Japan's is low, but what can they (or other countries) do to pump birth rates up?

I’m not sure; it sure seems like women statistically aren’t too eager to make tons of babies when actually given a choice. Not a cat you’d want back in the bag either. Perhaps we really are screwed on that front.

Allow immigration.

That's not a solution.

Maybe not, but at least It delays the issue for another 30-40 years, until every country in the world is as developed as we are now

Why not?

Japan is completely unequipped to take immigrants at any significant scale. It’s a delicately balanced society that depends heavily on people being socialized into the same rules from birth. Even if Japan could socially and economically integrate those immigrants, which is doubtful, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore. Tokyo would become like London or New York or Toronto, chaotic places where nobody knows the rules because they just got there five minutes ago.

Indeed, it’s doubtful to me that immigration is a fix even for Western Europe. Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos. For whatever reason, European countries are starkly different from the United States, where immigrant groups have long enjoyed similar economic mobility to the native born (which continues to be true for the contemporary wave of Latin American immigrants).

More generally, it just outsources the problem to immigrants. You’re compensating for a culture that has become broken in a key respect by importing people from a culture that isn’t b

>Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos

Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work. Come to London and tell me immigration is an outlandish idea - your barrista, your off-license shop keeper, your NHS keyworker and your TFL underground marshall will all laugh in your face.

> Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work.

I’m not talking about individual experiences, but aggregate statistics. In the UK, poor Muslims get more education than poor whites, but that doesn’t translate into better jobs: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-muslims-and-black-p.... They have lower income mobility than similarly situated whites.

The statistics are much worse in continental Europe, where Muslim immigrants are stuck in inter-generational poverty. Turkish people started immigrating to Europe in significant numbers around 1970, around the same time Vietnamese people started immigrating to the US. Half a century later, Vietnamese Americans have fully caught up with British Americans in terms of income. But the situation for Turks in Europe has been starkly different: https://theconversation.com/many-turkish-people-who-migrated... (“By the third generation, around half (49%) of those living in Europe were still poor, compared with just over a quarter (27%) of those who remained behind… Migrants from three family generations residing in countries renowned for the generosity of their welfare states were among the most impoverished. Some of the highest poverty rates were observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.”).

To an American those statistics are unbelievable. Germans, Italians, and Irish all came over a cheap labor and reached parity with British Americans within three generations. The Latin American immigrants coming to America today are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Several groups of immigrants who came here as impoverished refugees, such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Cubans, achieved parity even more quickly.

Your point about “class struggle” and the “barista, off-license shop keeper, [and] NHS keyworker” underscores my point. In Europe immigrants take those jobs, and then their kids take those jobs. That creates a politically and socially volatile situation. In America that doesn’t happen because immigrants have relatively high economic mobility. Irish and Italians did those jobs, and a lot worse, when they came here in the early 20th century. Today there is no meaningful class struggle centered around Irish or Italian identity because those groups fully integrated. In fact it’s a consistent struggle for US Democrats to build durable movements. Irish and Italians got FDR elected, but their kids and grandkids favored Reagan in a landslide.

How chaotic is Toronto?

It works in the USA, Canada, Australia.

Didn't work well for the native people though

It doesn't. These societies are permanently changed because of immigrations. This of course works fine for the immigrants (like myself!) but if I was a Canadian in the 70s I would be greatly opposed to this movement.

I'm not Japanese, but in objectively thinking about what's best for Japan, "immigration" is not on the list. In fact it's on the list of things to never ever do. I don't mean it as in "do not accept foreigners". I mean do not adopt the policy of mass immigration to offset the shrinking population.

As an Australian I'd say the single largest issue here is the cost of living. It is a massive problem. Housing is expensive (and scarce), public infrastructure is shocking (Roads are bad our public transport is terrible), utilities like electricity and gas are quite expensive, common goods like groceries are expensive.

Don't get me wrong the standard of living in this country is very good, we have a great public health system, our education system is good and crime rate is generally low but it comes at a cost.

Cities like Sydney and Melbourne regularly rank highly as some of the most expensive places in the world to live. It is really not affordable to have children, especially at a young age. As a result most of my friends, work colleagues etc. have waited until their 30's to start a family.

Immigration has not done a lot to bring down the cost of things. Personally I think if they want people to have more children they need to make life in general more affordable.

Japan has increased immigration for that reason.

Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.

I don't believe there's any examples of modern countries doing it. Providing lots of childcare benefits doesn't seem to help, though it does make the children you do get healthier.

Childcare benefits don't work for the same reason steep prison sentences don't work. Nobody does a cost benefit analysis of "years lost"/"benefit of murdering someone".

I'm sure there is a positive correlation with "home ownership, and low debt" with children however.

Because that would make you feel secure about your future.

Maybe not true for criminals, but many people don't have kids precisely because they did a cost benefit analysis on having them and decided it was too expensive to do so.

That correlation is due to people doing the cost benefit analysis. Do I want to deal with the costs of raising a child in an apartment? Do I want my child to bear the costs of having to change schools? Do I want my child and I to bear the costs of losing income while still paying lots of education/auto/home debt?

Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline.

Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time.

Who knows?

Incidentally what Afghanistan has done, with the claim that it will raise the birth rate. Women are banned from universities.

More religious yes, but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer” (at least not if the goal is a sustainable TFR). France and the US had birth rates around 2 as recently as the early aughts.

Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.

I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc. They’re expensive in terms of time too, and parents are practically always short on time due to needing dual incomes to be able to pay the bills without constantly sitting on the edge.

So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.

Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.

> Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc.

Except Japan has made nearly all of this absolutely free. So the financial cost argument falls a bit flat.

Huh? Where did you get this idea? Daycare, clothing, food, medicine, and education are not free in Japan. They're mostly not as horrifically expensive as in America, but definitely not free.

> but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer”

If you are not able to assure that you'll have a comfortable retirement years with the appropriate social safety nets to try to assure that someone who worked will be able to maintain at least the basic necessities for life, then having kids who make it into adulthood is that safety net.

The "ok, 60+ years old, unable to do meaningful work, move in with a successful child" is a fairly standard approach. This requires that you have kids and preferably enough that one of them will be able to support you moving in with them and isn't otherwise alienated from you.

Note that this only works on a per family basis and if you outlive your children (war can do that), then a more nationalized social safety net is something that because useful to have. By providing that safety net for retired adults, there is less pressure to have kids to support their parents in retirement and less pressure for single people to marry and have a family to fulfill that role.

Economic hardship (increasing the pressure to not have kids) and that safety net (reducing pressure to have kids at all) in both would then have downward force on the fertility rate and also would suggest putting off having kids until later.

Census.gov has a lot of interesting data for the rate - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat...

Also of interest - Multigenerational family structure in Japanese society: impacts on stress and health behaviors among women and men - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15087144/

I believe Israel is generally held up as an example of one modern country that has raised its birthrate.

more like kept it from sliding in the last few decades, but yes, still pretty high, and it's an achievement. They were also helped by having a very young population to begin with (just look at that perfect age pyramid), and the whole country currently has population of Nagoya metro area, Japan is much bigger and harder to change.

Does not look like a meaningful increase, and I wonder what the stats look like without the fertility rate of the Haredi group.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/fertility-r...

https://www.jns.org/israeli-birth-rate-on-decline-government...

>The Jewish fertility rate surpassed the Arab rate for the first time in 2020, with Jews having three children on average compared to 2.99 in the Arab sector.

>At 6.64 children per woman, haredi women had the highest fertility rate among Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 1.96 among secular Jewish women.

Looks close enough to women not belonging to super religious groups in other developed countries.

I've never understood statements to the effect of, "if you take out the group causing the effect, then the effect is no longer present".

I remember discussing a buggy application once with another engineer (I could reliably crash the server with a mis-configuration on the client), and I was taking a fairly apologetic stance that after all the workarounds I had to make it work, it worked OK. His response was, "yeah, if you take out all the parts that suck, then it doesn't suck". And now I can never unhear that.

astrange wrote:

>Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.

Which is what the causal factors seem to be in the fertility rate of Israel’s “modern” economy.

My experience suggests that there's a more or less fixed amount of religiosity in any person and it's on a normal distribution in any given population. That's the hardware/firmware so to speak, but what they apply that religiosity to can be quite varied. Just my observation from working in tech companies where C levels are treated like visionary leaders who provide the mission from on high - I could be mistaken, but the dynamics don't really feel terribly different from my religious education.

In the context of this discussion, I think astrange (and I) are using “religious” to mean a culture or tribe that encourages women to have many children and/or restricts women from being able to not have children. In my experience, these groups are typically associated with or offshoots of Christianity/Judaism/Islam, and usually described as “more religious” than the vast majority of people claiming to adhere to those belief systems.

If you look at the underlying data behind that report you'll indeed also see that a woman living in a top 10 percentile social-economic location is expected to have 1.95 children vs. bottom 10 percentile expecting 5.36 (though good luck separating religion from social-economic status).

If you look the graph and focus only on purely secular women (split as Haredi > Religious > Traditional-Religious > Traditional-Not that religious > Not religious-Secular) you can see that since 1979 it has been hovering around 2, so it is hard to tell if anything real or recent is actually going on. Though if you also understand statistics you'll see that Israel is heading to its own kind of demographic disaster since the least productive population has been consistently increasing at a very high exponent... (That said, it might be better to have the problem of needing to increase the productivity of the least productive than the problem of having no one to work)

Source (in Hebrew) https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/062/01_22... (The graph I mention is on page 11, so with the above mentioned divisions + a line for all Jewish women that end right above 3 you should be able to parse it even without knowing Hebrew ;))

Legalize polygyny for rich men who can financially support multiple wives.

Japan's population decline appears to be caused not by women giving birth to fewer children, but by an increase in the number of childless women. It appears that 1 in 3 women remain childless into their forties, compared to 1 in 20 in prior decades.

Women remain childless for several reasons, but my guess is they can't find a man who can support them financially and/or who they find themselves attracted to.

Is "we don't want to" not a valid reason anymore?

What is it that you don't want to? Give birth?

Children.

Edit to make it a more substantive point: me and my spouse are currently 35 and 36 years old and after much deliberation together (as well as observations of friends who did have children) we don't think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.

The vast majority of women who end up single and childless into their forties don't do it by choice. At least not directly. They _want_ to find a partner and have children; they just didn't succeed at making the right decisions in their life to end up in that desired destination.

Arranged marriages, known as "omiai", are still a thing in Japan, especially if someone is desperate for a marriage. If a man or woman doesn't marry, that is in the vast majority of cases by choice.

Perhaps things are different in Japan then, over here in Western Europe that is definitely not the main reason.

Yikes

> they just didn't succeed at making the right decisions

What would those decisions be?

Not putting enough effort to look like the girls in the idol groups

Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently. If you feel that your values or culture are worth preserving, you have kids.

Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.

So what? I'm not going to live my life for future generations, we only have a limited amount of time in this universe and personally, I don't want to waste it having and raising children for the next couple of decades. I know what one would rebut with, that it's "your" kids and that there's a lot of fun in raising children, and that may be true, but again it is not something that appeals to me and many other people these days.

That fine as long as you realize somebody else's children will have to take care of you when you wont be able to. And if enough people would think the same way as you do, than there certainly wouldn't be enough children to take care of the elderly generations.

Humean ethics don't seem to work particularly well in day-to-day society. If I have enough retirement savings, I will hire said children to take care of me either way, as there is no guarantee my own children would take care of me anyway.

Of course you can pay them, but they still have to come from somewhere.

> Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently.

If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?

No. Most of population has the desire for sex which leads procreation. It worked until we discovered contraception.

Contraception is also available to people descended from very fertile parents, so again, the evolutionary argument does not hold.

Of course it holds. Desire for sex was what was under evolutionary pressure which was a direct proxy for procreation. Because of contraception this link was severed. Only recently procreation is under evolutionary pressure.

There are many ways to impart ones values onto society, children being only one of them. It's a very myopic view to think that your children will copy your values and/or culture without developing a mind of their own.

In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.

I didn't like my kid before he existed that much either.

Do you also write reviews of restaurants you haven't been to?

No, but if I ask my friends who have been to the restaurant about how it was, then I can glean enough information from their responses to gauge whether I want to go there as well. Even if they feel compelled by social mores to say it was all great, you can observe how they act in addition to the things they say. We decided that while no doubt others love their children very much, it wasn't a lifestyle we were interested in.

Maybe try talking to older people, not just your currently stressed-out social group.

All your posts seems to say is "we heard that kids are hard work in the short term so we decided not to have them".

Why are parents so predisposed with trying to convince other people to have children as well, especially those who have made a decision not to, either way?

The same reason people who don't work are generally expected to look for a job. This has been mentioned by others.

That's not to say that everyone has the same expectations.

How are those analogous? People can live perfectly fine without a child but can't without a job (unless they live at home with their parents which coincidentally a lot of hikikomori do).

The ability to attract and successfully integrate hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year to support an oversized elderly population is not a luxury that most countries that can afford.

For most communities, normalizing childless will only come back to bite people in some form or another.

The number of people who actually regret having children is notable [1].

[1]: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288933

I would say that deciding not to have a family by observing others' is a lot better than deciding not to have a family after direct experience with it.

Not that I'm against having kids, but this argument is silly. If you feel that your values and culture are worth preserving, it's much more effective to write a book.

People should be allowed to self-select them selves out of reproduction. On the long term this is a eugenic pattern: it means the next generation will be more likely to have more people who value reproduction.

> we don’t think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.

By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.

And that’s not a moralistic point but a basic economic one. Any sustainable society needs people to have and raise 2.1 children on average. That’s self-evidently true in subsistence agricultural societies. But our society is still closer to those than to some hypothetical post-scarcity one where robots do all the work and replacement humans are created in artificial wombs. We can afford some people to be childless, but it can’t become a widespread thing.

You can paper over that temporarily with immigration, but you’re really just outsourcing a key social function to immigrants. Those immigrants then have to bear the burden of raising kids a toxically individualistic society that’s hostile to children.

> Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.

I get what you mean, but fuck that idea into the flaming sun.

All we need now is the state and society to force us to have children, on a planet with 8 billion souls.

Fuck that idea. Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation". When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?

> Fuck that idea.

It’s not an “idea.” It’s like saying “paying taxes is a social obligation” or “having a job if you’re able bodied is a social obligation.” At bottom those assertions rest on factual observations about society and the economy. If everyone evaded taxes civilization as we know it would quickly collapse. If able bodied people dropped out of the work force en masse, the economy would collapse. If we found out that the last child had been born in America, your retirement funds would quickly tank. These are such fundamental facts that societies have added a moral or religious gloss to them, but the underlying facts don’t go away even if you strip away that gloss.

If you won’t do those things, someone else will have to pick up your slack. Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.

> Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation".

Now that’s an “idea.”

> When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?

You’ve got it backward. Until five minutes ago, everyone agreed that everyone has a social obligation to carry out the various work necessary for society to function. “Do whatever you want with your life” is a blip in human cultural history. It’s a blip even in the history of western civilization. And to date every society to adopt that notion has essentially doomed itself to obsolescence.

That's caricature level gaslighting, even when accounting for your terribly low standards.

> Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.

All of these "outlandish" alternatives are seriously entertained by at least some members of the class of people who frequent HN.

>By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.

Doesn't that then beg the question; if a society can't convince it's enough of it's members of the value of that obligation, does that society/culture really deserve to continue to exist as is?

The Christian sect known as "Shakers" illustrate what you describe: They had a rule of celibacy and as a result have essentially died out; their Wikipedia entry says that as of 2021 their total membership was three people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

Unless those 3 people (and those in recent decades who have now died) were hypocrites and broke the rules, then the only way the sect has survived this long is immigration (we'd call it "converts" in this context, since they're not a country). However, while it's kept them alive since the 1800s, 3 people is pathetically small.

What’s the timeframe of that analysis?

What if the analysis turns out completely wrong? Did you weighted the downside as good as you did your analysis?

It's better to have a terrible 5-6 years dealing with diapers and strollers in your 30s than spend 30 years in your 50s to 80s alone.

There is no guarantee your children will visit or take care of you in old age, and if you're having children due to the above reason, that is a very poor reason indeed to have children, as it seems to be more of an argument for the parent's well being, rather than the child's. If you don't want to be alone, cultivate lifelong friends.

These are all novel cultural values not common in any traditional society with normal birth rates. In fact, this attitude is one reason why birth rates are so low.

It is totally normal to expect children to care for you in your old age. The guarantee is that other people can and should ostracize people for not caring for their parents. When an acquaintance tells me they don't visit/call/care for their parents with pride, I make a mental note to not be friends with that person. If you can't keep the most basic relationships straight... that's not a great sign, realistically.

That is certainly...one opinion. You don't know what those people have been through, they could have had abusive parents for example and don't talk to them anymore. If the parents don't take care of the child well when raising them, I consider it more than fair to not take care of them in old age (or even simply once the child leaves the nest, so to speak). Taking care of one's parents is not an immutable law of nature (indeed, many if not most organisms simply breed and leave their children), nor should it be. That you implicitly "make a mental note to not be friends with that person" is quite telling indeed.

If you're still pushing your kid around in a stroller at age 6, something is very wrong.

As a parent myself I can tell you that they are very likely referring to having two to three children close together rather than a single child ... ie. having both a six year old (eldest) and a child in diapers | stroller (youngest) at the same time.

After that period things are great!

. . . until you've faced with a household full of teenagers rebelling against anything and everything in overly dramatic ways.

It hasn't been two minutes and I already have a downvote.

I understand many people do not "like" this kind of solution because it conflicts with modern people's sensibilities.

But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:

Already one third of the population is over 65. Japan has about 120 million people. When you normally hear this number you imagine a country full with lots of human resources, but the fact that a large portion of these people are retirees. This is already causing a alrge portion of young men to checkout of society because they see no economic prospect for themselves.

Can you imagine what the situation will be like when that portion reaches 50% percent? Perhaps in only a few decades. The trend will accelerate: even more people will checkout of the ecnonomy, making things worse for everyone.

I didn't downvote, but I mean, it _is_ a profoundly stupid proposal.

> I understand many people do not "like" this kind of solution...

Which in and of itself should be disqualifying. This would be so deeply unpopular and destabilizing that it's not even worth considering.

I think you're being downvoted because people consider your original comment poorly constructed and poorly thought out.

That men can participate in polygamy does nothing to encourage birthrates; what is the incentive of the wives to want children? What is the incentive for the man here to want children?

Unless it's implied in your idea that the purpose of marriage is to produce children, polygamy solves nothing here. If that is the presumption that the arrangement requires children, how does this counteract the very common reasons for not having children?

- It's extremely time consuming and life changing; you have to commit substantial time or resources (or both) to ensuring the child is cared for

- A person or persons simply don't want children

- There isn't a strong reason to have children outside of one's own desire to do so (there isn't incentive to maintain a lineage of successors, build out an army of loyal subjects, and so on for the grand majority of people anymore)

- Even within religions, the impetus for having children just isn't emphasized in many sects like it was in the past

- Social mobility, while nowhere near perfect, is far more achievable via other arrangements or even to a degree with personal effort; it won't be the peasant to noble move that existed previously, but it's more possible than it has been in the past (though social mobility is still ridiculously difficult and fraught with discrimination and exploitation, so understand I am not at all saying that it's in a good spot)

Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.

Your follow-up comment here I think also misses a lot of points as to why people check out and undermines the idea that society can incentivize its way out of these problems. If the problem is a bleak economic future for people, trying to utilize childbirth as a pyramid scheme to overcome this economic uncertainty isn't really a great idea, as that means you need to somehow convince the children of the already checked-out persons that "no, really, it's a great system. Ignore why your parents are so miserable, it will be different for you for reasons."

I don't think you can just economically incentivize your way out of a declining population, not in any meaningful way aside from temporary trends which will fade. If the root cause of the issue is poor economic conditions and unstable comfortable living conditions, you need to first understand why those are happening in the first place. If it turns out that it's because only a select group have the economic stability to support a life that includes children and this select group is not a huge portion of the population, aside from mandating child birth, you haven't actually given incentive to make more children, you just have given special status to the already elite.

> But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:

I have, and I imagine we probably see more adoption of universal income and automation, and far more acceptance of such a system and interest in keeping such a system where you don't need to struggle for basic needs in place by investing time and effort into the system. There's a lot of this which of course is fantastical thoughts right now, but we're already seeing this in many nations, and the quality of life in these places is pretty good while birthrates are just "so-so".

I'd argue that legalizing polygyny would encourage more men to participate in the economy more eagerly: if they succeed they can have multiple wives and have multiple children with each. This is not a small prize.

Contrast to the current situation: if you work your ass off, the best you get is a wife who will treat you with resentment and disrespect in a couple years, expect you to do chores at home and help change children's diapers, etc. If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).

A large portion of young men around the world (not just in Japan) are opting out of society because they don't see a point. "The juice is not worth the squeeze".

> Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.

People are not holding off from having children. What's happening is there are more people who are failing to pair bond in order to have children. More men check out of society because they don't find the offer interesting, and as a result more women are unable to find a suitable mate.

Legalizing and normalizing polygyny solves the probem for a lot of women: just because someone is "taken" doesn't mean he's out of reach for her anymore.

Controversial truth: women prefer sharing a high value man than having the full attention of a low vaue man. Of course, they would prefer having the full attention of a high value man, but failing that, they'd rather share him than downgrade to a lesser man.

> If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).

This isn't mentioned enough in relation to the marriage/birth-rate subject. Men in developed countries (and it is typically developed countries with very pro-woman divorce laws/courts) are completely disincentivized to start families.

Do Japanese women want that?

The traditional household arrangement is the man is at the office 24/7, the wife gets his paychecks and uses them to raise the children and occasionally go on vacations, and the man gets an allowance (but doesn't go on the vacations because he has to be at the office). Not much room for a harem there.

There are many rich people in Japan who can afford to have multiple wives and support all of them financially. Some of them might do that in secret with a mistress but in the current social and political environment they probably wouldn't have children with their mistresses.

Do the wives have to hang out with each other or does he just alternating visiting each one of them in different apartments?

Either one would be an example of "things women don't actually enjoy".

Though Takehiro Sakurai and Aya Hirano both had career limiting scandals about dating 3+ people at the same time, so I guess some people try it.

An ex's mother was a concubine.

It's traditionally pretty normal for a married couple to drift apart over the years. People marry for appearances, social status, and to raise a family. They then seek gratification elsewhere.

The men who engage in this aren't looking to knock up more women. They already have a mother to their children. They want gratifying sex and emotional connection.

I've seen some posts by Japanese women suggesting they would be open to being the second wives of wealthy men but I'm not sure if they are the kind of women that rich men would be interested in.

caused by... an increase in the number of childless women.

Has there not also been an increase in the number of childless men? Or are men having as many children as they did decades ago, and it's only the women who are having fewer?

Men don't get pregnant. A man and two women can give birth to 10 children (5 each). A woman and two men cannot do the same.

I want to respond to this as I think you just have a fundamental misunderstanding on how wealth, relationships, and childbirth can be related.

A child is not made by the equation (One Female Parent + One Male Parent) + Marriage = Child.

This is not the actual requirement. It just requires sperm + ovum + body to carry the organism to birth. I interpret your comments here as attempting to take a purely logical/fact based approach, but you tie yourself to an unnecessary old fashioned notion of one man and one woman in a contractual union.

A woman and two men can absolutely be parents by inseminating the woman's eggs with their sperm and having someone else carry it, or artificial/manual insemination involving other women. I don't think you take your idea of efficiency here anywhere near the much more natural and sensible conclusion of "for-hire birthers", which already happens. A person, regardless of how they identify, should be allowed to do this; for simplicity sake though, I don't see why you don't mention this in your model -- a rich woman, paying for successors, and having multiple male partners who meets her scrutiny/desires raising the children and passing on genes/knowledge/personality traits.

You can suggest that your ideas imply this possibility, but frankly speaking I don't accept this suggestion; if you meant it, you would just say as such and/or use neutral terms for identifying the progenitors in your examples.

That's ridiculous. Next you'll try to tell me that 9 women can't have 1 child in a month. Any corporate manager can tell you otherwise.

> Legalize polygyny for rich men who can financially support multiple wives.

Rich men already have offspring from multiple women if they want, without having to marry. I fail to see what the advantage would be.

Removing stigma

If it's legal + acceptable for all men, then it undermines the advantage of the elite in this regard. Plus I don't think "stigma" matters to them at all.

The elite need more workers. Why would they care?

The elite already have immigration.

Survive in the next world war; baby booms are usually what happens next.

Is there any developed country that has been able to increase birth rate? Declining birth rate is a feature of developed countries with large middle class, only very rich or very poor people want to have more kids in such countries.

Israel. https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/why-are-there-so-m...

Is that a trend or a blip?

it seems consistent and steady for a few decades (consistently high, not growing), but it's a small country that developed under very special conditions

That special condition being a decent size population of Haredi Jews and Muslims who have much higher fertility rates than other groups.

Probably create a culture that promotes family values, makes housing, food and healtcare affordable, and denounces individualism and consumerism. Something that won't be very popular with modern audiences.

No, we have those and they also have low birth rates. It doesn't appear to work. It's like how the countries with the least sexism have even fewer women in STEM.

Can you give me some examples of where we already have this?

Finland? Japan?

South Korea but they're pretty consumerist.

Doesn’t Japan check most of those boxes?

Japan already does a lot of that. Housing, food, and healthcare are not only affordable but taken for granted by most people.

Individualism is a problem but the culture as a whole is not very individualistic.

Is housing in Japan affordable? From what I have heard, it might be OK outside major cities, but the most desirable jobs seem to be overwhelmingly centralized in those cities.

Tokyo, the most popular city, has decent relatively affordable housing. But you have to make some sacrifices on size, and at the very low end, lifestyle (you might have to go to the bath house for showers).

A 60m^2 apartment just around the periferies of the center of tokyo (I'm talking 10 minute train to Shinjuku) costs about 700k in dollar terms[0] if you want to buy it, and between 1500 to 2000 per month if you want to rent it.

Move further away from the center, and the cost drops dramatically. A house near a station that's 30 minutes from Shinjuku the same size above costs half the price (~350k).

[0] If you think about a 100 Japanese Yen as 1 "Japanese Dollar". It's not equivalent to 1 US dollar, but if you adjust for typical salaries and cost of living it comes out about the same, when you are considering the price of housing, etc.

I’m sorry but when visiting Japan and landing in Tokyo sort of late in the evening I was shocked that people actually fall asleep on the subway and fall down, and this is from overworking. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes.

Then late at night, scores of young men dressed in suits were playing arcade games.

I’ve also heard about those that just give up and live in a room in their parents house.

Japanese shops also have the weirdest assortment of products ever.

This might come off as ignorant as I’ve obviously not experienced the ‘real japan’ but I’m not sure this would be the case if what I mentioned would be a fundamental part of the culture.

Disclaimer: I really enjoyed my time there, espectially out of the big cities and was particularly impressed by the cleanliness and how nice the people were.

When I first visited Japan I went to Akihabara a lot. You can see a lot of "weird" and "only in Japan" things there, but it's not really a good representation of Japanese society. The vast majority of people in Japan don't frequent Akihabara, and many have never even visited it even once.

We discuss this issue a lot, be it about Japan, Korea, Germany or even stretches of the US.

I wonder about a more global perspective on this, and whether it's actually truly a problem in the long run. I assume the unspoken assumption of many who worry about population decline in the developed countries is that it will cause the world to regress in some way (either via instability or without) as the rest pick over the bones and important infrastructure and knowledge get lost.

But must this happen? Can't the developed countries perhaps pass their developed traits on to other up-and-coming countries to also stabilize and then slow their growth, and eventually we arrive at a stable and peaked, or perhaps smaller global pop the planet can actually more easily sustain with a sensible energy mix?

Population decline often seems like a hopeful opportunity to me, if we'd stop obsessing about the fortune and minmax of single nations and start putting humanity first.

>But must this happen? Can't the developed countries perhaps pass their developed traits on to other up-and-coming countries to also stabilize and then slow their growth, and eventually we arrive at a stable and peaked, or perhaps smaller global pop the planet can actually more easily sustain with a sensible energy mix?

Not if you promise the productivity of people in future generations to the current generation, but then find out the productivity of people in future generations falls short (perhaps due to insufficient people).

This isn't just a Japan problem...this is a worldwide problem. Testosterone/sperm levels are declining everywhere (and not just in humans).

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/health/news/a47476/dog-spe...

https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/health/sperm-counts-decline-d...

Human birth rates aren't declining because men are infertile now. You got millions of those things and you only need one of them to make it.

Take a zinc pill if you care.

This is like saying you only need one particle in the accelerator.

As Wheeler considered, you need only one electron.

what evidence do you have that population decline has anything to do with T levels? it's a pretty well known and established phenomenon that as societies modernize, people choose to have less children. I have not seen evidence to suggest the same amount of people are trying to have children and just can't (especially as fertility technology becomes more accessible)

I think focusing on birth rates puts attention on the wrong thing when it comes to talking about Japan or other post-industrialized countries. Even the replacement birth rate (i.e. keeping the current population) is at best just-barely sustainable from an environmental and quality of life perspective. Having too many retirees is indeed an issue, so I think the solution is to have fewer retirees. Realistically, a good amount of people could work well past the typical pension age without much of a sweat. They may not want to, but the cold fiscal reality is what it is.

I don't really understand why is declining population problem in any country and needs some solution. If you have properly set pension system population decline is completely irrelevant and beneficial for everyone.

A significant part of economic growth is the assumption that there will be more consumers tomorrow. If that goes, general growth goes, and with it the investments that usually fuel retirement

> If you have properly set pension system

In large parts of Western Europe, at least, these systems were robbed and then slaughtered in the 90s.

You can't have a proper pension system if you don't have enough young and middle-aged workers to pay for it, and to work all the jobs necessary to keep a society running.

But you're allowed to invest worldwide, and across the whole world the population is still growing.

you can, you can have your pension in savings investments without anyone's else financial contribution

it's just that most of the world is using archaic thorough/continuous model for pension system which is basically pyramid scheme everyone would avoid if it were used in any other area, but somehow is acceptable for pensions

if you really worry about pensions, you could start with children contributing to their parents pension and nobody contributing to childless people, that should solve declining population very fast, your can combine it with raising retirement age and raising fees everyone pays towards their own retirement

On a national scale, private retirement savings are not that different from pensions. Both are based on tokens that entitle you to some fraction of the economic output of those who do productive work. The value of a token depends on the total number of tokens, the size of the real economy, and the fraction of value the people doing productive work are willing to pay as taxes to the government and the capitalists.

Investing internationally changes some things. Retirees bring in money from abroad, but that does not increase domestic production. Prices will go up, as there is more money competing for the same goods and services. The people doing productive work will want more money for their services. Imports will be relatively cheaper, but the economy suffers, because the exports will be less competitive due to higher wages.

Saving for retirement is rational for any individual if the demographic structure cannot support the pension system. But while anyone can do it successfully, it's not possible for everyone at the same time.

> you can have your pension in savings investments without anyone's else financial contribution

Those investments still need workers to work in the underlying companies, and that doesn't count products that don't usually get covered by pension income e.g. healthcare. Those investments _will_ go into terminal decline if the labour and demand provided by the non-retired starts collapsing.

That just means old people have to work until they die. Problem solved.

Pension is a privilege I doubt I’ll get to enjoy, but that’s ok. I’m glad my parents, and maybe my children will.

In human societies younger working people take care of elderly people who can’t work. Financial systems can’t change that fundamental dynamic, it can only shift things around. You can’t eat stocks. They are just an earmark on the productive capacity of the working generation.

>If you have properly set pension system population decline is completely irrelevant and beneficial for everyone.

excuse me? pensions need a robust young population to work. otherwise who is going to be providing all those goods and services the pensioners want to pay for?

exactly, you can have all the paper money in the world, if there's no actual human beings to do the work, the money is useless.

declining population doesn't mean there will be no young people at all, just slow decline with less and less people including less old people not replaced by anyone

pensions don't need young population at all, you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension

I think the terminology you are using might be confusing to some. If I am correct based on your adjacent comments, what you mean by “pension” is the societal agreement to provide for older/disabled people from taxes.

If so, then yes, getting rid of that societal agreement would solve the problem of decreasing productivity.

yes, only you should be contributing towards your own pension without state (financial) assistance, it should be your savings/investment pension account

your kids can help you voluntarily without any system involved

if you didn't work/save and don't have kids them you can get some basic support same as people in productive age get, but it's not really enough even to survive

>you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension

No, that won't work. Money is only worth as much as the goods and services it will pay for, and those goods and services have to be provided by the labour of the working young. If there aren't enough young people to meet that demand for labour, prices will rise, and the purchasing power of those pensions will evaporate.

(This is why the "triple lock" and other such schemes are so evil; by pegging state pensions to inflation, they unfairly lock in the purchasing power of a lucky generation, in defiance of all economic logic.)

Wait.

It is my perpetual guess that evolutionary pressure alone will be sufficient in the long run. Our society is now strongly selecting for parents who want kids. That choice has only been a choice for a few generations.

Ten generations from now, I think there will be a much larger fraction of the human population who strongly prioritize having kids.

Not sure I agree. I don't think there are selection pressures on humans any more.

I come from an extremely long line of organisms that had offspring. In fact, it goes back to the beginning of life forms that could sexually reproduce. Are you saying that many of my sentient ancestors who understood where babies came from didn't actually want kids? It's possible I suppose. But I think my reasons for not wanting kids are less to do with my DNA and more to do with experiences I had during my life.

Also, if you're taking about modern changes and their effects on human behavior, what traits do paid sperm donation / surrogacy select for?

Maybe the concept of having that choice is new, but lots of people technically have the choice but don't "know it". They follow cultural norms. All of their friends have babies, so they have babies. Has something happened to the DNA of all these Japanese people who don't want kids? Or is it a cultural shift? I'm betting on the latter.

the only question is, does "wanting kids" get passed down or needs to be re-acquired every time

It might be self-balancing?

I agree, but I fear that might involve selecting for some undesirable traits.

It seems that many people today who never have kids do so for a good reason, such as unstable personal economy, not owning their home, not knowing as much as possible that their future children will have good lives.

The people that continue to have kids today are often the overly religious, the financially or generally irresponsible who lack self awareness, or just plain stupid people. These are not traits we want to evolutionarily select for. See the movie Idiocracy for an example.

Those were arguably the same people having kids in the 1500’s. We’ll just go through another bit of a dark she and bounce back.

When you can't afford getting a house/apartment big enough to have kids comfortably, and the job eats most of your life getting kids just looks like massive problem.

So fixing that would be a good start.

Nothing (that aligns with classically liberal values). Offering child rearing incentives like free childcare, education, outright money, etc does not seem to work, such as in the Nordic countries. People who grow and experience wealth simply don't want to have kids.

If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone. But your country's economy would suffer over and above the slowed birth rate you'd otherwise have.

In the future though, with artificial wombs, I'd imagine we'd go through a Brave New World type scenario where the government grows children themselves (and maybe has the bright idea to stratify the children's gender, race and intellectual capacity as well, but the latter is unlikely if we have AI and robots that do the jobs instead of needing perpetually content Street cleaners).

>you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, and raise religiosity.

The important part of this is making sure women lose their agency over having children by both removing access to effective contraception and their financial independence.

>Offering child rearing incentives like free childcare, education, outright money, etc does not seem to work, such as in the Nordic countries. People who grow and experience wealth simply don't want to have kids.

Pay large sums of money to promising young intelligent couple to have kids. (and no, the govt should not do it)

That still doesn't work unless the sum of money is quite large, over and above the cost of raising the child. And even then, there are many wealthy families, millionaires and billionaires, who still don't have kids. Having children is simply not as elastic of a good as people imagine it to be.

>That still doesn't work unless the sum of money is quite large

Yes it has to be large (several millions), enough so that the couple never have to work again for their entire lives. I would add a whole bunch of other things, ( like delegating the bulk of childcare to somebody else, with a couple only overseen what care is being taken) but it's a good start.

My larger point is that this is not exactly the unsolvable really hard technical problem.

In terms of human assets intelligent people and their offspring are the most important assets that society can have. ( agreed this has negative connotations of eugenics, but the overall concept is sound IMHO)

> If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone.

I think it is simpler than that: abolish any state-sponsored retirement plans. People used to have a lot of children so that someone could take care of them in their old age. Now that you have retirement savings you have no need for kids anymore.

They already got rid of private pensions and social security isn’t that livable on alone.

All 1st world countries have a stagnant fertility rate, some just make up for it with immigration. In fact global population is projected to stagnate in 100 years.

Why would you want to pump birth rates up?

Sharia, coverture et al.

For Japan, one practical thing would be the wider availability and acceptance of epidural anesthesia. Only ~5% use it here vs. 60+% in USA.

It couldn't hurt (pun intended). The problem is that insurance doesn't cover it for some bizarre reason. And some people seem indoctrinated to believe that they shouldn't avoid the pain of childbirth.

Hungary has a plan. Given that one of the big problems with large families is their affordability, this could work: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/have-four-or-more-babies-in-...

They ought to embrace one of a myriad of cultures and belief systems that have historically proven to have proper birth rates. Instead, most modern 'developed' countries are running large-scale social experiments with never-before-tried social policies.

Counter to the trend of comments here, I found the article uninsightful and without focus. He has vague gripes, but no apparent understanding of (or empathy for) Japan's social drivers. It's hard to respond to the article as a whole, so I'll just focus on one misconception, about "stagnant" living standards.

My Japan was Tokyo and Kanagawa of the 1980s-90s. It was brilliant and daring. It was the future. It was darn expensive. I was both in awe and angered by it, because life there was terribly unfair for the Japanese. Quality of life for individuals was always sacrificed for the good of the state and big companies. All of the wonderful things you hear about 1980s Japan were in the public space. In the private space, life was pretty miserable, as in nearly-3rd-world-slum level of miserable. Housing, though expensive, was shoddy and uncomfortable. Workers suffered long hours and harsh management. Prices for relatively poor quality consumer goods were kept high to support lower prices for higher quality exported goods. Dental care was abysmal quality. I could go on.

Private life in Japan today is hardly recognizable. My impression is that quality of daily life is now equivalent to the nicer Western countries. I think this is primarily due to changing social attitudes over the 1990s. Japanese traveled a lot and saw how much better life was in other countries, and decided to demand the same of life at home.

I really miss 1980s Japan (it was great for me), but life for the average person there is vastly better now than it was then.

This article is well-written and really paints a broad picture in the beginning so well. I'd be curious to hear from those living in Japan what they think.

As a foreigner living in Japan (similar situation to the author), this article hits the nail on the head.

>This article is well-written

Considering the bleedingly obvious political slant fueled by feel-goodism, especially towards the end of the article: No. This is just another make-readers-angry hit piece.

Among many egregious errors and ignorances: No, the LDP has not "ruled ever since". There have been a number of times the LDP was not in power, including most recently when the Fukushima #1 power plant underwent a meltdown because the Democrat Party (not to be confused with the LDP) government at the time was utterly inept.

Rivers are "walled with grey concrete" because to not do so means the rivers flood uncontrolled during the rainy seasons leading to washed out towns and villages which fucking nobody reasonable wants. The coasts are "blighted by tetra pods" because high tides, waves, and fucking tsunamis are commonplace.

Japan absolutely faces many big problems as it moves forward, but this article serves to help precisely nothing. The author might as well have wasted his 10 years in Japan if this is truly all he could write.

> make-readers-angry

I read it and did not get angry.

> There have been a number of times the LDP was not in power

The LDP has been in power since 1955, except for two periods (1993-94 and 2009-12). That's roughly 61/67 years.

> rivers flood uncontrolled during the rainy seasons

Not all rivers flood, but almost all have been lined with concrete.

OP's article definitely reminds me of some of Alex Kerr's writing (a good interview at https://www.kyotojournal.org/kyoto-interview/concretizing-th...). He defined some of the issues facing Japan, including the concretization of coasts and waterways.

I'm not surprised that wage growth in Japan stagnated considering the limited size of the domestic market, lack of English proficiency and little import of foreign talent via immigration.

Regarding fertility rate, I don't know the projections for the younger generation, but 27% of 50 year old women here have never had children. It's hard to convince the remaining women and their partners to make big sacrifices to have three or more kids in order to make up for the perceived freeloaders (the never-married ~28% of men and ~18% of women that have no interest in each other).

Without the government somehow brainwashing the population, any real solution would likely result in opposition from large parts of society, so the can gets kicked down the road...

One thing that I can comment on is that Japan has drastically changed its immigration policies and opened its doors to workers from overseas. A decade or so so ago you needed to have lived in the country for more than ten years to gain permanent residence, but now you can get it in as little as 3 years. English is much more common especially in major cities, partly thanks to the preparation for the Tokyo Olympics. Support for foreigners living there has increased likewise. But yes, still a long way to go until you see immigrants take on top roles in major corporations or even the government.

>but now you can get it in as little as 3 years.

Incorrect: it's 1 year if you score 80 points on the point list for the HSP visa, and 3 years if you score 70 points.

As far as I can tell, Japan has the easiest and most permissive immigration policies among developed nations, bar none. Compare with the "pro-immigration" US where there's strict limits on worker visas, H1-B holders have to leave the country very quickly (a week?) if they lose their job and can't find a new sponsor fast, there's strict limits on green cards (PR) with a lottery of all things, etc.

I've been living in Tokyo for many years, and this article is completely spot on.

And no it is not "the same in many other countries" like some HN comments would like you to believe.

The article could do with a bit about the Plaza Accord, the US assault on the Japanese chip sector or something about the short stint where LDP was not in power and instead Japan was ruled by party that had promised to close US bases on Okinawa.

"your new home is worth less than what you paid for it and after you've finished paying off your mortgage in 40 years, it is worth almost nothing"

Isn't this a good thing?

Yeah, my first thought on the article opening with that was “wow, exactly how it should work then?”

I’ve always found the idea of property as an investment to be deeply entitled. IMO there is no morally justifiable reason why the price of housing in many western nations has skyrocketed over the past several decades, we’ve just artificially constrained supply by failing to build enough houses to match demand. Now more than ever it’s having a crippling effect on so many folks’ ability to lead a comfortable and happy life.

Perhaps we should just let people who want to build a house for their family go and do so. Have you ever attempted such a thing? In the past, it was easy. You bought wood and some nails and started. Today, it involves more trips to city hall than the hardware store, unfortunately.

Not only it's a good thing, but it's bad faith anyway because it's not telling the whole story.

Houses are seen as pretty-much worthless overall, and many people would decide to destroy and build a new house rather than fix and maintain a 20 years-old one. There are many reasons to this, both cultural and practical.

The good consequence is that the prices here are relatively stable and does not inflate like in the west. It is possible to buy an individual house in Tokyo for the average resident, you don't need to be rich.

But the elephant in the room that the article forgets to tell is that while houses become worthless quickly, land does not. When you buy a property, about 80% of it's price is the value of the land itself, not the house. And while it can fluctuate depending on the area and it's surroundings, it does not degrade much over time.

The other factor is that old houses are downright unsafe. This is a place that regularly experiences earthquakes, sometimes big ones, and construction standards have improved over time after learning lessons from bad earthquakes and with improved technology. So no one wants to live in a 50-year-old building that's likely to collapse when the next big earthquake happens if they can help it, and so buildings tend to be demolished more frequently and replaced with newer ones.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Nikkei 225 (Japan's equivalent to the S&P500) hasn't recovered since the crash of 89: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EN225/. Which I think is interesting comparatively, because the S&P/DOW has had decently substantial downturns multiple times, but always recovered++ historically.

I think you'd come out ahead reinvesting dividends (play with a calculator like https://dqydj.com/nikkei-return-calculator/), but yeah, the returns are abysmal even accounting for that. They've had low to no inflation for decades but even the nominal returns aren't good. I am not sure how the returns look if you account for cost averaging vs. lump sum investing.

Editorial opinion regarding "whys" for low-birth rates in Japan and what we'd typically call "household formation" in the United States:

Japan had a giant property bubble and economic collapse a few decades ago, creating a "lost generation." Off-topic, it is an interesting way to see aspects of America's future with many common factors.

Socially: From the Japanese men side the picture, there are many news stories of "herbivore men" that are not initiating or engaging women for dating, sex, etc. Women that can afford to do so, end up hiring male "hosts" at host bars for their (non-sexual) social company.

Culturally: Many Japanese women would prefer to be full-time parents and homemakers, exiting the workforce after having children. This requires a husband/partner with stable employment and income. Many Japanese women would also prefer partners to be at home more often than the well-known grueling "salaryman" experience in Japanese corporate business culture.

Economically: Japan recently reported record inflation levels over several decades where wages have not kept up. In some cases companies will be raising salary levels in response, but the vast majority of people working are not in roles or at companies to see this. The minimum wage level in Tokyo is approximately 1,070 yen/hr or around $8.25 USD/hr. Basic hourly wages at a common ramen or gyu-don type restaurant in Tokyo pay around 1,200 yen/hr. The impact of the lot generation weighs in heavily here.

Demographically: If you walk around the streets of Tokyo, you'll probably observe that there are many people of older age working simple jobs marshaling car traffic from garages, street crossings, street/utility maintenance, and cleaning sidewalks, streets, train stations. There often appears to be many more people working than the minimum needed. Automation technology in areas, such as food production, end ip creating a surplus of labor elsewhere.

TL;DR: Dating as a whole is occurring less often between Japanese men and women. Economically, traditional households are not forming because people cannot afford to support the traditionally desired lifestyle where Japanese women become full-time parents and homemakers after parenthood.

>Many Japanese women would prefer to be full-time parents and homemakers, exiting the workforce after having children.

This also plays a significant negative role in women workforce share.

In Japan, it is customary for full-time employees to work their entire career through retirement at a single company. Companies in turn invest in their employees, expecting them to return that investment over the coming 50~60 years. Men are generally fine with this arrangement, even today, but this throws a spanner when it comes to women.

As far as companies are concerned, if a woman is going to leave in less than 10 years, maybe even just a few years, after the company invested time and resources training them, then they would rather hire a man who will stay with them for his entire career.

So this results in two things: Women continue to form a small minority of the workforce, and the women who do manage to stay are either single or otherwise managed to find a precarious balance between work and private life.

Maybe Japan needs working reform, but working women aren't entirely compatible with being a good Japanese housewife.

> it is customary for full-time employees to work their entire career through retirement at a single company

This has never been universally true, and today it is less common than ever. According to the Japan times, 8.8% of Japanese companies offer lifetime employment.

>TL;DR: Dating as a whole is occurring less often between Japanese men and women. Economically, traditional households are not forming because people cannot afford to support the traditionally desired lifestyle where Japanese women become full-time parents and homemakers after parenthood.

I hate resorting to stereotypes, but it looks like that after a certain age(I don't want to use the magic word boom*r), people are completely blind to any argument that takes in account the most obvious reason for which people behave like they behave: their economic condition.

People can't afford to raise a traditional family even with well paid jobs? This is irrelevant, the main reason people are not raising families the old way is because of tiktok and avocado toasts.

Clarification: women who want a deadbeat guy that will pimp them out if he can (but looks like a Final Fantasy character) go to host clubs

The majority of women that frequent host bars are hostesses themselves. It's an expensive hobby and not something most women would choose over just making the approach to talk to a guy or just hang out with their friends or some kind of social club.

Japan is superior in almost every way compared to most western countries.

I also wish for an ethnostate.

Sounds like you have never been to Japan.

Ah yes, the plutocracy with a Minister of Cyber Security with 0 knowledge on IT. So superior.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026

The Western media loves to nitpick on Japan because it puts us to shame on almost every front. The country is clean, safe, efficient beyond anything the average Joe can imagine. Let me spell it out for you: Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan. The issues the author wrote down pale in comparison to what we're dealing with. I just can't take this kind of criticism seriously with the sheer amount of filth, crime and misery that's part of any major Western city. I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year, the real culture shock was coming back home to what we call normal.

I also spent some time in Japan. I want to push back on this:

- my wife found her job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture, beyond anything I have ever seen in the West

- there is vast discrimination against foreigners in housing and many other aspects, more so than in most Western countries

- like the author mentioned, students in Japan (I taught at a university) were less worldly and less knowledgeable about things going on outside Japan, extending into even their direct professional activities

- there is an abnormal amount of nepotism. It is incredibly difficult to start your own business without connections (there is basically no startup economy) and it is equally hard to advance in a large company without being related to someone important

What are you pushing back on exactly? These problems are extremely minor compared to the rate of crime and poverty in American cities.

Treating half the population as undeserving of a career is "extremely minor"?

I am not convinced that finding "job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture" is the same as "treating half the population as undeserving of a career".

In what way are they different?

It seems like a different description of the same thing.

One is hyperbolic. One can believe that there is some bias against women without believing that they are treated as undeserving of having a career.

Ok, I read the description as quite literal not hyperbolic.

And you think they are the same? How much experience do you have with the Japanese job market?

I am not a female in the Japanese job market, but I do have first hand accounts from them.

Are you a woman in the Japanese job market?

I am not a woman in the Japanese job market. I am merely a man trying to understand how "job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture" is the same as "treating half the population as undeserving of a career". I see "job opportunities and career growth severely limited" for women in many industries in the United States and yet it would be silly to say that many think they are "undeserving of a career".

I am skeptical of some claims made about specific industries and cultures being much worse than others.

The word choice may be the same, but Japan is significantly more extreme than the US.

In 2018 21.8% of Medical doctors in Japan where women vs 36.6% in the US and 48.6% in the UK. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

You can find more and less extreme examples in various industries, but there’s a real difference between the two counties.

Does this existence of fewer women in a job mean that they are kept out by those who think them “undeserving of a career”? Only 4% of sewage plant operators are female. Is that because they are kept out of the industry?

Deserving of a career here implies the career is desirable.

So, I understand if reality makes you uncomfortable but reality doesn’t care.

The reality of the situation has not caused me any discomfort.

I remain unconvinced that the two phrases are descriptions of the same thing.

Both phrases where used to describe the same situation. So they quite literally where describing the same thing.

The two phrases were used by two different commenters. I questioned that one was equal to the other. I still do.

Do you honestly think they aren’t both describing the job situation in Japan as it applies to women from the poster’s perspective?

Because I can only assume you’re playing pretend at this point.

I take offense at your assumption. I have sincerely written what I think. You have implied that you can read my mind and that I am "uncomfortable" or "playing pretend".

User SoylentOrange wrote that his wife "found her job opportunities and career growth severely limited by the heavily patriarchal culture." That seems a very believable assertion to me, given what I have read about Japanese culture and seen in many industries outside of tech in Western cultures.

User lozenge rephrased that as, "treating half the population as undeserving of a career".

I have no idea if lozenge has any experience with Japanese culture. I read his statement as a summary of what SoylentOrange wrote.

I remain unconvinced that the median Japanese man thinks that women are undeserving of a career. I welcome those with first hand experience to share more than anecdotes to convince me.

To be accused of "playing pretend" when questioning hyperbole makes me reconsider commenting on HN at all.

Sexism and racism is minor compared to crime and poverty? (Which Japan also has, you just don't see it)

Kinda yes? I’d rather be discriminated (to some degree) than shot dead.

Your chances of being shot outside of an inner city ghetto is so small as to be negligible. You've been brainwashed by sensationalist news. Meanwhile there are places in Japan that won't allow non-Japanese to enter.

I'd say the chances of most people being shot inside an inner city ghetto are also small.

But I'm going to guess those complaining about the risk of being shot dead in an American city are unwilling to say the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment is a factor, or that we simply have too many guns.

The correlation between gun ownership and gun-related homicides (by state) is (weakly) negative.

We are happy to talk about the statistics, they just don't tell the story you want to tell.

You're saying that in states with a higher gun ownership rate, there are few (per capita, I hope you mean) gun related homicides. Specifically comparing US states, not the US to another country.

But 100% of gun related homicide happens with a gun. I had a funny read of your comment, perhaps you think those happen with "borrowed" guns ... If they only owned those guns outright, they could benefit from your statistic.

Sure if guns didn't exist, we wouldn't have gun violence. The question is: given that we have guns, what is the right form of regulation that would lead to better public safety overall? After all, there is meaningful evidence that guns are often used (even just presenting the gun, not actually firing it) for legitimate self-defense purposes.

I said nothing about borrowed guns. To my knowledge, most of those homicides are done with stolen handguns, and are used by people involved in organized crime in the most highly gun-restricted cities in the nation.

By the way, some googling on your claim found this as a first hit.

https://www.newswise.com/politics/gun-ownership-and-homicide...

"... [A] 1-per-cent increase in the rate of ownership is associated with a 1-per-cent increase in the rate of homicide by gun, which is three times higher than the previous studies had estimated,” Chalak explained.

There are lots of studies that come down on both sides of the issue. I'll have to check that one out, but experience suggests this one will have methodological issues.

Asian standard of crime rate is very different from the US...

I used to enjoy the night hanging out with friends or having fun alone in big Chinese cities (Beijing and Shanghai), hopping on public transportation, and having food in narrow streets. Without even the slightest worry of being robbed (but pickpockets do exist). Tokyo and other Japanese cities are supposed to be better.

But during my visit to Chicago and New Haven, I was strongly advised against going out alone (without a car) at night by my landlord.

Due respect, but your landlord was an idiot. It's dark at 4:30PM in Chicago in December. You think the city just shuts down?

Honest question: is it OK if I live near UChicago (visiting) and go out alone by foot at 9-10pm?

I have done for over 20 years. Hyde Park is one of the safer neighborhoods in Chicago.

You should, as in all places, be aware of your surroundings.

> Your chances of being shot outside of an inner city ghetto is so small as to be negligible. You've been brainwashed by sensationalist news.

So have you. Just the word ghetto shows how disconnected you are from reality (sorry) - I haven't heard it in the city for decades. Your chance of getting shot anywhere is very tiny. People live and work, every day, for their entire lives in the highest-crime neighborhoods; almost all of them never get shot. They aren't idiots or monsters; they are normal people. If it was that dangerous, they would find a way to move. You could go there right now and you'd be fine. (And still, too many people are getting shot.)

That just shows what's important to you. Which is not necessarily what's important to others.

There's isn't necessarily more of either poverty or crime in USA cities than rural areas, it's roughly the same on average. (per capita; there are of course more people total in a city than a similarly sized rural area). Googling for cites, I find numbers all over the place.

I don't know how to compare problems between the USA and Japan, or decide what kinds of problems are "worse"... but our misperceptions of the size of various problems based on our "common sense" probably doesn't help.

I also lived for a time in Germany and in Canada. I want to note that West != USA.

These countries are not without their own problems but I see no need to paper over them. Rather, we can be honest about their faults and their positive qualities so we might learn to build a better society or inform others who may want to try living there.

Multi racial/cultural societies have a different set of problems and advantages. Why can't we be more like Japan is because you can't? It would be interesting to see what a modern multi racial/cultural society built under an Asian country would be like. Dubai? UAE? Not really the place for me.

Attributing problems to race is unfounded, a soft racism promoted by the far right (and unwittingly repeated).

This image of US cities is misleading.

American cities I've been in are dyanamic engines of the American economy, filled with culture and life. Crime is low (though shootings are up nationwide, in every kind of place, urban to rural). Poverty is a big problem all over the US.

The strongest evidence is the very high premium people will pay to live in these cities.

As a foreigner that got a rental apartment in Japan I would like to push back on the image that renting is difficult. I didn't have too much problems despite not being able to speak the language. I just looked up properties myself on Suumo (website to find listings) and arranged viewings, and managed to get my top pick. I would say that whatever problems there are in this area are just overshadowed by the fact that in many places in the US there isn't even enough housing.

I really like living in Japan, but the first apartment we tried to get here we got denied because I'm a foreigner. Other than that I can't recall any instances of discrimination (been here ~12 years).

My agent here in Japan told me not to bother with half the listings I showed him since they had racist/foreigner exclusion policies. That was of a few months ago.

It heavily varies on the price you’re willing to pay.

Cheapish appartments will have a ton of specific clauses, including no foreigners in general. Slightly overpriced ones will be more open, and you won’t have issues finding something above 160000 a month.

This is one of the reason why getting a meh paying job just to come to Japan is playing the immigration game in hard mode.

PS: for those shocked by “no foreigners” clauses, you’ll be interested to know that “girls only”, “no pets”, “no music instrument”, “no smoker” are also pretty common clauses, and you’ll also get refused depending on your employer if they don’t look good enough to the eyes of the owner. Lower tier appartments are a wild ride in general.

Can you exclude renters with children in Japan? Curious how far the delta goes between US protected classes wrt housing law and Japan.

At least part of the reason foreigners are excluded is because of flight risk. That being said low income, low rent places always give problems to renters even in America. In America you have to deal with credit checks, application fees that do the discriminating in a legal way. In Japan the average foreigner is actually renting with no credit check or income verification, and many forgo even attempting to learn the language which can make it hard to follow rules.

I would summarize your criticisms as Japan doesn't have Western values and priorities.

I can’t speak to this, but I can say that many of the Japanese-born students I taught expressed many of these same concerns to me. My female students felt discouraged that they would not be as successful as their male peers after graduating university. Many of my brighter students lamented the job culture and the lack of startup chances.

There's probably selection bias in your experience. They may have come here for school because they were among those that disliked their native culture the most. They may have picked up American values and priorities after arrival etc.

This was when I taught in Japan

Or maybe, instead of that, it is inaccurate to dismiss real problems with sexism and gender discrimination as "just cultural differences".

> There's probably selection bias in your experience.

Is there any argument at all that would convince you? A foreigner is unconvincing because he/she is a foreigner, and locals are unconvincing because of selection bias. So what would convince you?

I say this as a Japanophile myself, but a lot of male westerners experience have a very rose tinted glasses view of visiting the country.

People of Japanese descent, especially women, will give you a litany of reasons they left... most around the rigid work culture, sexism, bureaucracy, limited opportunities, etc.

When a white male westerner visits, the only discrimination we experience is generally in the form of positive discrimination. Talk to a female of southeast asian or mainland Chinese descent how they experience Japan and you'll get quite a different story.

GP says: > I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year, the real culture shock was coming back home to what we call normal.

I think that's really the crux of it - as a place to visit, or even live for a relatively short period of time (particularly if you're a man), it is vastly superior to most Western countries in a whole host of ways.

That is, of course, different than saying it's a place to make your life and career or that the country as a whole is moving in a positive direction. Spending a short time (even a year) in a place, particularly as an outsider, only lets you see the superficial parts of that place. Is it clean? Is it safe? Is the cost of living reasonable? Do people treat you well in day-to-day interactions? These are all important, but the answers can also all be great while the underlying political and social systems and outdated, patriarchal and oppressive to many.

Right, I spent a few years learning the language and really love the people/culture/food/etc. However, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that the only way I would ever want to work there was as an expat for a US company.

Some of the local customs carry over to the firms operating US offices. My friends wife, who had come over to US 10 years ago, told us some crazy stories about working for Japanese companies even in the US office, if it was all Japanese ex-pats.

For example, being given a written reprimand for not using the proper title for the level of boss she addressed in an email once. In English, it would be like if your bosses boss was John Smith, SVP and you failed to address him precisely as "SVP Smith" 100.0% of the time.

Or a reprimand / told to cover up because of the straps on her top not conforming to their office dress code. She was a woman who dressed very modestly, so it wasn't her, it was them. This was as recent as 4 years ago.

You may not realize it, but there’s a strong selection bias at work here. If you ask Japanese women living in foreign countries most of them will say they prefer it there. But if you ask Japanese women in Japan (i.e. the vast majority), most would never consider moving

Agreed this is true.

Asking citizens if they believe there are social problems so bad that they want to leave also has selection bias, and lots of it. I would hazard a guess that most people anywhere are not considering leaving, are not prepared to, and can't fairly speak to the merits of one place vs another, for lots of reasons such as national pride, friends and family, and language and cultural familiarity.

I don't see your comment as push back to OP's comment, because you are both right. On the one hand Japan is very safe, low poverty levels, etc like OP said. On the other hand there are all the issues you described.

From what I gather reading this and previous articles on HN is Japan is either great or terrible depending on what you want to do. If you want to explore another culture, and really experience something different than the west than Japan is probably the best place you can go for that experience. On the other hand if you're trying to start a company, move up the corporate ladder, etc, then the US is going to be a much better place for you than Japan.

> - like the author mentioned, students in Japan (I taught at a university) were less worldly and less knowledgeable about things going on outside Japan, extending into even their direct professional activities

While university may be different, there is a non-small portion of the US that knows little outside their own community/state/maybe country.

There is one exception to the foreigner comment though. Blonde / white foreigners usually have an advantage, even over native Japanese people since the Eurocentric beauty standard is much in play there. You can see evidence of this in their modeling industry where high paying modeling gigs go to those who are Caucasian or half Caucasian.

Source: Interview with a model in Japan (https://youtu.be/VEubSC2CidA?t=157)

That’s true in certain industries like modeling, but not others, even if you’re a white native Japanese. Often, these types struggle to ever be fully accepted into society. They’re seen as outsiders and, at best, seen as “cool” in an exotic way.

Is it Japan's duty to sacrifice its standard of living and culture to make it more comfortable for you, or should they be seeking out the best life for their own people first?

The best life for whom exactly? If Japanese youth leave and don’t want to live in rural communities, if they don’t want to raise families, if their leading cause of death is suicide, then the country does not ‘seek out the best life for them’.

1) Whether you're White or not, and whether the destination is filled with People of Color or not, isn't it a little entitled for anybody to go to another country and agitate against cultural standards that don't align perfectly with yours?

2) Regardless of whether you or Japanese know what's in their own best interest, can you please answer my general question. Is it Japan's duty to try and make life better for themselves first, or for you first? Can we acknowledge that it's any country's first duty to try and seek out the best possible lives for their own people first?

I believe the entitlement is held by those who determine and control what their society should be, when their next generation are voting with their actions that they don’t want it.

It’s entitled to say those people are ‘Japan’ and the other people there, who want change are not.

1) Doesn't Japan have some kind of democratic system where they can cast their vote and make their choices about the direction of their society in a more concrete form than your arbitrary assumption about meaning of the next generation's actions?

2) The reasons for anything large on a societal level usually have more than one nuanced answer, but I'd like to try and figure out your meaning here. What significant evidence exists that certain things you listed such as Japanese youth not wanting to live in rural areas or youth not making as many babies as previous generations has anything to do with their treatment of foreigners? I don't really see a direct and obvious connection, and in fact these trends seem fairly common in Western youth (with a radically different inclusive culture) as well.

The evidence for dissatisfaction is in the article and in suicide stats found online. The issue I’m raising is that this indicates their democracy does not represent the needs of all its people.

I would argue, this is why their economy has stalled relatively, since the 90s.

Well, the same kind of cultural effects among the young exist in the Western world (the youth want to live in cities, not reproducing as much, problems with suicides, etc) and these are countries that are open and welcoming to foreigners and try and respect everybody of every race/gender/etc.

Therefore, I'm not seeing a strong case for Japan's problems being caused by them not being welcoming to foreigners because other countries are welcoming to foreigners and still have these problems in greater number today.

The suicide rate in the US is significantly higher. Japan's isn't that high compared to other peer nations.

In my experience, the discrimination against foreigners regarding housing is much deserved. I've rented out my condo in Japan to Japanese people for years, and my tenants have, without exception, kept the place clean and in excellent condition. All I have to do between tenants is clean a little. Other than that, my condo still looks the same as it always has. Contrast that with my rental property in the US, which most renters turn into a shit hole that has to be renovated between tenants. I always give deposits back in Japan. I rarely can in the US.

Also, I went into an apartment that had been rented by college-aged Americans in Chiba, Japan once. There were hundreds of cockroaches smashed into the carpet, one room was completely covered in black mold, the shoji doors had holes punched through them. It was embarrassing. This wasn't the only time I've seen this either.

In my opinion, the best way to overcome housing discrimination in Japan would be for foreigners to have some pride and treat other people's property with respect.

I doubt it puts us to shame on how failure is dealt with within Japanese culture.

Or how kids from gaijins keep being one for their whole life, even if born and raised in Japan.

Or work to death culture.

> Or work to death culture.

Which leads to the freeta era post bubble economy for so any who didn't want the fate of a salaryman, and the subsequent population collapse and herbivore men.

Not exactly what I'd all a stellar record, when the ethnicity itself is at risk of phasing itself out due to the 'great society they've created. Im bi fan of Japanese culture, but tier society is nearly dystopic because of the social pressures, forced suppression, and ambivalence (if not outright xenophobia) towards anything they see as a threat to the established order of things: be it work related or otherwise.

Still, it's quite a rich culture with lots of to offer to the modern World, but I fear South Korea has surpassed them in everything they resoundingly dominated in the 90s.

You write this while in most Western countries..

..many people who fail (lose a job, divorce, illness, accident) become drug addicted, homeless, mentally ill and are left to their own devices.

..people are still referred to as “Black Americans” and “Asian Americans” instead of just “Americans” (similar in other countries) although they have lived there for generations, while there simply aren’t many non-Asian looking foreigners living in Japan for a long time.

..a barrage of articles on this site reports tens of thousands of workers being laid off, who worked hard and still got no job security.

I give Japan its fair share of criticism, but your take is easily dismissed as naive.

Mixing US culture with Western.

Nope, I explicitly qualified my statements. I’m sorry you expected a full list.

For another example, if you want to see drug addicted or mentally ill but untended to people then visit the train station of any major city in Germany.

I fail to see how listing every single negative issue from every Western country, while ignoring the negatives of Japanese society, and worshipping their positives, puts us to shame.

> ..people are still referred to as “Black Americans” and “Asian Americans” instead of just “Americans” (similar in other countries) although they have lived there for generations, while there simply aren’t many non-Asian looking foreigners living in Japan for a long time.

Why is this listed as a fault (or even listed under “most Western countries”)?

This is proud component of American culture. You’re more often to find people embrace this than see it is a con.

You'll find that people in the West have an unfounded arrogance about the QoL in Western countries (by which I mean primarily the Anglo-Saxon world along with some "white" European countries).

Many countries have better QoL than the West, because it turns out crime and filth don't have to be normal nor accepted. Specifically in the case of Japan, you'll also find that people are much better behaved in general.

Do you mean northern European? Germanic? Scandinavian? What on earth does white mean here?

So well behaved that trains have women-only cars because of how prevalent sexual assault is.

And creep shots are so prevalent cameras have legally mandated shutter sounds.

> legally mandated

It’s not.

A discussion of the details: https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_...

I commuted for a few years in Paris, and have seen a few dozens fist fights between passengers, sometimes at rush hour. And people get their purse mugged in the car behind, homeless shitting in the back of the car, super high guy with completely empty eyes playing with a knife while sitting next to the door.

It was a fucking circus. Having a “women only” car at rush hour to deescalate tensions is such a minor peeve in comparison.

Having a “women only” car shows there are deep societal issues that are normalized due to the country’s ultra patriarchal ways. A normal solution would be to prosecute the perpetrators but Japan doesn’t take women seriously. A “women only” car does not at all address the cultural problem of men thinking it’s okay to commit sexual assault.

I get your point, but having a “women only” car (which is actually a “women and kids and elderly and disabled people only”, from 7h to 10h in the morning) is a lower hurdle than what people imagine.

It is not the high moral ground solution, and two cars among 20 isn’t a big change either, but that’s the most pragmatic solution to this. Catching some random guy during rush hours when there’s a train every 4 min and thousands of people get in and out is more of a logistical nightmare than how you make it sound like.

Intentional or accidental groping also happens in France for instance, and the best you’ll get will be a passenger fight, no cops nor rail staff coming in to do anything, while the other passengers shout insanities at the fighters because the train is already too fucking late (actually had that once on the train I was riding). The equivalent situation is taken way more seriously in Japan[0].

Patriarchy is strong either way, but I’d be looking at school uniforms more than rush hour arrangements if we want to dig on the topic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Just_Didn't_Do_It

Talking about "Western" as one here is meaningless. In Norway it was for a long time common to use the term "American conditions" as a derogatory way to dismiss policy proposals seen as US inspired, and Texas is used as a term for crazy / out of control. Many western countries are as different from each other as from Japan.

> I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year

The people that are gushing the most about Japan, ready to defend its honour on every corner of the Internet, are those that don't have much experience living there. Says it all, really.

It's such a common phenomenon these people even have a slightly derogatory nickname. Also:

> Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan

I'd really like to know how many Western countries have you lived in for at least a year.

I've lived in three and find it amusing how there's two camps arguing with a straight face as if they could generalize anecdotes/conclusions about large amorphous entities. Both Norway and Venezuela are western countries. Tokyo is very different from rural Hokkaido. San Francisco is very different from New Orleans.

The West doesn’t really understand Japan - and never has, going back to the Meiji era - because the Japanese managed to “modernize” without entirely “Westernizing.” To our Enlightenment-derived idea of Progress, these are not two separate things, so we become very confused when a place is futuristic technologically but “behind” culturally, in terms of our own Western cultural history.

What do you mean by "Westernize" in this context? Are you sure that Japan hasn't westernized (assuming no goalpost moving) perhaps just expressed differently?

Well I said “Westernized entirely,” implying that there is some level of Westernization.

I am using this to mean an adoption of Western social and political values: universalist democracy, secularism, individualism, the unimportance of public space being sacred or imposing restrictions upon behavior, “the workplace is more important than the home,” and a million other things. Japan has some degree of these things, but there is a pretty huge difference between the average Japanese city and the average Western one.

I think a lot of those differences and distinctions are less pronounced once you get outside of the Anglosphere but still "western" - a lot of them just have to do with bad urban planning and architecture. The continent probably sits in the middle there w.r.t public spaces.

But based off of what you said, and I of course have never lived in Japan, is there really much difference in practical, day-to-day activities in terms of being westernized? For example, you mentioned "the workplace is more important than the home" and I genuinely wasn't sure if you were talking about America or Japan.

Of course there are differences in government, but are the differences more pronounced with England's style of government versus Switzerland, or are there more differences between France and Japan? Nevermind the Big Tent approach of the American 2-party state.

Genuinely curious to hear your thoughts. I know what you're getting at, I guess I wonder if it's a meaningful distinction w.r.t at what point does one country become roughly westernized? Is Brasil westernized? Mexico?

There are some pretty distinct cultural differences between Western and Eastern cultures, far too many and far too nuanced for me to explain in a brief HN comment. We’re talking thousands of years of culture, language, history, etc.

As my original comment was saying, the reason Western people get so confused by Japan is that it is technologically “ahead” in many ways while apparently “behind” culturally, from the Western perspective. This cognitive dissonance is a result of the Progress ideal which merged culture and technology into one entity. This isn’t the case with other countries that are just perceived as being “behind” entirely, technologically and culturally.

But is Japan perceived as being behind culturally? Many would look to something like housing costs in Tokyo, lack of prevalence of firearms, or universal healthcare as progressive values that Japan has that are "ahead" of at least America in (housing costs probably more progressive than the Anglosphere at least and probably the west in general).

I have a hard time reconciling the general nature of your comments w.r.t Japan isn't westernized with the specifics as well. If westernization is mainly about philosophical traditions (secularism, individualism, etc.) I think Japan is certainly less westernized in some ways (think like many attributes that skew in different directions), but if you look at other things, maybe it's not? You could examine attributes such as the tight alliances with the west to how anime characters are represented.

I'm still wondering if what we're talking about here is just a different expression of being "westernized" versus a meaningful difference.

Personally I actually have a view that's moreso that the Anglosphere (US, Canada, Australia, UK, New Zealand) + Japan and perhaps to a lesser extent South Korea are more "westernized" together than say the Anglosphere and Germany and France.

United States is also a exceptional very weird country in western world.

Yea I mostly agree. It’s really hard to compare a lot of countries.

>“the workplace is more important than the home”

Wait, are you saying that this is a western value?

Japan. Land of the overworked Salaryman. Is like the literal embodiment of this.

Actually I meant it as a Western value, in reference to the fact that women in Japan often leave the workforce to focus on the home full-time. In the West, being a stay at home mom is not really acceptable socially, at least in major cities.

It’s definitely complicated though, as the salaryman phenomenon shows. No simple and straightforward answers.

I don't think there's any social judgement for a woman to quit her job and become a stay at home mom. I think it's only less popular in the US due to lack of financial freedom to pull that off.

I do noodle around this thought in my head though that socially accepting women to work ended up just making family lives harder. If take the assumption that corporations aren't generally giving in how they raise salaries and such, it seems like women were onboarded into the workplace but men and women just share the same slice of pie that men had before the change took place. So instead of a man making X$s a year to raise a family, it's just the same 2 * (X$ / 2) and now the kid has to be raised in daycare which I believe is less beneficial than being raised their parents, dad or mom. This is definitely a showerthought and not something I feel strongly for. It's just more of a what-if question.

Modern Japanese society is closer to 1950s America than it is Meiji or Edo Japanese. Occupation had a profound impact on them and still does to this day.

In fact, I’d posit that the reason why the “West” views Japan with such fascination is because it’s looking into an alternate history. “What if the hippies and postmodernists lost in the 1960s?” A lot of the cultural values Japan exhibits can be found in old PSA videos and newsreel footage of 1950s and early 1960s USA. Then they skipped straight into 1980s yuppie consumerism, spedrun straight into a financial crisis and then skipped straight into the smartphone era.

It truly is a different place but not for reasons of deep history (bushido is a 19th century invention, Sushi as we consume it is only as old as modern refrigeration, Tokyo metro used to be a dirty noisy place).

AFAICT, the Hippies lost in America too, or worse: they turned into people who completely supported the values they professed to abhor when they were hippies.