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> I really don't see a way out for Japan that's not immigration. That's a pretty small-minded and dogmatic statement; it basically amounts to "copy US policy,
by DashRattlesnake 10y ago
> I really don't see a way out for Japan that's not immigration.
That's a pretty small-minded and dogmatic statement; it basically amounts to "copy US policy, it's the only way." At some point, someone in the world is going to actually have to solve the problem of stagnant or declining populations, without copping out and just importing new populations from elsewhere.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoWell, that "US way" has worked better than every other developed country in that respect, why not adopt it?
- bionsuba 10y agoWe do not live in a one variable world. You can't ascribe the position of the US solely to its immigration policies. Especially since it's impossible to correlate immigration trends in recent years in the US to economic trends.
- grillvogel 10y agojapanese culture predates "the US way" by thousands of years.
- astrange 10y agoModern Japan was founded in 1868 and then destroyed and rebuilt again in WW2. The people have been there that long, but the country and culture haven't.
- grillvogel 10y agoi dont even know where to begin with how wrong this is. what culture is something like Todai-Ji a part of? since japan was apparently invented in 1868
- krapp 10y ago>what culture is something like Todai-Ji a part of? China.
- grillvogel 10y agowhatever you say
- krapp 10y agoYou're not aware that Buddhism isn't native to Japan? And here I thought you were a cultural expert on all things Japanese. Although I did make an error - it's both Korean and Chinese.
- grillvogel 10y agoits a japanese buddhist/shinto temple. an american church isn't roman. and buddhism isn't chinese.
- krapp 10y agoThe point, which you seem to be missing, is drawn somewhere on the arbitrary line between "true" Japanese culture, and foreign culture. Buddhism isn't Chinese, but it reached Japan by way of China and Korea. So, yes, it's a Japanese Buddhist/Shinto temple. But the religion isn't originally Japanese, and neither is the architecture. The only thing native there is the Shinto. No one considers modern Japan to not be Japanese, despite it being, in some sense, an American reboot of a Prussian remix of Imperial China. If you want to say Japanese culture predates the US by "thousands of years," fine - except you would need to ignore the thousands of years of European culture that America is based on to do so. And also ignore the fact that, yes, modern Japanese culture is very much a product of the postwar period, making it both older than, and newer than, the US. And the aspects which are newer are likely the more relevant to Japanese people.
- astrange 10y ago
- doall 10y agoBecause there are huge side effects by copying the "US way". If you want a much smaller scale and a weaker version of the US then adopt it. That is definitely not what the Japanese people want.
- mkaziz 10y agoRight, and the current situation is one such consequence of that. Of course they could try something else - they've been trying since the 90's from what I understand, with mixed results at best.
- jimmywanger 10y agoThe US was amazingly gifted by geography and natural resources. Trying to credit America's success on the "US Way" is fallacious - I don't think we'd be much worse off if we were ruled by a monarchy, or even an extremely ethnically homogenous culture, since we're protected by two oceans, have massive oil and mineral and forest reserves, and had the native population decimated by infectious diseases before we moved in.
- mkaziz 10y agoI mean, the US way works. Immigration, especially of skilled labour, lends real tangible benefits to the US, its growth, and its culture.
- pdx 10y agoImmigration of skilled labor is always valuable. Japan, the US, France, Germany, etc should always welcome it, and should have policies that allow people with verified and needed skills to immigrate. However, drowning your citizens in a sea of immigrants is cultural suicide. If your culture is such that it has allowed your ancestors to build a country that immigrants want to flee their own countries to live in, then your culture is worth preserving, rather than allowing it to be replaced by the culture of those who would happily flood into it. That means, you can't solve your demographic problems by opening the floodgates. Instead, you need to fix the economic problems that are making people hesitant to have children in the first place.
- mkaziz 10y agoIt's not a floodgates vs nothing situation. You can certainly decide on an appropriate rate that you're comfortable with - enough to jumpstart the economy but not enough to completely drown out the host culture.
- ng12 10y agoHasn't Japan already done that? Secondly, I think it's very Western-centric viewpoint that your country's economy comes before everything else.
- BoysenberryPi 10y agoI mean without a strong economy everything else around it kinda goes to shit.
- ng12 10y ago
- pottersbasilisk 10y agoYou are absolutely right. Korea and Japan are investing heavily into robots.
- muh_gradle 10y agoKorea has a lot of immigrants.
- pcurve 10y agonot as many as Japan. Korean is a lot more homogeneous than Japan.