25 ms·

Poverty in Japan

201 points by robk 9y ago

SolaceQuantum 9y ago
The mention in the article of the false perception by people vacationing in japan of describing the japanese as just naturally, culturally happy to serve whites/foreigners well into old age reminds me of how black people were depicted in America (and their depictions are still around here and there...) (fairly similar notions of “just culturally/inherently happy to serve”). I think this may be a part of othering or being able to live on cognitive dissonance? Edited for clarity; I think people thought I was saying Japanese people are white serving, not that there is a false perception of such.
- goldenkey 9y ago
  Maybe it's just true... Why does everything objective have to fit into "what is nice." Nature isn't nice. Some cultures aren't nice. Is it nice that dogs and cats are stacked in cages in China for consumption? I'd say no. Is the American meat industry nice? I'd say no. But why do you want to assert this "nice" conformity onto anything about cultures? Those have objective characteristics just like anything else.
  - senthil_rajasek 9y ago
    Being "nice" is being cultured though nature may be cruel.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      "Nice" has interesting etymology. Used to mean foolish/ignorant in middle ages, and now somehow has a vague meaning along the lines of agreeable. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice
- g09980 9y ago
  As someone who only spent a fraction of his life in America, I'm always at wonder at how Americans try to find racism/oppression in every situation. As another poster below alludes, life isn't always pleasant. We can't all be equal, but inequality != servitude.
  - scarmig 9y ago
    We can't all be equal, but we can build a society where old people don't have to work long hours until the day they die, and young people don't have to struggle to pay for electricity or healthcare. I'm just noting that so we don't fall into the trap of letting our Randian overlords pre-emptively limit the bounds of our imagination.
    - ci5er 9y ago
      > but we can build a society where old people don't have to work long hours until the day they die Why would we? I note that my father is deteriorating faster now that he does not work. Is it unreasonable to think that work is actually "good for us"?
      - scarmig 9y ago
        I agree that work fosters social interactions and meaning, and older people who continue to maintain those fare a lot better than those who don't. But there's a world of difference between working because it gives you meaning, and working because if you don't you'll starve to death in your unheated apartment. No older person is benefiting from having to dig through trash for bottles to recycle for nickels.
        ci5er 9y ago
        > No older person is benefiting from having to dig through trash for bottles to recycle for nickels. Agreed. But I think we are squandering the wealth of experience that old people can bring to the work-place by essentially aging them out. They have something to offer - and we need it - and (in Japan) the safety net, it ain't so safe! EDIT: I lived in Japan a long time, but I realized (at some point), that no matter how much I payed into the retirement system, as a retiree, I would lose my visa and be kicked out (just the way it is). So I moved "back home", so that I would have the opportunity to work until I die.
- watwut 9y ago
  Tourists does not have to be white. The niceness has nothing to do with race, if anything Japanese see themselves above us. It has a lot to do with fact that if you won't be nice, you will be punished.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    > Tourists does not have to be white. The niceness has nothing to do with race, if anything Japanese see themselves above us. No, that's not really true. Many Japanese do not treat white Americans and Philippine people the same, for instance.
- ci5er 9y ago
  > the japanese as just naturally, culturally happy to serve whites What are you talking about? The Japanese are preternaturally polite, but they aren't necessarily any "nice"er than anyone else. And they aren't there to serve "the white man". If anything, they believe that they are the most evolved race of humans (or some think 'not even the same species as normal humans') on the planet. Look - their society is rough and tough. But it has nothing to do with race. It's just a tough gig being Japanese.
  - SolaceQuantum 9y ago
    In the article it outlines a false perception of foreigners that japan is great because all the people there are happy to serve you.
    - ci5er 9y ago
      It does. I apologize.
    - jackvalentine 9y ago
      I think that was sarcasm?
g09980 9y ago
I've lived in Japan, and I love Japan for all its charms. Westerners definitely romanticize it, but day-to-day life for local people isn't all roses. Something brings one to reality when you see raggedy old men vomiting outside Pachinko parlours, the scantily clad "massage" women shivering in zero degree weather, or the mentally ill muttering to himself while bumping into the walls at the conbini. Aging population, high rate of alcoholism, difficult work culture, and untreated mental illness are some things you don't see on a postcard, but they are real.
- s4vi0r 9y ago
  Do people really romanticize it, outside of certain delusional anime fans? Pretty much everything I hear about Japan - whether it be news, or talking to Japanese friends - makes it seem like the country isn't doing so hot as far as the top 10 or 15 countries in the world go. Authoritarian government with poor freedom of press, social and mental health issues out the wazoo, aging population combined with xenophobia/refusal to open up or otherwise encourage mass immigration, poor gender equality, salaryman issues, etc. It feels like they peaked in the early to mid 90s and have just sorta been stumbling around since then.
  - mc32 9y ago
    The whole world is heading toward zero pop growth or declining growth. We're projected to peak by about 2050. We'll all be there (with some exceptions). The point is, we will need to figure out how to keep society going (economically, or specifically from a population welfare point of view) despite declining populations. There is no reason a Japan of 70 million should not be a viable society. It's still one of the densest countries on earth, given their usable land --it's mostly unusable, non arable mountainous.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      > The point is, we will need to figure out how to keep society going (economically, or specifically from a population welfare point of view) despite declining populations. Nobody has that figured out. For now the answer for developed countries involves allowing in immigrants to make up for the deaths.
rayiner 9y ago
> Of course, if you saw it in your own country, you’d recognize it for what it was—people working their asses off, even well into old age, not out of some perverse industriousness, but simply because they’ve gotta eat. Until we invent replicators, everyone’s gotta work to eat. Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that. What people in the US admire about Japanese culture is their attitude to the work they’ve got to do to survive. It’s not like folks in the US don’t have to work to eat. But if you’ve ever been in an airport security line in both places you can tell the difference.
- RealityVoid 9y ago
  Not true for everyone though, is it? There are people that get the privilege of existing without working anything. Besides, I say that the term you mentioned for solving this issue, "until we invent replicators" makes it sound like we are bound this way and could not solve this problem were that we wanted to. No, I think that is not true, we simply don't want to and some of us are rather concerned of the side effects of doing so. But I don't think that this issue would be insurmountable, if we would want to fix it.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    The beliefs about replicators and transforming planets like mars are just a futurist fantasy about how our problems will all be magically solved in the wonderful future, its great escapism to avoid caring about real issues we really can solve right now, and a very convenient dismissal if issues we can address right now with "The future will fix it"!. Note, many of the people that don't need to work are extraordinarily wealthy, hundreds of thousands of times over what would be required to lead a reasonable life, their wealth bases usually built, directly or indirectly, from the efforts of the same people that have to work until they are 70. But yeah, in the future, somehow this arrangement will change into a magical utopia, not a situation where those same wealthy horde an even more absurd amount of power, while everyone else struggles to scrape by, or is just discarded entirely in the face of cheaper and better automation that is owned by the wealthier rentier class. You see this callous disregard on HN every time an article about Uber or Amazon treating their employees like shit, remarks to the effect of "they shouldn't be complaining, cant wait till they are replaced by robots", and I think its disgusting, but its a telling remark about how employees are going to be viewed increasingly in the future. If we don't even want to bother broaching the serious wide-cutting issues we have right now with poverty and inequality in our society, I fail to see how the hell technology that effectively massively magnifies the economic power of whoever can afford them the most will do anything but make the situation far, far more dire.
ci5er 9y ago
I think that I have seen (tripped over) more dead aging alcoholics in Japan (Shinjuku and Shibuya in particular) than any other country I have ever lived in. I've tried to administer CPR a couple of times, but the Japanese going from point A to point B, (as polite as they are normally), just shrug and move on...
- pyre 9y ago
  > the Japanese going from point A to point B, (as polite as they are normally), just shrug and move on I imagine this is more of an urban vs. rural issue than anything specifically Japanese.
  - ci5er 9y ago
    That is possibly so. But I never saw the same thing in NYC or Berlin or Paris.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- make3 9y ago
  that's really fucked up. don't they have free healthcare for the super poor? how hard is it to call the EMTs.
  - ci5er 9y ago
    I do not know. Whenever I called EMTs in Japan, they came and got me. But, that said, I do remember having to get a dead guy out of the way to be able to use the pay phone in west Shinjuku. (Lest you think I am heartless, my first call was to the 911 equivalent).
  - ramchip 9y ago
    It’s hard to tell if someone is just sleeping or actually in danger. Drunk people sleeping in weird places is a fact of life in some areas of Tokyo. I’ve had serious doubts once or twice, and the person turned out to be fine (at least physically).
GreaterFool 9y ago
I see poverty in Japan and I have no illusion that for many people here life is hard. But where is better? I often travel to US and it is like going to a third-world country. And I only visit nice places there!
- Veratyr 9y ago
  Have you been to western/northern europe or Australia? I've visited Paris, Berlin and Zürich and haven't seen US levels of poverty in any of them. I've also visited a kinda out of the way part of Russia and while average wealth seemed lower than in the US, the floor was higher.
  - drcode 9y ago
    You must not have visited the same Berlin I visited...
    - Veratyr 9y ago
      Can you elaborate? I certainly didn't see tent encampments or beggars like I've seen in every major US city I've visited so far but it's possible I missed something.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Not Berlin, but one of the images that stuck with me when visiting Hamburg this year was this: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/hamburg-germany-july-tramps-dwelling-under-bridge-helgolaender-street-st-pauli-homeless-people-96327849.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/hamburg-germany-july-tramps-... (Not my photo, but it's from the place I remember)
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    You obviously haven't been to Northern Territory in Australia. The way that the Aboriginal people have been treated, and the conditions they live in are Australia's national shame. People getting hit by cars because they drank too much and fell asleep on the road are a legitimate issue. They even have PSAs to try and stop people from sleeping on the road [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/XA241Lg70fg https://youtu.be/XA241Lg70fg
monkeypizza 9y ago
Spike Japan is another well-written blog covering poverty & decay in Japan, specifically Tokyo. It also has nice photos of things rusting. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/
- robk 9y ago
  thanks this is an enjoyable blog
- monkeypizza 9y ago
  Sorry, it actually covers Hokkaido.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Poking around it seems like the older posts are about the Tokyo area and the newer ones about Hokkaido.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I've never really looked at this before. It seems to combine an interesting topic and a fair bit of research with, frankly, writing that is a little bit obnoxious. But still worth looking at.
nitwit005 9y ago
> When I first moved from the U.S., it all seemed fantastically romantic. Old wooden houses without insulation? That’s “traditional culture.” A family of four in an apartment the size of an American kitchen? Efficient use of space. I kind of have trouble parsing this post, as I'm not sure if it's the author's own romanticizing of things, or someone Japanese is telling them this.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  What he is saying is that when he first came to Japan he mistook the outward signs of poverty for charming cultural quirks.
aikinai 9y ago
Weird that this guy has lived in Japan for ten years, but he groups a bunch of culture aspects in with his evidence of poverty. Preparing a lunch box, recycling bath water for laundry, using kerosene heaters? These are just how things are done in Japan, no matter how much money you have. Maybe that's one of the cultural differences this author is missing. Most people in Japan, even when they are far more wealthy than their neighbors, still live exactly the same lifestyle.
- norswap 9y ago
  Perhaps. Yet the other things he points out can't be explained away so easily, so the point stands.
kingofpandora 9y ago
I've been to Japan a few times and I'm the fucking idiot who explained it away. Thank you.
emodendroket 9y ago
This really hits home for me. I spent a year in northern Japan when I was a college student and of course I was just as oblivious as this guy was, just thinking how nice it was that the service was so great everywhere. When I go back now, with more understanding of what it takes to produce that, well, I feel a lot more conflicted, let's say.
CryptoPunk 9y ago
This is fantastically written, but I hesitate to upvote it out of fear it will increase public support for forcible income redistribution and other forms of centralization. On the subject of Japan: people overestimate its wealth. It industrialized much more recently than the West, and even pre-industrialization, was behind economically and technologically. What the society has accomplished in such a short period of time is impressive, but looking at its buildings it's clear that it still trails the West in capital concentration. In any case, there's more to a society than wealth. The orderliness and safety of Japanese society makes for a standard of living that is much higher than it otherwise would be. There are a lot of intangible and hard to quantify benefits to feeling safe in person and property when outside your home at any time of day or night.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  "I liked this post about poverty, but I hesitate to upvote it because I fear it will increase public support for alleviating poverty."
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    I believe such policies retard economic development, which is the only way to alleviate poverty.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I mean there's only so much of the islands they can pave over before a new strategy is needed.
      - CryptoPunk 9y ago
        Expanding the area of land occupied by buildings and machines is not all economic development encompasses.
    - tmnvix 9y ago
      Do you agree with any form of wealth redistribution? If you don't, I have nothing more to say. If you do, I would have to ask to what extent, and how do you arrive at this amount if poverty plays no part in your estimation?
havill 9y ago
Um, you all do realize that the guy who writes this blog is known within the English Japan crowd as a fabulist (a storyteller), right? The characters in this story are all figments of the blog author's imagination. You all have fallen for yet another Japan hoax. Like the bagel heads or LED braces.

201 points by robk 9y ago

The mention in the article of the false perception by people vacationing in japan of describing the japanese as just naturally, culturally happy to serve whites/foreigners well into old age reminds me of how black people were depicted in America (and their depictions are still around here and there...) (fairly similar notions of “just culturally/inherently happy to serve”). I think this may be a part of othering or being able to live on cognitive dissonance? Edited for clarity; I think people thought I was saying Japanese people are white serving, not that there is a false perception of such.

goldenkey 9y ago
Maybe it's just true... Why does everything objective have to fit into "what is nice." Nature isn't nice. Some cultures aren't nice. Is it nice that dogs and cats are stacked in cages in China for consumption? I'd say no. Is the American meat industry nice? I'd say no. But why do you want to assert this "nice" conformity onto anything about cultures? Those have objective characteristics just like anything else.
- senthil_rajasek 9y ago
  Being "nice" is being cultured though nature may be cruel.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    "Nice" has interesting etymology. Used to mean foolish/ignorant in middle ages, and now somehow has a vague meaning along the lines of agreeable. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice
g09980 9y ago
As someone who only spent a fraction of his life in America, I'm always at wonder at how Americans try to find racism/oppression in every situation. As another poster below alludes, life isn't always pleasant. We can't all be equal, but inequality != servitude.
- scarmig 9y ago
  We can't all be equal, but we can build a society where old people don't have to work long hours until the day they die, and young people don't have to struggle to pay for electricity or healthcare. I'm just noting that so we don't fall into the trap of letting our Randian overlords pre-emptively limit the bounds of our imagination.
  - ci5er 9y ago
    > but we can build a society where old people don't have to work long hours until the day they die Why would we? I note that my father is deteriorating faster now that he does not work. Is it unreasonable to think that work is actually "good for us"?
    - scarmig 9y ago
      I agree that work fosters social interactions and meaning, and older people who continue to maintain those fare a lot better than those who don't. But there's a world of difference between working because it gives you meaning, and working because if you don't you'll starve to death in your unheated apartment. No older person is benefiting from having to dig through trash for bottles to recycle for nickels.
      - ci5er 9y ago
        > No older person is benefiting from having to dig through trash for bottles to recycle for nickels. Agreed. But I think we are squandering the wealth of experience that old people can bring to the work-place by essentially aging them out. They have something to offer - and we need it - and (in Japan) the safety net, it ain't so safe! EDIT: I lived in Japan a long time, but I realized (at some point), that no matter how much I payed into the retirement system, as a retiree, I would lose my visa and be kicked out (just the way it is). So I moved "back home", so that I would have the opportunity to work until I die.
watwut 9y ago
Tourists does not have to be white. The niceness has nothing to do with race, if anything Japanese see themselves above us. It has a lot to do with fact that if you won't be nice, you will be punished.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > Tourists does not have to be white. The niceness has nothing to do with race, if anything Japanese see themselves above us. No, that's not really true. Many Japanese do not treat white Americans and Philippine people the same, for instance.
ci5er 9y ago
> the japanese as just naturally, culturally happy to serve whites What are you talking about? The Japanese are preternaturally polite, but they aren't necessarily any "nice"er than anyone else. And they aren't there to serve "the white man". If anything, they believe that they are the most evolved race of humans (or some think 'not even the same species as normal humans') on the planet. Look - their society is rough and tough. But it has nothing to do with race. It's just a tough gig being Japanese.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  In the article it outlines a false perception of foreigners that japan is great because all the people there are happy to serve you.
  - ci5er 9y ago
    It does. I apologize.
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    I think that was sarcasm?

g09980 9y ago

I've lived in Japan, and I love Japan for all its charms. Westerners definitely romanticize it, but day-to-day life for local people isn't all roses. Something brings one to reality when you see raggedy old men vomiting outside Pachinko parlours, the scantily clad "massage" women shivering in zero degree weather, or the mentally ill muttering to himself while bumping into the walls at the conbini. Aging population, high rate of alcoholism, difficult work culture, and untreated mental illness are some things you don't see on a postcard, but they are real.

s4vi0r 9y ago
Do people really romanticize it, outside of certain delusional anime fans? Pretty much everything I hear about Japan - whether it be news, or talking to Japanese friends - makes it seem like the country isn't doing so hot as far as the top 10 or 15 countries in the world go. Authoritarian government with poor freedom of press, social and mental health issues out the wazoo, aging population combined with xenophobia/refusal to open up or otherwise encourage mass immigration, poor gender equality, salaryman issues, etc. It feels like they peaked in the early to mid 90s and have just sorta been stumbling around since then.
- mc32 9y ago
  The whole world is heading toward zero pop growth or declining growth. We're projected to peak by about 2050. We'll all be there (with some exceptions). The point is, we will need to figure out how to keep society going (economically, or specifically from a population welfare point of view) despite declining populations. There is no reason a Japan of 70 million should not be a viable society. It's still one of the densest countries on earth, given their usable land --it's mostly unusable, non arable mountainous.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    > The point is, we will need to figure out how to keep society going (economically, or specifically from a population welfare point of view) despite declining populations. Nobody has that figured out. For now the answer for developed countries involves allowing in immigrants to make up for the deaths.

rayiner 9y ago

> Of course, if you saw it in your own country, you’d recognize it for what it was—people working their asses off, even well into old age, not out of some perverse industriousness, but simply because they’ve gotta eat. Until we invent replicators, everyone’s gotta work to eat. Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that. What people in the US admire about Japanese culture is their attitude to the work they’ve got to do to survive. It’s not like folks in the US don’t have to work to eat. But if you’ve ever been in an airport security line in both places you can tell the difference.

RealityVoid 9y ago
Not true for everyone though, is it? There are people that get the privilege of existing without working anything. Besides, I say that the term you mentioned for solving this issue, "until we invent replicators" makes it sound like we are bound this way and could not solve this problem were that we wanted to. No, I think that is not true, we simply don't want to and some of us are rather concerned of the side effects of doing so. But I don't think that this issue would be insurmountable, if we would want to fix it.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  The beliefs about replicators and transforming planets like mars are just a futurist fantasy about how our problems will all be magically solved in the wonderful future, its great escapism to avoid caring about real issues we really can solve right now, and a very convenient dismissal if issues we can address right now with "The future will fix it"!. Note, many of the people that don't need to work are extraordinarily wealthy, hundreds of thousands of times over what would be required to lead a reasonable life, their wealth bases usually built, directly or indirectly, from the efforts of the same people that have to work until they are 70. But yeah, in the future, somehow this arrangement will change into a magical utopia, not a situation where those same wealthy horde an even more absurd amount of power, while everyone else struggles to scrape by, or is just discarded entirely in the face of cheaper and better automation that is owned by the wealthier rentier class. You see this callous disregard on HN every time an article about Uber or Amazon treating their employees like shit, remarks to the effect of "they shouldn't be complaining, cant wait till they are replaced by robots", and I think its disgusting, but its a telling remark about how employees are going to be viewed increasingly in the future. If we don't even want to bother broaching the serious wide-cutting issues we have right now with poverty and inequality in our society, I fail to see how the hell technology that effectively massively magnifies the economic power of whoever can afford them the most will do anything but make the situation far, far more dire.

ci5er 9y ago

I think that I have seen (tripped over) more dead aging alcoholics in Japan (Shinjuku and Shibuya in particular) than any other country I have ever lived in. I've tried to administer CPR a couple of times, but the Japanese going from point A to point B, (as polite as they are normally), just shrug and move on...

pyre 9y ago
> the Japanese going from point A to point B, (as polite as they are normally), just shrug and move on I imagine this is more of an urban vs. rural issue than anything specifically Japanese.
- ci5er 9y ago
  That is possibly so. But I never saw the same thing in NYC or Berlin or Paris.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
make3 9y ago
that's really fucked up. don't they have free healthcare for the super poor? how hard is it to call the EMTs.
- ci5er 9y ago
  I do not know. Whenever I called EMTs in Japan, they came and got me. But, that said, I do remember having to get a dead guy out of the way to be able to use the pay phone in west Shinjuku. (Lest you think I am heartless, my first call was to the 911 equivalent).
- ramchip 9y ago
  It’s hard to tell if someone is just sleeping or actually in danger. Drunk people sleeping in weird places is a fact of life in some areas of Tokyo. I’ve had serious doubts once or twice, and the person turned out to be fine (at least physically).

GreaterFool 9y ago

I see poverty in Japan and I have no illusion that for many people here life is hard. But where is better? I often travel to US and it is like going to a third-world country. And I only visit nice places there!

Veratyr 9y ago
Have you been to western/northern europe or Australia? I've visited Paris, Berlin and Zürich and haven't seen US levels of poverty in any of them. I've also visited a kinda out of the way part of Russia and while average wealth seemed lower than in the US, the floor was higher.
- drcode 9y ago
  You must not have visited the same Berlin I visited...
  - Veratyr 9y ago
    Can you elaborate? I certainly didn't see tent encampments or beggars like I've seen in every major US city I've visited so far but it's possible I missed something.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Not Berlin, but one of the images that stuck with me when visiting Hamburg this year was this: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/hamburg-germany-july-tramps-dwelling-under-bridge-helgolaender-street-st-pauli-homeless-people-96327849.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/hamburg-germany-july-tramps-... (Not my photo, but it's from the place I remember)
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  You obviously haven't been to Northern Territory in Australia. The way that the Aboriginal people have been treated, and the conditions they live in are Australia's national shame. People getting hit by cars because they drank too much and fell asleep on the road are a legitimate issue. They even have PSAs to try and stop people from sleeping on the road [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/XA241Lg70fg https://youtu.be/XA241Lg70fg

monkeypizza 9y ago

Spike Japan is another well-written blog covering poverty & decay in Japan, specifically Tokyo. It also has nice photos of things rusting. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

robk 9y ago
thanks this is an enjoyable blog
monkeypizza 9y ago
Sorry, it actually covers Hokkaido.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Poking around it seems like the older posts are about the Tokyo area and the newer ones about Hokkaido.
emodendroket 9y ago
I've never really looked at this before. It seems to combine an interesting topic and a fair bit of research with, frankly, writing that is a little bit obnoxious. But still worth looking at.

nitwit005 9y ago

> When I first moved from the U.S., it all seemed fantastically romantic. Old wooden houses without insulation? That’s “traditional culture.” A family of four in an apartment the size of an American kitchen? Efficient use of space. I kind of have trouble parsing this post, as I'm not sure if it's the author's own romanticizing of things, or someone Japanese is telling them this.

emodendroket 9y ago
What he is saying is that when he first came to Japan he mistook the outward signs of poverty for charming cultural quirks.

aikinai 9y ago

Weird that this guy has lived in Japan for ten years, but he groups a bunch of culture aspects in with his evidence of poverty. Preparing a lunch box, recycling bath water for laundry, using kerosene heaters? These are just how things are done in Japan, no matter how much money you have. Maybe that's one of the cultural differences this author is missing. Most people in Japan, even when they are far more wealthy than their neighbors, still live exactly the same lifestyle.

norswap 9y ago
Perhaps. Yet the other things he points out can't be explained away so easily, so the point stands.

kingofpandora 9y ago

I've been to Japan a few times and I'm the fucking idiot who explained it away. Thank you.

emodendroket 9y ago

This really hits home for me. I spent a year in northern Japan when I was a college student and of course I was just as oblivious as this guy was, just thinking how nice it was that the service was so great everywhere. When I go back now, with more understanding of what it takes to produce that, well, I feel a lot more conflicted, let's say.

CryptoPunk 9y ago

This is fantastically written, but I hesitate to upvote it out of fear it will increase public support for forcible income redistribution and other forms of centralization. On the subject of Japan: people overestimate its wealth. It industrialized much more recently than the West, and even pre-industrialization, was behind economically and technologically. What the society has accomplished in such a short period of time is impressive, but looking at its buildings it's clear that it still trails the West in capital concentration. In any case, there's more to a society than wealth. The orderliness and safety of Japanese society makes for a standard of living that is much higher than it otherwise would be. There are a lot of intangible and hard to quantify benefits to feeling safe in person and property when outside your home at any time of day or night.

emodendroket 9y ago
"I liked this post about poverty, but I hesitate to upvote it because I fear it will increase public support for alleviating poverty."
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  I believe such policies retard economic development, which is the only way to alleviate poverty.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I mean there's only so much of the islands they can pave over before a new strategy is needed.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      Expanding the area of land occupied by buildings and machines is not all economic development encompasses.
  - tmnvix 9y ago
    Do you agree with any form of wealth redistribution? If you don't, I have nothing more to say. If you do, I would have to ask to what extent, and how do you arrive at this amount if poverty plays no part in your estimation?

havill 9y ago

Um, you all do realize that the guy who writes this blog is known within the English Japan crowd as a fabulist (a storyteller), right? The characters in this story are all figments of the blog author's imagination. You all have fallen for yet another Japan hoax. Like the bagel heads or LED braces.