9 ms·

Building a Functional One-Party Democracy (2019)

69 points by telotortium 6y ago

keenreed 6y ago
I read statistics where 40% of young people do not start family, do not date, and basically withdraw from society. In interviews they blame it on long working hours and rigid rules in society in general. So maybe there is no conflict, but it is hardly functional.
- oreally 6y ago
  > So maybe there is no conflict, but it is hardly functional. You do realize this is a pretty condescending and closed-minded statement to make no? It's been said that any developing country going through accelerated economic improvement will have their birth rates reduced by quite a bit. That doesn't make it their society any less functional than say the NRA vs mass shootings, or political gridlocks between parties. And last I heard Japan was opening up to foreign sources of labour. They are slowly changing their minds and adapting.
  - keenreed 6y ago
    In west birth rate declines because people have more options and want to enjoy life. That was not my experience in Japan. They have rigid culture of corporations, education, hard labor and over achievement. Some people just do not like that. There is no communication, because society does not like conflict! US politics is other extreme, there is no communication, because society loves conflict! It will get started whenever and wherever possible.
- atoav 6y ago
  From a european perspective I find the current state the US is in vastly more dystopian than Japan. As of now I'd rather live in Japan than the US.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > I find the current state the US is in vastly more dystopian What you're seeing in the US MSM is nascent Marxism. Half the population didn't vote for it, and the other half will be getting a rude awakening in the next year or so when utopia doesn't arrive (ie. no student loan forgiveness.)
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Please expand. Japan is much, much poorer. The work environment is awful in at least two different ways, dualisation and insane levels of presenteeism. It’s quite sexist by European or US standards. What makes Japan look good?
    - rualca 6y ago
      The US's appalling lack of basic social safety nets, specially regarding healthcare, coupled with its poverty rate (over twice of Brazil's) and violence epidemic don't make it a shining beacon of a functioning society. Just because STEM graduates in the US can aspire to live in a comfort bubble due to their access to a cushy job, that does not make it an example of a well-functioning society by no means. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that a country has a well-functioning society if it happens to have a hand full of ultra-rich billionaires while the whole population suffers to barely make ends meet, let alone have a shot at a decent life.
      - barry-cotter 6y ago
        > It makes absolutely no sense to claim that a country has a well-functioning society if it happens to have a hand full of ultra-rich billionaires while the whole population suffers to barely make ends meet, let alone have a shot at a decent life. The US is much, much richer than any remotely comparable entity. Americans do not live the lives of grinding poverty you imagine. The only country or region that consumes more per household is Hong Kong[1]. A comfortable life in the US is available to much, much more of the population than STEM graduates as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
- Tade0 6y ago
  Coming from a country where, comparing to Japan: -Suicide rates are roughly the same. -Fertility rate was actually lower for a time - currently slightly higher. -People work considerably more hours per annum. -Average apartment sizes are lower. I take such statistics with a grain of salt. I think that currently they aren't significantly different in this regard than the rest of the developed world. My anecdata from southern and eastern Europe says that things like stable employment and housing are hard to come by among the Ys and Zs and these are both major hurdles towards starting a family.
ohduran 6y ago
Japan is hardly the first country that comes to mind as "functional". They've been stagnant for several decades.
- Iv 6y ago
  Which is possibly representative of the will of the society. Another one-party democracy that worked well, at least for a few decades, is Singapore.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > Another one-party democracy that worked well, at least for a few decades, is Singapore. Well, if you and your neighbors vote against the ruling party, your garbage pickup gets cut off, and maybe your water.
- rualca 6y ago
  It's terribly short-sighted to try to portray a whole society on it's economic growth rate. From that nonsense, it becomes even more foolish to assert that Japan (a G8 nation and the 3rd largest economy in the world) is not "functional" by focusing exclusively on it's economy.
  - sneak 6y ago
    There's nothing in GP that suggested they were referring to the economy specifically: the population has been in decline for some time, and many parts of the country are losing tax revenues.
    - mpweiher 6y ago
      We need populations to at the very least stagnate, decline is also not a bad idea.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
Iv 6y ago
Actually reading the article, I think the most interesting part of it is not the one-party democracy or even the insights it provides about Japanese politics. It is the fact that they did something that is generally discouraged in this field: using open-ended questionnaires. And it gave them tons of insights! Instead of asking "Which party do you prefer?" They realized that almost no party preference was expressed, except for the LDP, the ruling party and usually as an opposition to it. They discovered the categories of focus in the electorate instead of shoehorning a grid into it. Of course you don't really want to do it when you compare countries, and you open yourself to a ton of bias when you do manual analysis, but I think it is good once in a while to do such a thing to allows insights that may have been missed to show up.
Iv 6y ago
One thing that surprised me coming to live in countryside Japan is that everybody is part of the "kumi" hierarchical structure. They are neighborhood assemblies, so 10-20 persons in my area, with a president and a budget. The kumi bosses elect a boss for their super-kumi (forgot the name of that) and it is hierarchical up to the city level. They meet regularly to discuss local events, repairs, but mostly the matsuri (summer festival) and the bonenkai (the booze event of the end of the year). But they are also the ones who tell you who to support for elections. This year the local kumicho (head of kumi) came to give us leaflets for a city hall candidate, which surprised me because I know he dislikes the guy. But the boss of the "super-kumi" supports him so he gave lip-service to that. Knowing that this is the supported candidate by the local kumis will win a lot of local voters. Another thing to understand is that seniority is very respected in Japan. I have seen a 63 yo man defer to a 65 yo because he was his "sempai". I don;t know if all the kumis are like that but ours is pretty much based on the assumption that the elder can boss around the younger. That can explain why the conservative party is so well entrenched. People polled in that article claim that they base their appreciation on managerial qualities and personal advantage, but from what I have seen, they get these opinions from their own social environment.
- Iv 6y ago
  Hah, trying to find the name of the "super-kumi" I learned that this terminology is known in the west for being used by Yakuza. It makes sense, organizing the matsuri, which involves finding young men for carrying the mikoshi (a heavy palanquin you have to carry around) must be an excellent way to recruit people straying away.
- donw 6y ago
  I've been asked to step in and take this over for our neighborhood, so I'm learning about this process. Doing so has really showcased one thing that I truly like about Japan: people tend to take care of their communities. This starts from a young age: even in grade school, kids are responsible for cleaning their schools, and for serving lunch to other kids. Back when Mom was alive, I asked her about why we didn't do this in the US -- she was a school-board member -- and it boiled down to: "The parents will sue us for a gigantic list of reasons, the union representing the janitors will sue us because having students clean violates our work contract with the janitors, it probably violates child-labor laws, and the media will eat us alive for all of the above reasons." In the case of my neighborhood, we have a communal trash area, and there's a rotating roster for which household gets to handle cleaning that trash area for any given week. I am heavily incentivized to ensure this area stays clean, as it is immediately in front of my house. :) Even when I was living in a high-rise, where trash was handled by the building, we had a "floor coordinator" -- also a resident -- that handled a number of things, including emergency drills. The coordination of which was assigned to me after I slept through the first one, thus ensuring that I would not make that mistake again.
yorwba 6y ago
> Japanese politics is different from US politics. And not in the quirky, hand-wagging way that European politics is different. Japanese politics is not US politics expressed using a different idiom, but rather a world of its own. I'm surprised by the implication that the authors think European politics is US politics expressed using a different idiom. There's not even such a thing as a single "European politics". Just compare France, where President Macron's party « La République En Marche ! » was founded in 2016, and Germany, where CDU and SPD used to be in binary opposition, but lost so much support that they had to form a coalition government together to stay in power. The article mentions that > existing research shows that party loyalty, insofar as it is understood in the US and Europe as a sense of identification with a “team”, is almost unknown in Japan.[6] The Japanese World Values Survey team even went so far as to drop the standard question on party loyalty from their poll as it was “not relevant in Japan” so I went to look for the World Values Survey. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp Their website is some terrible session-based thing where you can't link to anything, so here's the path you need to follow: "2017-2020" → "Select all" → "Next" → Enter "Q98" as the variable → click on "Show" in the search result → select the "Maps" tab → select "Not a member". The percentage of people who're not in a political party in Japan is 94.4%, with the closest European countries being Denmark (94.7%) and Germany (93.5%). The US is the country with the lowest percentage of non-party members at 49.9%. I think it's pretty clear who's the odd one out here.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > The percentage of people who're not in a political party in Japan is 94.4%, with the closest European countries being Denmark (94.7%) and Germany (93.5%). The US is the country with the lowest percentage of non-party members at 49.9%. I think it's pretty clear who's the odd one out here. It feels like they're comparing different things though. In the US, they use voter registration / party identification as "membership", while they use actual membership in other countries. My grandmother always used to vote for the Social Democrats in Germany, certainly identified with them, but was never a member. She wouldn't show up as a party member here, but she would if she did the same in the US. It seems "true believers" would be the better metric to compare to the US party affiliation. Also, it's amazing how bad that website is built. Thanks for the bread crumbs to follow.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dripiv 6y ago
Sounds like fascism.
williesleg 6y ago
Hacker news!
dripiv 6y ago
>One-Party Democracy War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

69 points by telotortium 6y ago

I read statistics where 40% of young people do not start family, do not date, and basically withdraw from society. In interviews they blame it on long working hours and rigid rules in society in general. So maybe there is no conflict, but it is hardly functional.

oreally 6y ago
> So maybe there is no conflict, but it is hardly functional. You do realize this is a pretty condescending and closed-minded statement to make no? It's been said that any developing country going through accelerated economic improvement will have their birth rates reduced by quite a bit. That doesn't make it their society any less functional than say the NRA vs mass shootings, or political gridlocks between parties. And last I heard Japan was opening up to foreign sources of labour. They are slowly changing their minds and adapting.
- keenreed 6y ago
  In west birth rate declines because people have more options and want to enjoy life. That was not my experience in Japan. They have rigid culture of corporations, education, hard labor and over achievement. Some people just do not like that. There is no communication, because society does not like conflict! US politics is other extreme, there is no communication, because society loves conflict! It will get started whenever and wherever possible.
atoav 6y ago
From a european perspective I find the current state the US is in vastly more dystopian than Japan. As of now I'd rather live in Japan than the US.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > I find the current state the US is in vastly more dystopian What you're seeing in the US MSM is nascent Marxism. Half the population didn't vote for it, and the other half will be getting a rude awakening in the next year or so when utopia doesn't arrive (ie. no student loan forgiveness.)
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Please expand. Japan is much, much poorer. The work environment is awful in at least two different ways, dualisation and insane levels of presenteeism. It’s quite sexist by European or US standards. What makes Japan look good?
  - rualca 6y ago
    The US's appalling lack of basic social safety nets, specially regarding healthcare, coupled with its poverty rate (over twice of Brazil's) and violence epidemic don't make it a shining beacon of a functioning society. Just because STEM graduates in the US can aspire to live in a comfort bubble due to their access to a cushy job, that does not make it an example of a well-functioning society by no means. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that a country has a well-functioning society if it happens to have a hand full of ultra-rich billionaires while the whole population suffers to barely make ends meet, let alone have a shot at a decent life.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      > It makes absolutely no sense to claim that a country has a well-functioning society if it happens to have a hand full of ultra-rich billionaires while the whole population suffers to barely make ends meet, let alone have a shot at a decent life. The US is much, much richer than any remotely comparable entity. Americans do not live the lives of grinding poverty you imagine. The only country or region that consumes more per household is Hong Kong[1]. A comfortable life in the US is available to much, much more of the population than STEM graduates as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
Tade0 6y ago
Coming from a country where, comparing to Japan: -Suicide rates are roughly the same. -Fertility rate was actually lower for a time - currently slightly higher. -People work considerably more hours per annum. -Average apartment sizes are lower. I take such statistics with a grain of salt. I think that currently they aren't significantly different in this regard than the rest of the developed world. My anecdata from southern and eastern Europe says that things like stable employment and housing are hard to come by among the Ys and Zs and these are both major hurdles towards starting a family.

ohduran 6y ago

Japan is hardly the first country that comes to mind as "functional". They've been stagnant for several decades.

Iv 6y ago
Which is possibly representative of the will of the society. Another one-party democracy that worked well, at least for a few decades, is Singapore.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > Another one-party democracy that worked well, at least for a few decades, is Singapore. Well, if you and your neighbors vote against the ruling party, your garbage pickup gets cut off, and maybe your water.
rualca 6y ago
It's terribly short-sighted to try to portray a whole society on it's economic growth rate. From that nonsense, it becomes even more foolish to assert that Japan (a G8 nation and the 3rd largest economy in the world) is not "functional" by focusing exclusively on it's economy.
- sneak 6y ago
  There's nothing in GP that suggested they were referring to the economy specifically: the population has been in decline for some time, and many parts of the country are losing tax revenues.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    We need populations to at the very least stagnate, decline is also not a bad idea.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

Iv 6y ago

Actually reading the article, I think the most interesting part of it is not the one-party democracy or even the insights it provides about Japanese politics. It is the fact that they did something that is generally discouraged in this field: using open-ended questionnaires. And it gave them tons of insights! Instead of asking "Which party do you prefer?" They realized that almost no party preference was expressed, except for the LDP, the ruling party and usually as an opposition to it. They discovered the categories of focus in the electorate instead of shoehorning a grid into it. Of course you don't really want to do it when you compare countries, and you open yourself to a ton of bias when you do manual analysis, but I think it is good once in a while to do such a thing to allows insights that may have been missed to show up.

Iv 6y ago

One thing that surprised me coming to live in countryside Japan is that everybody is part of the "kumi" hierarchical structure. They are neighborhood assemblies, so 10-20 persons in my area, with a president and a budget. The kumi bosses elect a boss for their super-kumi (forgot the name of that) and it is hierarchical up to the city level. They meet regularly to discuss local events, repairs, but mostly the matsuri (summer festival) and the bonenkai (the booze event of the end of the year). But they are also the ones who tell you who to support for elections. This year the local kumicho (head of kumi) came to give us leaflets for a city hall candidate, which surprised me because I know he dislikes the guy. But the boss of the "super-kumi" supports him so he gave lip-service to that. Knowing that this is the supported candidate by the local kumis will win a lot of local voters. Another thing to understand is that seniority is very respected in Japan. I have seen a 63 yo man defer to a 65 yo because he was his "sempai". I don;t know if all the kumis are like that but ours is pretty much based on the assumption that the elder can boss around the younger. That can explain why the conservative party is so well entrenched. People polled in that article claim that they base their appreciation on managerial qualities and personal advantage, but from what I have seen, they get these opinions from their own social environment.

Iv 6y ago
Hah, trying to find the name of the "super-kumi" I learned that this terminology is known in the west for being used by Yakuza. It makes sense, organizing the matsuri, which involves finding young men for carrying the mikoshi (a heavy palanquin you have to carry around) must be an excellent way to recruit people straying away.
donw 6y ago
I've been asked to step in and take this over for our neighborhood, so I'm learning about this process. Doing so has really showcased one thing that I truly like about Japan: people tend to take care of their communities. This starts from a young age: even in grade school, kids are responsible for cleaning their schools, and for serving lunch to other kids. Back when Mom was alive, I asked her about why we didn't do this in the US -- she was a school-board member -- and it boiled down to: "The parents will sue us for a gigantic list of reasons, the union representing the janitors will sue us because having students clean violates our work contract with the janitors, it probably violates child-labor laws, and the media will eat us alive for all of the above reasons." In the case of my neighborhood, we have a communal trash area, and there's a rotating roster for which household gets to handle cleaning that trash area for any given week. I am heavily incentivized to ensure this area stays clean, as it is immediately in front of my house. :) Even when I was living in a high-rise, where trash was handled by the building, we had a "floor coordinator" -- also a resident -- that handled a number of things, including emergency drills. The coordination of which was assigned to me after I slept through the first one, thus ensuring that I would not make that mistake again.

yorwba 6y ago

> Japanese politics is different from US politics. And not in the quirky, hand-wagging way that European politics is different. Japanese politics is not US politics expressed using a different idiom, but rather a world of its own. I'm surprised by the implication that the authors think European politics is US politics expressed using a different idiom. There's not even such a thing as a single "European politics". Just compare France, where President Macron's party « La République En Marche ! » was founded in 2016, and Germany, where CDU and SPD used to be in binary opposition, but lost so much support that they had to form a coalition government together to stay in power. The article mentions that > existing research shows that party loyalty, insofar as it is understood in the US and Europe as a sense of identification with a “team”, is almost unknown in Japan.[6] The Japanese World Values Survey team even went so far as to drop the standard question on party loyalty from their poll as it was “not relevant in Japan” so I went to look for the World Values Survey. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSOnline.jsp Their website is some terrible session-based thing where you can't link to anything, so here's the path you need to follow: "2017-2020" → "Select all" → "Next" → Enter "Q98" as the variable → click on "Show" in the search result → select the "Maps" tab → select "Not a member". The percentage of people who're not in a political party in Japan is 94.4%, with the closest European countries being Denmark (94.7%) and Germany (93.5%). The US is the country with the lowest percentage of non-party members at 49.9%. I think it's pretty clear who's the odd one out here.

luckylion 6y ago
> The percentage of people who're not in a political party in Japan is 94.4%, with the closest European countries being Denmark (94.7%) and Germany (93.5%). The US is the country with the lowest percentage of non-party members at 49.9%. I think it's pretty clear who's the odd one out here. It feels like they're comparing different things though. In the US, they use voter registration / party identification as "membership", while they use actual membership in other countries. My grandmother always used to vote for the Social Democrats in Germany, certainly identified with them, but was never a member. She wouldn't show up as a party member here, but she would if she did the same in the US. It seems "true believers" would be the better metric to compare to the US party affiliation. Also, it's amazing how bad that website is built. Thanks for the bread crumbs to follow.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dripiv 6y ago

Sounds like fascism.

williesleg 6y ago

Hacker news!

dripiv 6y ago

>One-Party Democracy War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.