7 ms·

There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't b

There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago
This would seem to be only a temporary local solution. Once world population stabilizes or starts shrinking, you can only increase population by exporting the problem to somebody else.
- skyfaller 4y ago
  "Good news"! Due to the climate crisis, large sections of the globe are likely to become uninhabitable, so even if world population declines, there will be an influx of refugees into habitable locations. In other words, local population density could easily increase worldwide even if there are fewer people overall.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    Or Japan could itself sink into the sea and skip the step of moving people into the newly depopulated islands.
Ygg2 4y ago
As another poster has noted, that's not a solution, that's just exporting problem to another country. What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?
- roflyear 4y ago
  It's the only thing that works. Otherwise you have to change how you do everything. Much harder.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Well. Looks like everything will need to change anyway.
- dnissley 4y ago
  I would rather have a runway of X + Y years to deal with these problems than X years, while more thoroughly mixing world culture in hopes of having a more cooperative society by then.
neilwilson 4y ago
Immigration is just colonial appropriation. It's the solution proposed by city dwellers who think we should live 50 deep in a square mile of massive cities - generally an upper middle class who seem to believe they should have constant access to cheap servants they don't have to personally house and look after. Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work. We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
- roflyear 4y ago
  If Japan wants to keep their systems running they need immigration. Or they will have to drastically alter their lifestyles.
  - walleeee 4y ago
    We will all have to drastically alter our lifestyles and the longer we wait the harder it'll be
    - roflyear 4y ago
      I agree, but that is really hard. It only comes by force.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Why? They will and already are leading the charge on automation. Most people's jobs can be automated. In this way, the US is like the Antebellum South, preferring servants driving their economy instead of adopting advances in tech, like the "North" in this metaphor (Japan) forced the necessity of creating.
    - roflyear 4y ago
      Soon their pension and other systems in place to support their aging population will not be able to be supported by those working. Where will the money come from? There needs to be someone there to work. The labor force has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of immigrants looking for jobs. Billions.
oska 4y ago
> No one talks about it People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.
- imgabe 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is under the impression that the country of Japan is obligated to do what some random Internet commenter thinks. People are allowed to have opinions that something would be a good course of action or not. That's not paternalism.
  - oska 4y ago
    The comment was phrased as trenchant criticism of the Japanese on a matter that is strictly their own business, calling them racist & xenophobic and contrasting them to the USA who 'do immigration well'. Do this, be more like (supposedly virtuous) X and don't be Y & Z is clear paternalism and, in my opinion, highly arrogant paternalism to boot.
    - vimacs2 4y ago
      Boo boo? I'm not sure exactly why you expect Japan to be held to a different or lower standard than the rest of the world but I don't stop to think about the feelings of disgruntled nationals when bringing up racism in any other country. What's far more arrogant is you thinking your culture is so magically different that you're somehow immune to such criticisms. I wonder how the Koreans and Chinese would feel about that.
    - pbourke 4y ago
      I suspect that you wouldn’t react as strongly to a smug assertion that the USA is a basket case. It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.
ETH_start 4y ago
I mean Japan has a much lower crime rate than the US, and no massive opioid epidemic, huge homeless camps in the middle of major cities or elderly Asian people being randomly assaulted on the streets like the US does, so I don't know why it should follow in the footsteps of the US. The US should set an example that others want to follow.
- roflyear 4y ago
  I doubt Japan has a lower crime rate. You would have to look past just reported numbers. The US arrests a lot of people and Japan only pursues crimes they can solve 100% due to political reasons.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    Reported homicide rates will 100% correspond to real homicide rates, and they are much lower in Japan. I've also spent a lot of time in Tokyo and it feels dramatically safer. It shows in the little things too, like how clean the streets are. I remember one time seeing someone reserve their table at McDonalds by placing their credit card on it, something which is unthinkable in any US city.
  - pauldenton 4y ago
    What political reasons would exist in Japan, that do not exist in America to keep reported crime down
ralph84 4y ago
Call it whatever you want but by and large people prefer to live around other people with whom they share the same culture and language. Even in countries with large amounts of immigration people self-segregate to be around people like themselves.
alfor 4y ago
We are headed for a massive population collapse everywhere Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement. Japan, China, Europe, Russia. The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?) We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain. Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population. Japan is just a bit ahead of the rest of us.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  "Don't think of it as dying, think of it as beating the rush." I suspect you may well be right but for different reasons: Societies have a life-cycle and there are quite a few of them that feel like they've passed their Zenith and are on the way down. I don't see how that can be reversed once it gains momentum and given the upside-down cost structure that we'll end up with collapse may be rather faster than how long it took to go up. Immigration is just a shell game in this respect, though it may postpone the inevitable for a bit. Outsourcing manufacturing, food production and quite a few other critical components for a functioning society may yield short term gains but long term it isn't sustainable and the current perfect storm of war, climate change, covid and politics may well set off the avalanche.
smcf 4y ago
I see this stated often, but it doesn't seem right to me. Almost any professional with a job offer from a Japanese company can get a work visa. Incoming software developers (and other in-demand workers) can probably rack up enough points to qualify as an HSFP/高度人材 and get permanent residence after 5 years. With enough points you can get it in one. Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
- legutierr 4y ago
  The US accepts a lower percentage of H1b applicants because the number of H1b visas is capped. Other entry routes are less restrictive—most notably via family reunification. If immigration to Japan were to increase substantially enough, most likely things would change and it would not be so easy even for professionals to get work visas. And keep in mind that the bulk of US immigration is not of professionals, but of unskilled workers and their families. The fact that the US is able to use immigration to fill population gaps at every economic level is the main reason that it is not facing the same demographic problems that the rest of the developed world is facing.
- plankers 4y ago
  is it expected of skilled immigrants to be able to speak Japanese? getting people to learn the global lingua franca is a much easier sell. reading and writing Japanese at a fluent level takes quite a while and oodles of memorization.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 4y ago
>There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation. Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is). >No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners. Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either. "Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them. Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  In what sense does the US “have a huge majority of blacks in jail”? This initially seemed hyperbolic and when I looked quickly at the numbers, it still seems hyperbolic.
  - pegasus 4y ago
    The numbers are not as bad as GP implies, but still quite bad: In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, they accounted for 23% of inmates. Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
  - coldtea 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
The US does this well Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Well, the US, unlike other huge countries (india, china, etc..) is not forcasted to have population decline in the next 100 years. This is primarily b/c of immigration.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Immigration to Japan pre-covid was about as strict as going to the US from EU. All countries restrict severely to skilled workers only. US has the bonus of not requiring a barely spoken language globally to integrate. The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
collegeburner 4y ago
i think america is uniquely well suited to accept immigrants bc that's how we got made. one of the biggest things i learned talking to friends i made from outside our country is we don't even realize how much more diverse and accepting we are. like we've obviously got room to grow but looking at how europe is doing after letting in some immigrants is kinda startling.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago

This would seem to be only a temporary local solution. Once world population stabilizes or starts shrinking, you can only increase population by exporting the problem to somebody else.

skyfaller 4y ago
"Good news"! Due to the climate crisis, large sections of the globe are likely to become uninhabitable, so even if world population declines, there will be an influx of refugees into habitable locations. In other words, local population density could easily increase worldwide even if there are fewer people overall.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Or Japan could itself sink into the sea and skip the step of moving people into the newly depopulated islands.

Ygg2 4y ago

As another poster has noted, that's not a solution, that's just exporting problem to another country. What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?

roflyear 4y ago
It's the only thing that works. Otherwise you have to change how you do everything. Much harder.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Well. Looks like everything will need to change anyway.
dnissley 4y ago
I would rather have a runway of X + Y years to deal with these problems than X years, while more thoroughly mixing world culture in hopes of having a more cooperative society by then.

neilwilson 4y ago

Immigration is just colonial appropriation. It's the solution proposed by city dwellers who think we should live 50 deep in a square mile of massive cities - generally an upper middle class who seem to believe they should have constant access to cheap servants they don't have to personally house and look after. Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work. We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.

roflyear 4y ago
If Japan wants to keep their systems running they need immigration. Or they will have to drastically alter their lifestyles.
- walleeee 4y ago
  We will all have to drastically alter our lifestyles and the longer we wait the harder it'll be
  - roflyear 4y ago
    I agree, but that is really hard. It only comes by force.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Why? They will and already are leading the charge on automation. Most people's jobs can be automated. In this way, the US is like the Antebellum South, preferring servants driving their economy instead of adopting advances in tech, like the "North" in this metaphor (Japan) forced the necessity of creating.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Soon their pension and other systems in place to support their aging population will not be able to be supported by those working. Where will the money come from? There needs to be someone there to work. The labor force has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of immigrants looking for jobs. Billions.

oska 4y ago

> No one talks about it People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.

imgabe 4y ago
I don't think anyone is under the impression that the country of Japan is obligated to do what some random Internet commenter thinks. People are allowed to have opinions that something would be a good course of action or not. That's not paternalism.
- oska 4y ago
  The comment was phrased as trenchant criticism of the Japanese on a matter that is strictly their own business, calling them racist & xenophobic and contrasting them to the USA who 'do immigration well'. Do this, be more like (supposedly virtuous) X and don't be Y & Z is clear paternalism and, in my opinion, highly arrogant paternalism to boot.
  - vimacs2 4y ago
    Boo boo? I'm not sure exactly why you expect Japan to be held to a different or lower standard than the rest of the world but I don't stop to think about the feelings of disgruntled nationals when bringing up racism in any other country. What's far more arrogant is you thinking your culture is so magically different that you're somehow immune to such criticisms. I wonder how the Koreans and Chinese would feel about that.
  - pbourke 4y ago
    I suspect that you wouldn’t react as strongly to a smug assertion that the USA is a basket case. It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.

ETH_start 4y ago

I mean Japan has a much lower crime rate than the US, and no massive opioid epidemic, huge homeless camps in the middle of major cities or elderly Asian people being randomly assaulted on the streets like the US does, so I don't know why it should follow in the footsteps of the US. The US should set an example that others want to follow.

roflyear 4y ago
I doubt Japan has a lower crime rate. You would have to look past just reported numbers. The US arrests a lot of people and Japan only pursues crimes they can solve 100% due to political reasons.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Reported homicide rates will 100% correspond to real homicide rates, and they are much lower in Japan. I've also spent a lot of time in Tokyo and it feels dramatically safer. It shows in the little things too, like how clean the streets are. I remember one time seeing someone reserve their table at McDonalds by placing their credit card on it, something which is unthinkable in any US city.
- pauldenton 4y ago
  What political reasons would exist in Japan, that do not exist in America to keep reported crime down

ralph84 4y ago

Call it whatever you want but by and large people prefer to live around other people with whom they share the same culture and language. Even in countries with large amounts of immigration people self-segregate to be around people like themselves.

alfor 4y ago

We are headed for a massive population collapse everywhere Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement. Japan, China, Europe, Russia. The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?) We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain. Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population. Japan is just a bit ahead of the rest of us.

jacquesm 4y ago
"Don't think of it as dying, think of it as beating the rush." I suspect you may well be right but for different reasons: Societies have a life-cycle and there are quite a few of them that feel like they've passed their Zenith and are on the way down. I don't see how that can be reversed once it gains momentum and given the upside-down cost structure that we'll end up with collapse may be rather faster than how long it took to go up. Immigration is just a shell game in this respect, though it may postpone the inevitable for a bit. Outsourcing manufacturing, food production and quite a few other critical components for a functioning society may yield short term gains but long term it isn't sustainable and the current perfect storm of war, climate change, covid and politics may well set off the avalanche.

smcf 4y ago

I see this stated often, but it doesn't seem right to me. Almost any professional with a job offer from a Japanese company can get a work visa. Incoming software developers (and other in-demand workers) can probably rack up enough points to qualify as an HSFP/高度人材 and get permanent residence after 5 years. With enough points you can get it in one. Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.

legutierr 4y ago
The US accepts a lower percentage of H1b applicants because the number of H1b visas is capped. Other entry routes are less restrictive—most notably via family reunification. If immigration to Japan were to increase substantially enough, most likely things would change and it would not be so easy even for professionals to get work visas. And keep in mind that the bulk of US immigration is not of professionals, but of unskilled workers and their families. The fact that the US is able to use immigration to fill population gaps at every economic level is the main reason that it is not facing the same demographic problems that the rest of the developed world is facing.
plankers 4y ago
is it expected of skilled immigrants to be able to speak Japanese? getting people to learn the global lingua franca is a much easier sell. reading and writing Japanese at a fluent level takes quite a while and oodles of memorization.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 4y ago

>There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation. Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is). >No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners. Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either. "Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them. Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.

sokoloff 4y ago
In what sense does the US “have a huge majority of blacks in jail”? This initially seemed hyperbolic and when I looked quickly at the numbers, it still seems hyperbolic.
- pegasus 4y ago
  The numbers are not as bad as GP implies, but still quite bad: In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, they accounted for 23% of inmates. Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
- coldtea 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

The US does this well Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.

roflyear 4y ago
Well, the US, unlike other huge countries (india, china, etc..) is not forcasted to have population decline in the next 100 years. This is primarily b/c of immigration.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Immigration to Japan pre-covid was about as strict as going to the US from EU. All countries restrict severely to skilled workers only. US has the bonus of not requiring a barely spoken language globally to integrate. The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.

collegeburner 4y ago

i think america is uniquely well suited to accept immigrants bc that's how we got made. one of the biggest things i learned talking to friends i made from outside our country is we don't even realize how much more diverse and accepting we are. like we've obviously got room to grow but looking at how europe is doing after letting in some immigrants is kinda startling.