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> mass immigration would effectively mean the end of Japanese society. Meh, in the same sense the country being forced to open up to European merchants, the Me

> mass immigration would effectively mean the end of Japanese society. Meh, in the same sense the country being forced to open up to European merchants, the Meiji Restoration, or the two atomic bombs and the Emperor's fall from a godlike being to a symbolic leader "destroyed" Japan. It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway. Women leading men? People getting married in Christian churches? Unthinkable!

dctoedt 2y ago
> It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway. In 2003 I read an essay that said in part, "It was fascinating to learn that the Chinese were visiting [Chinatown in] San Francisco to look at their own history. They saw the city as a snapshot of Chinese culture, pickled in time, whose residents preserved as much as possible the China of 1850, from which San Francisco had been populated. The visiting Chinese were fascinated by the antique dress, the quaint old customs, and the old-fashioned language. Our most vivid memory of the event was of the visitor who spoke some English remarking 'This little town is more Chinese than China is.'" (The essay was at the Anglicans Online Website but seems no longer to be there; I'd quoted it in a blog post, https://www.questioningchristian.com/2003/12/time_warps.html https://www.questioningchristian.com/2003/12/time_warps.html) EDIT: Thanks to @philipkglass, who found it on the Wayback Machine (see below); I'd looked there but didn't think to look where he did: https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.anglicansonline.org/031207/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...
- philipkglass 2y ago
  Your comment prompted me to dig around in the Wayback Machine until I found the original essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.anglicansonline.org/031207/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...
  - dctoedt 2y ago
    Thank you! I looked at the Wayback Machine but was unsuccessful at finding it; I guess I didn't look hard enough.
    - philipkglass 2y ago
      You're welcome! The Anglicans Online site wasn't captured often enough for the week you referenced to be directly accessible. While looking at the nearest capture I noticed that the Anglicans Online site itself retained past essays on a "morgue" subdomain. I was then able to use an early 2004 snapshot to find the essay from December 2003.
- maxglute 2y ago
  Related phenomenon to this would be immigrant "time bubble", when immigrant's mental conception of their original country is frozen in time, when after decades, their origin country has moved on. Especially true in older generations that don't travel back often and fallback to what they knew.
rayiner 2y ago
Sure, societies evolve, but they evolve together. Introducing heterogeneity is an entirely different thing. Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order? Sweden is the bellwether for this. They have a negative immigration rate now. They tried immigration, realized it didn’t work, and stopped it. Just like they tried social democracy in the 1960s, realized it didn’t work, and moved back to a more market economy in the 1980s.
- dctoedt 2y ago
  > Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order? OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world. Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall. I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years. EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    I limited the time horizon to 70 years because Japan’s experience with immigration is much more likely to be like Sweden’s or France’s than America’s. But America isn’t even an exception. Without immigration, America would be more like Australia or Canada in the late 20th century. Those are better countries than the U.S.: more socially cohesive, better run, lower in crime, less corrupt, and more efficient. Canadians and Australians get much better government per tax dollar because they spend far less political capital bridging over group conflicts. The influx of immigration I was a part of made Virginia a worse place too. It was an extremely orderly and well-run state when I was growing up in the 1990s. It’s still coasting on that, but in 30 years it will go the way of California. It’s not a coincidence that there are zero immigrant societies that function as well as Denmark or Sweden. Disorder and conflict is part and parcel of putting different cultural groups in the same place and having them try to run a country together.

dctoedt 2y ago

> It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway. In 2003 I read an essay that said in part, "It was fascinating to learn that the Chinese were visiting [Chinatown in] San Francisco to look at their own history. They saw the city as a snapshot of Chinese culture, pickled in time, whose residents preserved as much as possible the China of 1850, from which San Francisco had been populated. The visiting Chinese were fascinated by the antique dress, the quaint old customs, and the old-fashioned language. Our most vivid memory of the event was of the visitor who spoke some English remarking 'This little town is more Chinese than China is.'" (The essay was at the Anglicans Online Website but seems no longer to be there; I'd quoted it in a blog post, https://www.questioningchristian.com/2003/12/time_warps.html https://www.questioningchristian.com/2003/12/time_warps.html) EDIT: Thanks to @philipkglass, who found it on the Wayback Machine (see below); I'd looked there but didn't think to look where he did: https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.anglicansonline.org/031207/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...

philipkglass 2y ago
Your comment prompted me to dig around in the Wayback Machine until I found the original essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.anglicansonline.org/031207/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...
- dctoedt 2y ago
  Thank you! I looked at the Wayback Machine but was unsuccessful at finding it; I guess I didn't look hard enough.
  - philipkglass 2y ago
    You're welcome! The Anglicans Online site wasn't captured often enough for the week you referenced to be directly accessible. While looking at the nearest capture I noticed that the Anglicans Online site itself retained past essays on a "morgue" subdomain. I was then able to use an early 2004 snapshot to find the essay from December 2003.
maxglute 2y ago
Related phenomenon to this would be immigrant "time bubble", when immigrant's mental conception of their original country is frozen in time, when after decades, their origin country has moved on. Especially true in older generations that don't travel back often and fallback to what they knew.

rayiner 2y ago

Sure, societies evolve, but they evolve together. Introducing heterogeneity is an entirely different thing. Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order? Sweden is the bellwether for this. They have a negative immigration rate now. They tried immigration, realized it didn’t work, and stopped it. Just like they tried social democracy in the 1960s, realized it didn’t work, and moved back to a more market economy in the 1980s.

dctoedt 2y ago
> Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order? OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world. Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall. I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years. EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.
- rayiner 2y ago
  I limited the time horizon to 70 years because Japan’s experience with immigration is much more likely to be like Sweden’s or France’s than America’s. But America isn’t even an exception. Without immigration, America would be more like Australia or Canada in the late 20th century. Those are better countries than the U.S.: more socially cohesive, better run, lower in crime, less corrupt, and more efficient. Canadians and Australians get much better government per tax dollar because they spend far less political capital bridging over group conflicts. The influx of immigration I was a part of made Virginia a worse place too. It was an extremely orderly and well-run state when I was growing up in the 1990s. It’s still coasting on that, but in 30 years it will go the way of California. It’s not a coincidence that there are zero immigrant societies that function as well as Denmark or Sweden. Disorder and conflict is part and parcel of putting different cultural groups in the same place and having them try to run a country together.