9 ms·

Turning Japanese: Coping with stasis

122 points by lermontov 12y ago

carsongross 12y ago
Nearly everyone was on the same proverbial page: Japan's population is 98.5 per cent Japanese, as defined by citizenry. While ethnic diversity has its strengths (and some academics point out that, when you analyse the population's regional roots, Japan is quite diverse), a set of common cultural values, instilled from birth, may strengthen resilience in the face of crisis and adversity. Thought-crime in progress, citizens. Look away! Look away!
- kazinator 12y ago
  I think what that means that if some Japanese folk are in a crisis, they (within obvious limitations of individual personalities and capacities) can generally count on each other to "do the Japanese thing". That brings a certain spontaneous efficiency and order into a chaotic situation, compared to having to deal with clashes of different mindsets on top of the crisis.
  - dhimes 12y ago
    Indeed, we were all counting on that with Fukashima.
  - hkmurakami 12y ago
    >do the Japanese thing I think this is important to stress, because "doing the Japanese thing" isn't a natural, subconscious thing. It's a deliberate "playing the part". The uniformity of Japanese society isn't entirely due to the uniformity of its people. It's also strongly driven by people responsibly acting like they are "supposed to" in role play fashion. There are many people who couldn't handle the role play and bowed out of mainstream work and life. It's kind of like not being able to guzzle down the coolaid at a "SV Startup" and thus bowing out.
    - kazinator 12y ago
      I have been informed by some non-immigrant Japanese people that they find some Japanese immigrants living in, say, Canada or America, to have their own way of thinking (so that, "yappari" (of course, no surprise!), those people prefer being immigrants in another culture). So sometimes I ask the question, like it's great in Japan, why do you want to be here? The reasons are various, among them things like, "I like just addressing people by their first name", or "there are people from many different countries and cultures in Canada; people are not 'the same'". Once on the train (in Canada) I overheard some snippet of conversation among some girls about some planned event, "... minna Nihonjin dakara ikitakunai" ("I don't want to go, because everyone there will be Japanese").
      - hkmurakami 12y ago
        I know exactly what that girl meant by that phrase and empathize with her. As as outsider of any degree (whether American born like me or simply not having fit in with the "way things are" in a Japanese group setting), it can be stifling.
    - lovemenot 12y ago
      >> "doing the Japanese thing" isn't a natural, subconscious thing. It's a deliberate "playing the part". Arguably, for anyone, it always is just playing a part. Japanese seem to get this point better than some, so tend to keep in character for longer.
      - kazinator 12y ago
        Basically, you're not going to say and do the right thing, if you're raised by wolves in the woods, no matter what genes you contain. It is learned. So then whether it's acting its just a question of how deeply is the learning integrated into your personality and how it aligns with your so called temperament.
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  You're the only person who has mentioned that paragraph. Clearly the thought police are asleep today.
- drpgq 12y ago
  Well even Robert Putnam has admitted that diversity is overrated.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    After delaying publication of his work until he could figure out how to spin it. Personally I think the Japanese are blessed for having a homogeneous society because it means they don't have to devote time in every discussion to race issues.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- le_lenny_face 12y ago
  Jesus Christ. Why do we even allow this sort of pseudo-scientific "race realist" (read: racist) rubbish on Hacker News? Japan is one of the most racist first-world countries in the world. Have you even seen their incessant xenophobia?
  - girvo 12y ago
    I think there can be an interesting discussion on the benefits of integration vs. diversity, even if I personally think diversity is something that is good. Integration has good sides and bad sides; the good being the focus of the original article, the bad being horrendous xenophobia and terrible treatment of those who don't integrate. Shutting discussion down as if things don't have multiple sides isn't very liberal, in my opinion, even if I personally disagree with the focus of said discussion.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Culture isn't race... Are there actual comments from "race realists" somwhere I'm missing, or are you raging against something that doesn't exist?
  - Danieru 12y ago
    No I haven't seen the zenophobia. Granted I only live here so maybe it is more obvious from SF?
- cbd1984 12y ago
  Yes. Being anti-racist is just like being the Thought Police in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
hkmurakami 12y ago
>And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens on the way from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of the Los Angeles highway off-ramps by LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit. Even on the train from Narita Airport to Tokyo, you'll pass plenty of comparatively run down "commerce areas" adjacent to small train stops. The buildings are old, and made of nondescript concrete that have been stained by the rainfall over decades. It makes me uneasy every time I see these sort of buildings. Taking the Narita Express or the Limousime Busses will largely insulate you from seeing those things though.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  Yeah, that line is ridiculous. Tokyo is the only part of Japan that's still growing in population, and that will stall and reverse by 2020. Even in Tokyo, "new and shiny" is concentrated in a few central spots near major train stations. Population in the rest of the country is shrinking, with many places in outright collapse. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering-into-truth/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering...
  - jcurbo 12y ago
    Bit of a sidebar but I really like Spike Japan. I wish they'd compile all the blog posts into a book.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      I just wish he'd keep posting. I got the distinct impression someone complained to his employer, though, and he was told to stop. I used hit that site up all the time looking for a new post.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    I went to Gunma a couple months ago and saw this first hand. Small villages where abandoned housing outnumbered occupied buildings 2 to 1. In this case it was in a more mountainous area, but there's a lot of community collapse going on (the tsunami probably exacerbated the trend in some areas)
marcusgarvey 12y ago
>from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite It certainly feels like the entire developed world is at this awakening point. Some cultures are just built to handle it worse, or better, than others.
- hyperion2010 12y ago
  If we make it for long enough we will face a time when growth based economics fail. The funny thing is that if you think quality of life is related to GDP per capita then one way to improve quality of life is to allow GDP to stagnate while you decrease the population. We desperately need to find alternatives to US style consumer economies because they are simply unsustainable and don't really lead to happiness or fulfilment. It amuses me that this article seems to suggest that it is not technological innovations that may save Japan but their longstanding cultural habits and priorities.
gwern 12y ago
Not exactly a hard-hitting analysis.
- bjwbell 12y ago
  Just looking at the title of his book "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S." gives doubts to his objectivity.
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    You literally just judged a book by its cover in order to accuse its author of a lack of objectivity. God I hate you guys sometimes.
    - troubled5 12y ago
      No, the circumstantial evidence of the book title was placed along with the shallow exposition that made up the "analysis" and was found to point in the same way: towards a not very objective assessment by the author. I mean, this is a the text where a teacher relates anecdotes of the japanese actively sabotaging their learning (answering "yes" even when they don't understand) in a positive context.
- gcr 12y ago
  A bibliography would be nice. :)
Bognar 12y ago
This site has this line in bookstrap.css: /* Use responsive pixels */ font-size: 1px; Since Firefox uses the font size to determine scroll distance, this page scrolls really slowly in FF.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  Seems OK for me with FF 33 and 36 on Mac.
  - pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
    He's talking about the click wheel scrolling that goes line by line. Not the two-finger magic scrolling in OS X.
    - Dylan16807 12y ago
      And arrow key scrolling. So slow.
- edgarvaldes 12y ago
  Using FF 36 on Linux Mint, same issue. Thanks.
- e12e 12y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I was mostly happy the thing worked well (except for arrow-key scrolling) with js off... I wasn't aware of this (mis)feature of Firefox (I can see the rationale of using line-height for scrolling a line at a time, so it might be safe to say that the css is at fault here).
  - Slackwise 12y ago
    Speaking of misfeatures: I was scrolling down this page, wanted to go back up to re-read something, and the entire page just changed. I wondered why for a second, then made a half-inch swipe to the left and discovered there's a "feature" to let me change the page for some reason, but it requires that I change the fundamental way I operate my phone/browser. Tried to read the article again, and on the way down to where I was last reading, the page changed again. Closed the tab and won't bother reading the rest because I'm infuriated. This is on a Nexus 5 with Android 5.1, so no, there is no rendering issue here, or lag in read of inputs. This is just an anti-feature that need not exist, nor is made obvious to the user that it exists and needs to be worked around.
jayfuerstenberg 12y ago
Herbivore men in Japanese is not "soshoku danshi", it's "soshoku KEI danshi". Just sayin'.
- aikinai 12y ago
  I just looked it up and you're technically right; that's apparently the official dictionary term, but I've never heard anyone actually say that. Everyone calls them "soshoku danshi."
  - jayfuerstenberg 12y ago
    Well the kanji uses "kei" too.
    - aikinai 12y ago
      A Google fight (excluding Chinese) turns up 549,000 results for 草食系男子 and 571,000 for 草食男子. Much closer than I expected, but the 'kei' is definitely not required.
      - adsofhoads 12y ago
        I think they meant that http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-three/images/DeskHerbivorous.jpg http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-three/images/DeskHe... has the 系 but then the translation the article gives below it is missing the "kei".
        aikinai 12y ago
        Oh, I see! Yeah, that's true.
- mlmonkey 12y ago
  Does this apply to vegetarian Japanese men? Does this mean vegetarianism is considered a negative (at least among men)?
tsotha 12y ago
I don't find his reasoning compelling at all. Countries can coast on the efforts of previous generations for a long time. Indeed, you would expect to see all the outward signs of prosperity in a society which has comparatively few children to whom resources must be allocated.
drpgq 12y ago
I think when comparing Japan's growth versus other countries one has to remember the differences between GDP growth and GDP growth per capita (as the article alluded to). I live in Ontario, which basically has been sub 2% GDP growth since the 90s, but has had around 1.1% population growth. So most of the GDP growth has been from population increases rather than people individually becoming richer. Sometimes I thing the Japanese are on to something.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway344 12y ago
  For anyone who is interested in Ontario's GDP numbers, I found some data. Excel so beware. http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/economy/ecaccts/oea_hist.xls http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/economy/ecaccts/oea_hist.xls
  - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
    You can read Excel in Pandas and in R.
    - w1ntermute 12y ago
      As well as LibreOffice Calc.
lovemenot 12y ago
Such cultural aspects of Japan are indeed attractive and I hope they will endure. However, the current economic model is not sustainable for a country of 120M, or even 80 - 90% of that (after shrinkage of human assets). Ironically, from the perspective of the country as a whole, sustainable agriculture / craft industries are very far from being so. I believe, Japan needs to find a way to attract economically stimulating diversity into the midst of its cultural homogeneity, without generating excessive social disapproval. OIST[1] is an interesting experiment and I'd like to keep an eye on its progress. Otherwise, it'll eventually come down to a drastic upheaval, along the lines of Meiji or Post-WWII. And that can only happen after the other countries have laid down a bright new model for Japan to follow and improve upon. Which could be a long time hence since, as the article says, Japan is in the vanguard right now. [1] http://www.oist.jp/ http://www.oist.jp/
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  They need to bring in immigrants of only a single gender from any given nation. They will assimilate much quicker than those who will have the opposite gender to form relations with and isolated communities with. Early immigrants right after the war in Britain assimilated quite well, even normally conservative ones like Muslim communities when only men were brought over.
  - lovemenot 12y ago
    I am not sure that I am arguing for large-scale, planned mixing and assimilation. Rather I am proposing that native Japanese and resident visitors could each benefit from co-habitation of the physical space, despite having very divergent social and economic models.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  The interesting difference to eg. the Meiji revolution, and what makes this really uncharted territory, is that the extreme aging of Japan makes both democratic and violent upheaval near-impossible. You can't vote out the bastards, because the pensioner vote outweighs the youth, and any violent students/revolutionaries will not be able to get the majority of the population on their side. As a practical example, my father-in-law was a salaryman with a rock-solid pension and amazing health care (a month in a hospital costs $50, etc). His generation has no incentive to change the system that has worked for them -- even though it imposes an increasingly unsustainable burden on the ever-shrinking working generations paying for it.
LukeHoersten 12y ago
'"Do rich societies really need to get richer and richer indefinitely?" he asks.' They do if they are going to pay off their mega-debt. The real fear is when the GDP drops below the yearly interest payments. I feel the same when I go to nice European countries. "Wow everything is so nice" and then I remind myself that Germany is paying for it all. It's not sustainable. Look at some of the Scandinavian countries for nice mass public transit in a more sustainable setting.
- thret 12y ago
  Does anyone actually think the USA will ever pay off its debt?
  - gnaritas 12y ago
    Public debt is private savings, you don't ever want to pay it off. Debt is to be serviced, not paid off.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    The way fractional reserve currencies work it's literally impossible for everyone to pay off their debt, and if a substantial portion of people did there would literally be no money. So... no.
  - lmm 12y ago
    If you're talking about bonds, it came pretty close near the end of the Clinton administration. (If you're considering every dollar as a piece of government debt, which in some sense it is, then probably not).
- roymurdock 12y ago
  There is an alternative to paying off mega-debt - defaulting. Just as Germany did when they were forced to pay ridiculous war reparations after WWI (after a period of hyperinflation as they tried to print their debts away, much in the spirit of the EU QE efforts). If Germany is paying for all of this and building an unsustainable debt by not investing in European infrastructure and businesses that will generate it a return, then so be it - this is a problem for Germany. They'll either have to start seizing assets or annulling debt.
timeal 12y ago
Why so many negative comments? Japan certainly seems to outshine the US according to multiple metrics, so they are doing something right: Japan's unemployment rate is 3.6% vs 5.5% for the US: http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/roudou/results/month/index.htm http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/roudou/results/month/inde... vs http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 Japan's homelessness rate is 20 per 100,000 population (25,000 homeless people in 2001) vs 220 per 100,000 in the US: http://books.google.com/books?id=q-PgHH8TJi8C&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=q-PgHH8TJi8C&printsec=front... vs https://www.onecpd.info/resources/documents/2012AHAR_PITestimates.pdf https://www.onecpd.info/resources/documents/2012AHAR_PITesti... Japan's incarceration rate is 50 per 100,000 population vs 710 per 100,000 for the US. Japan is even on track to stop increasing their public deficit by this year (thanks to the new sales tax) whereas the US is far from being on budget. And Japan even manages to achieve this despite a significantly aging demographics (lots of social benefits paid to non-working people), compare http://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/japan-population-pyramid-2014.gif http://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/japan-p... vs http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/3/28/saupload_3-28-us.png http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/3/28/saupload_3-... Japan's society seems to be functioning better than the US. I appreciate this article for trying to find out why.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > Why so many negative comments? Because the English-speaking world has roughly agreed on the neoliberal economic consensus that extreme individualism, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism is the Only Way. It is an absolute dogma, reinforced constantly through the press and the best-funded political parties. Rich nations like Japan or Norway who are trundling happily along with more equitable societies, rather than a return to Victorian social models, need to be stigmatized lest one start asking questions like "what's the point having a country of billionaires and ditch-diggers?" Might as well pitch atheism in Saudi Arabia.
  - funkyy 12y ago
    "How dare Japan not fall under our rules, hurr durr" Whole Asia is rising thanks to one and single fact - they stick to their rules. While whole western world is bending every possible rule to wage wars, shut protesters and buy votes. As history teaches us east will collapse under its own degeneration of freedom so Asia can flourish. Then Asia will collapse in its self control obsession so the east world will flourish. Its how the world rolls over and over.
stevedekorte 12y ago
Is the author saying recession caused the good aspects of Japan. If that is the hypothesis, then we expect that none of these cultural aspects like low crime rates, politeness, good food, cleanliness, etc existed before the Japanese recession? Why do people take articles like this seriously?
aikinai 12y ago
I just noticed that the calligraphy responsively changes from vertical right-to-left to horizontal left-to-right even though it's an image. If you're reading on an iPad, you can check just by changing the orientation. Very cool attention to detail.
- e12e 12y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out (reading on a desktop, so I'm wouldn't have noticed otherwise). The source does this via: <figure class="book-fullbleed ipad-portrait-img"> <img src="ima( … )9.jpg" alt=""> </figure> <figure class="book-fullbleed ipad-landscape-img"> <img src="imag( … )x1039.jpg" alt=""> </figure> And where ipad-landscape-img is backed by media-selectors in bookstrap.js. I wonder if this "bookstrap" think is related to bookstrap.org? The site is blank, and the github-repo linked to from https://www.npmjs.com/package/bookstrap https://www.npmjs.com/package/bookstrap is gone/empty … Either way it's refreshing to see some people still make sensible design without a ton of minimized CSS (even if this still pulls in two big stylesheets and a js-file … all to display some text … ).
Animats 12y ago
There's a new "Cool Japan" venture capital fund.[1] It's run by the government and some big banks. Since their startup late last year, they've bought the world's largest translation/subbing service, a TV channel, and an anime streaming operation, and opened a food court in Singapore. The government of Korea has been spending heavily to promote K-Pop, and Japan is responding. They take proposals. See their investment criteria.[2] Someone should propose a robot-run restaurant in San Francisco. [1] http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/investment/flow.html http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/investment/flow.html
- rtpg 12y ago
  what's the story behind the food court?
Inetgate 12y ago
There is one typo in brush style typeface translation. The word "萎縮" is pronounced as "Ishuku" not "Jishuku". If writer want to "Jishuku", chinese character should be "自粛".
VaedaStrike 12y ago
Japan is a cut rose. Cut in a clean way. Kept at an optimal temperature and sitting in an optimized floral solution. It will last quite a while in a very attractive state, but its still cut from that which renews and replaces.they, like much of the world, are in for either a great mutation or an extinguishing.
greggman 12y ago
I've had that experience as well but it's arguably a pretty self selected thing. It's only people living abroad who are almost all people who wanted to live abroad. Ask the same questions to an actual slice of Japanese natives living in Japan and the number of people that want those things will likely be a tiny percentage of the total.
chaostheory 12y ago
> Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low. The difference with at least Germany, Italy, and Singapore is that they are fighting low birthrates with increased immigration. Japan is not. They are betting on robotics, in order to keep their population homogenous.
agentultra 12y ago
> I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable. When I visited Tokyo in 2008 I felt the same thing upon my return home. The transportation systems are efficient, punctual, and clean. People paid for their meals, bought snacks, and took the subway using their phone to pay for all of it. People were, with few exceptions, polite and helpful despite my boorish attempts to fit in. Everything... it's so well thought out. You hand the store clerk your yen on a small tray. You can swipe your phone at a vending machine to get a quick bottle of water. You can walk from a bustling interstitial arcade into a quiet shrine. It seems like everything is meticulous and considered. Even the seediest clubs in Roppongi or the dirtiest punk bars I could find still maintained the propriety and concern for others I found everywhere else. After one show the band passed around a bucket for some yen and we all sat down together and had food and drinks. One of the kids I came with made sure I got on the right train before the subway shut down. Even as a foreigner I could find people who were concerned about me as they were for everyone else. Arriving back in Canada, where I'm from, was not what I had expected. The streets are haphazard and practical without a consideration for how it looks. People are louder. Traffic is thick. Litter abounds. Turnstiles, ticket booths, and grumpy ticket booth operators. Pushing... always the pushing. I had to wait a while before Street Fighter 4 would come across the Pacific so I could play it again... and 7 years for Apple to announce that you may eventually be able to buy a Coke with your phone in certain regions. Coming back to Canada felt like walking backwards in time.

122 points by lermontov 12y ago

Nearly everyone was on the same proverbial page: Japan's population is 98.5 per cent Japanese, as defined by citizenry. While ethnic diversity has its strengths (and some academics point out that, when you analyse the population's regional roots, Japan is quite diverse), a set of common cultural values, instilled from birth, may strengthen resilience in the face of crisis and adversity. Thought-crime in progress, citizens. Look away! Look away!

kazinator 12y ago
I think what that means that if some Japanese folk are in a crisis, they (within obvious limitations of individual personalities and capacities) can generally count on each other to "do the Japanese thing". That brings a certain spontaneous efficiency and order into a chaotic situation, compared to having to deal with clashes of different mindsets on top of the crisis.
- dhimes 12y ago
  Indeed, we were all counting on that with Fukashima.
- hkmurakami 12y ago
  >do the Japanese thing I think this is important to stress, because "doing the Japanese thing" isn't a natural, subconscious thing. It's a deliberate "playing the part". The uniformity of Japanese society isn't entirely due to the uniformity of its people. It's also strongly driven by people responsibly acting like they are "supposed to" in role play fashion. There are many people who couldn't handle the role play and bowed out of mainstream work and life. It's kind of like not being able to guzzle down the coolaid at a "SV Startup" and thus bowing out.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    I have been informed by some non-immigrant Japanese people that they find some Japanese immigrants living in, say, Canada or America, to have their own way of thinking (so that, "yappari" (of course, no surprise!), those people prefer being immigrants in another culture). So sometimes I ask the question, like it's great in Japan, why do you want to be here? The reasons are various, among them things like, "I like just addressing people by their first name", or "there are people from many different countries and cultures in Canada; people are not 'the same'". Once on the train (in Canada) I overheard some snippet of conversation among some girls about some planned event, "... minna Nihonjin dakara ikitakunai" ("I don't want to go, because everyone there will be Japanese").
    - hkmurakami 12y ago
      I know exactly what that girl meant by that phrase and empathize with her. As as outsider of any degree (whether American born like me or simply not having fit in with the "way things are" in a Japanese group setting), it can be stifling.
  - lovemenot 12y ago
    >> "doing the Japanese thing" isn't a natural, subconscious thing. It's a deliberate "playing the part". Arguably, for anyone, it always is just playing a part. Japanese seem to get this point better than some, so tend to keep in character for longer.
    - kazinator 12y ago
      Basically, you're not going to say and do the right thing, if you're raised by wolves in the woods, no matter what genes you contain. It is learned. So then whether it's acting its just a question of how deeply is the learning integrated into your personality and how it aligns with your so called temperament.
lclarkmichalek 12y ago
You're the only person who has mentioned that paragraph. Clearly the thought police are asleep today.
drpgq 12y ago
Well even Robert Putnam has admitted that diversity is overrated.
- tsotha 12y ago
  After delaying publication of his work until he could figure out how to spin it. Personally I think the Japanese are blessed for having a homogeneous society because it means they don't have to devote time in every discussion to race issues.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
le_lenny_face 12y ago
Jesus Christ. Why do we even allow this sort of pseudo-scientific "race realist" (read: racist) rubbish on Hacker News? Japan is one of the most racist first-world countries in the world. Have you even seen their incessant xenophobia?
- girvo 12y ago
  I think there can be an interesting discussion on the benefits of integration vs. diversity, even if I personally think diversity is something that is good. Integration has good sides and bad sides; the good being the focus of the original article, the bad being horrendous xenophobia and terrible treatment of those who don't integrate. Shutting discussion down as if things don't have multiple sides isn't very liberal, in my opinion, even if I personally disagree with the focus of said discussion.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Culture isn't race... Are there actual comments from "race realists" somwhere I'm missing, or are you raging against something that doesn't exist?
- Danieru 12y ago
  No I haven't seen the zenophobia. Granted I only live here so maybe it is more obvious from SF?
cbd1984 12y ago
Yes. Being anti-racist is just like being the Thought Police in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

hkmurakami 12y ago

>And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens on the way from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of the Los Angeles highway off-ramps by LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit. Even on the train from Narita Airport to Tokyo, you'll pass plenty of comparatively run down "commerce areas" adjacent to small train stops. The buildings are old, and made of nondescript concrete that have been stained by the rainfall over decades. It makes me uneasy every time I see these sort of buildings. Taking the Narita Express or the Limousime Busses will largely insulate you from seeing those things though.

jpatokal 12y ago
Yeah, that line is ridiculous. Tokyo is the only part of Japan that's still growing in population, and that will stall and reverse by 2020. Even in Tokyo, "new and shiny" is concentrated in a few central spots near major train stations. Population in the rest of the country is shrinking, with many places in outright collapse. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering-into-truth/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering...
- jcurbo 12y ago
  Bit of a sidebar but I really like Spike Japan. I wish they'd compile all the blog posts into a book.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    I just wish he'd keep posting. I got the distinct impression someone complained to his employer, though, and he was told to stop. I used hit that site up all the time looking for a new post.
- rtpg 12y ago
  I went to Gunma a couple months ago and saw this first hand. Small villages where abandoned housing outnumbered occupied buildings 2 to 1. In this case it was in a more mountainous area, but there's a lot of community collapse going on (the tsunami probably exacerbated the trend in some areas)

marcusgarvey 12y ago

>from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite It certainly feels like the entire developed world is at this awakening point. Some cultures are just built to handle it worse, or better, than others.

hyperion2010 12y ago
If we make it for long enough we will face a time when growth based economics fail. The funny thing is that if you think quality of life is related to GDP per capita then one way to improve quality of life is to allow GDP to stagnate while you decrease the population. We desperately need to find alternatives to US style consumer economies because they are simply unsustainable and don't really lead to happiness or fulfilment. It amuses me that this article seems to suggest that it is not technological innovations that may save Japan but their longstanding cultural habits and priorities.

gwern 12y ago

Not exactly a hard-hitting analysis.

bjwbell 12y ago
Just looking at the title of his book "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S." gives doubts to his objectivity.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  You literally just judged a book by its cover in order to accuse its author of a lack of objectivity. God I hate you guys sometimes.
  - troubled5 12y ago
    No, the circumstantial evidence of the book title was placed along with the shallow exposition that made up the "analysis" and was found to point in the same way: towards a not very objective assessment by the author. I mean, this is a the text where a teacher relates anecdotes of the japanese actively sabotaging their learning (answering "yes" even when they don't understand) in a positive context.
gcr 12y ago
A bibliography would be nice. :)

Bognar 12y ago

This site has this line in bookstrap.css: /* Use responsive pixels */ font-size: 1px; Since Firefox uses the font size to determine scroll distance, this page scrolls really slowly in FF.

serve_yay 12y ago
Seems OK for me with FF 33 and 36 on Mac.
- pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
  He's talking about the click wheel scrolling that goes line by line. Not the two-finger magic scrolling in OS X.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    And arrow key scrolling. So slow.
edgarvaldes 12y ago
Using FF 36 on Linux Mint, same issue. Thanks.
e12e 12y ago
Thanks for the heads up. I was mostly happy the thing worked well (except for arrow-key scrolling) with js off... I wasn't aware of this (mis)feature of Firefox (I can see the rationale of using line-height for scrolling a line at a time, so it might be safe to say that the css is at fault here).
- Slackwise 12y ago
  Speaking of misfeatures: I was scrolling down this page, wanted to go back up to re-read something, and the entire page just changed. I wondered why for a second, then made a half-inch swipe to the left and discovered there's a "feature" to let me change the page for some reason, but it requires that I change the fundamental way I operate my phone/browser. Tried to read the article again, and on the way down to where I was last reading, the page changed again. Closed the tab and won't bother reading the rest because I'm infuriated. This is on a Nexus 5 with Android 5.1, so no, there is no rendering issue here, or lag in read of inputs. This is just an anti-feature that need not exist, nor is made obvious to the user that it exists and needs to be worked around.

jayfuerstenberg 12y ago

Herbivore men in Japanese is not "soshoku danshi", it's "soshoku KEI danshi". Just sayin'.

aikinai 12y ago
I just looked it up and you're technically right; that's apparently the official dictionary term, but I've never heard anyone actually say that. Everyone calls them "soshoku danshi."
- jayfuerstenberg 12y ago
  Well the kanji uses "kei" too.
  - aikinai 12y ago
    A Google fight (excluding Chinese) turns up 549,000 results for 草食系男子 and 571,000 for 草食男子. Much closer than I expected, but the 'kei' is definitely not required.
    - adsofhoads 12y ago
      I think they meant that http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-three/images/DeskHerbivorous.jpg http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-three/images/DeskHe... has the 系 but then the translation the article gives below it is missing the "kei".
      - aikinai 12y ago
        Oh, I see! Yeah, that's true.
mlmonkey 12y ago
Does this apply to vegetarian Japanese men? Does this mean vegetarianism is considered a negative (at least among men)?

tsotha 12y ago

I don't find his reasoning compelling at all. Countries can coast on the efforts of previous generations for a long time. Indeed, you would expect to see all the outward signs of prosperity in a society which has comparatively few children to whom resources must be allocated.

drpgq 12y ago

I think when comparing Japan's growth versus other countries one has to remember the differences between GDP growth and GDP growth per capita (as the article alluded to). I live in Ontario, which basically has been sub 2% GDP growth since the 90s, but has had around 1.1% population growth. So most of the GDP growth has been from population increases rather than people individually becoming richer. Sometimes I thing the Japanese are on to something.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
throwaway344 12y ago
For anyone who is interested in Ontario's GDP numbers, I found some data. Excel so beware. http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/economy/ecaccts/oea_hist.xls http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/economy/ecaccts/oea_hist.xls
- semi-extrinsic 12y ago
  You can read Excel in Pandas and in R.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    As well as LibreOffice Calc.

lovemenot 12y ago

Such cultural aspects of Japan are indeed attractive and I hope they will endure. However, the current economic model is not sustainable for a country of 120M, or even 80 - 90% of that (after shrinkage of human assets). Ironically, from the perspective of the country as a whole, sustainable agriculture / craft industries are very far from being so. I believe, Japan needs to find a way to attract economically stimulating diversity into the midst of its cultural homogeneity, without generating excessive social disapproval. OIST[1] is an interesting experiment and I'd like to keep an eye on its progress. Otherwise, it'll eventually come down to a drastic upheaval, along the lines of Meiji or Post-WWII. And that can only happen after the other countries have laid down a bright new model for Japan to follow and improve upon. Which could be a long time hence since, as the article says, Japan is in the vanguard right now. [1] http://www.oist.jp/ http://www.oist.jp/

IndianAstronaut 12y ago
They need to bring in immigrants of only a single gender from any given nation. They will assimilate much quicker than those who will have the opposite gender to form relations with and isolated communities with. Early immigrants right after the war in Britain assimilated quite well, even normally conservative ones like Muslim communities when only men were brought over.
- lovemenot 12y ago
  I am not sure that I am arguing for large-scale, planned mixing and assimilation. Rather I am proposing that native Japanese and resident visitors could each benefit from co-habitation of the physical space, despite having very divergent social and economic models.
jpatokal 12y ago
The interesting difference to eg. the Meiji revolution, and what makes this really uncharted territory, is that the extreme aging of Japan makes both democratic and violent upheaval near-impossible. You can't vote out the bastards, because the pensioner vote outweighs the youth, and any violent students/revolutionaries will not be able to get the majority of the population on their side. As a practical example, my father-in-law was a salaryman with a rock-solid pension and amazing health care (a month in a hospital costs $50, etc). His generation has no incentive to change the system that has worked for them -- even though it imposes an increasingly unsustainable burden on the ever-shrinking working generations paying for it.

LukeHoersten 12y ago

'"Do rich societies really need to get richer and richer indefinitely?" he asks.' They do if they are going to pay off their mega-debt. The real fear is when the GDP drops below the yearly interest payments. I feel the same when I go to nice European countries. "Wow everything is so nice" and then I remind myself that Germany is paying for it all. It's not sustainable. Look at some of the Scandinavian countries for nice mass public transit in a more sustainable setting.

thret 12y ago
Does anyone actually think the USA will ever pay off its debt?
- gnaritas 12y ago
  Public debt is private savings, you don't ever want to pay it off. Debt is to be serviced, not paid off.
- tsotha 12y ago
  The way fractional reserve currencies work it's literally impossible for everyone to pay off their debt, and if a substantial portion of people did there would literally be no money. So... no.
- lmm 12y ago
  If you're talking about bonds, it came pretty close near the end of the Clinton administration. (If you're considering every dollar as a piece of government debt, which in some sense it is, then probably not).
roymurdock 12y ago
There is an alternative to paying off mega-debt - defaulting. Just as Germany did when they were forced to pay ridiculous war reparations after WWI (after a period of hyperinflation as they tried to print their debts away, much in the spirit of the EU QE efforts). If Germany is paying for all of this and building an unsustainable debt by not investing in European infrastructure and businesses that will generate it a return, then so be it - this is a problem for Germany. They'll either have to start seizing assets or annulling debt.

timeal 12y ago

Why so many negative comments? Japan certainly seems to outshine the US according to multiple metrics, so they are doing something right: Japan's unemployment rate is 3.6% vs 5.5% for the US: http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/roudou/results/month/index.htm http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/roudou/results/month/inde... vs http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 Japan's homelessness rate is 20 per 100,000 population (25,000 homeless people in 2001) vs 220 per 100,000 in the US: http://books.google.com/books?id=q-PgHH8TJi8C&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=q-PgHH8TJi8C&printsec=front... vs https://www.onecpd.info/resources/documents/2012AHAR_PITestimates.pdf https://www.onecpd.info/resources/documents/2012AHAR_PITesti... Japan's incarceration rate is 50 per 100,000 population vs 710 per 100,000 for the US. Japan is even on track to stop increasing their public deficit by this year (thanks to the new sales tax) whereas the US is far from being on budget. And Japan even manages to achieve this despite a significantly aging demographics (lots of social benefits paid to non-working people), compare http://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/japan-population-pyramid-2014.gif http://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/japan-p... vs http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/3/28/saupload_3-28-us.png http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/3/28/saupload_3-... Japan's society seems to be functioning better than the US. I appreciate this article for trying to find out why.

rodgerd 12y ago
> Why so many negative comments? Because the English-speaking world has roughly agreed on the neoliberal economic consensus that extreme individualism, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism is the Only Way. It is an absolute dogma, reinforced constantly through the press and the best-funded political parties. Rich nations like Japan or Norway who are trundling happily along with more equitable societies, rather than a return to Victorian social models, need to be stigmatized lest one start asking questions like "what's the point having a country of billionaires and ditch-diggers?" Might as well pitch atheism in Saudi Arabia.
- funkyy 12y ago
  "How dare Japan not fall under our rules, hurr durr" Whole Asia is rising thanks to one and single fact - they stick to their rules. While whole western world is bending every possible rule to wage wars, shut protesters and buy votes. As history teaches us east will collapse under its own degeneration of freedom so Asia can flourish. Then Asia will collapse in its self control obsession so the east world will flourish. Its how the world rolls over and over.

stevedekorte 12y ago

Is the author saying recession caused the good aspects of Japan. If that is the hypothesis, then we expect that none of these cultural aspects like low crime rates, politeness, good food, cleanliness, etc existed before the Japanese recession? Why do people take articles like this seriously?

aikinai 12y ago

I just noticed that the calligraphy responsively changes from vertical right-to-left to horizontal left-to-right even though it's an image. If you're reading on an iPad, you can check just by changing the orientation. Very cool attention to detail.

e12e 12y ago
Thank you for pointing this out (reading on a desktop, so I'm wouldn't have noticed otherwise). The source does this via: <figure class="book-fullbleed ipad-portrait-img"> <img src="ima( … )9.jpg" alt=""> </figure> <figure class="book-fullbleed ipad-landscape-img"> <img src="imag( … )x1039.jpg" alt=""> </figure> And where ipad-landscape-img is backed by media-selectors in bookstrap.js. I wonder if this "bookstrap" think is related to bookstrap.org? The site is blank, and the github-repo linked to from https://www.npmjs.com/package/bookstrap https://www.npmjs.com/package/bookstrap is gone/empty … Either way it's refreshing to see some people still make sensible design without a ton of minimized CSS (even if this still pulls in two big stylesheets and a js-file … all to display some text … ).

Animats 12y ago

There's a new "Cool Japan" venture capital fund.[1] It's run by the government and some big banks. Since their startup late last year, they've bought the world's largest translation/subbing service, a TV channel, and an anime streaming operation, and opened a food court in Singapore. The government of Korea has been spending heavily to promote K-Pop, and Japan is responding. They take proposals. See their investment criteria.[2] Someone should propose a robot-run restaurant in San Francisco. [1] http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/ [2] http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/investment/flow.html http://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/investment/flow.html

rtpg 12y ago
what's the story behind the food court?

Inetgate 12y ago

There is one typo in brush style typeface translation. The word "萎縮" is pronounced as "Ishuku" not "Jishuku". If writer want to "Jishuku", chinese character should be "自粛".

VaedaStrike 12y ago

Japan is a cut rose. Cut in a clean way. Kept at an optimal temperature and sitting in an optimized floral solution. It will last quite a while in a very attractive state, but its still cut from that which renews and replaces.they, like much of the world, are in for either a great mutation or an extinguishing.

greggman 12y ago

I've had that experience as well but it's arguably a pretty self selected thing. It's only people living abroad who are almost all people who wanted to live abroad. Ask the same questions to an actual slice of Japanese natives living in Japan and the number of people that want those things will likely be a tiny percentage of the total.

chaostheory 12y ago

> Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low. The difference with at least Germany, Italy, and Singapore is that they are fighting low birthrates with increased immigration. Japan is not. They are betting on robotics, in order to keep their population homogenous.

agentultra 12y ago

> I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable. When I visited Tokyo in 2008 I felt the same thing upon my return home. The transportation systems are efficient, punctual, and clean. People paid for their meals, bought snacks, and took the subway using their phone to pay for all of it. People were, with few exceptions, polite and helpful despite my boorish attempts to fit in. Everything... it's so well thought out. You hand the store clerk your yen on a small tray. You can swipe your phone at a vending machine to get a quick bottle of water. You can walk from a bustling interstitial arcade into a quiet shrine. It seems like everything is meticulous and considered. Even the seediest clubs in Roppongi or the dirtiest punk bars I could find still maintained the propriety and concern for others I found everywhere else. After one show the band passed around a bucket for some yen and we all sat down together and had food and drinks. One of the kids I came with made sure I got on the right train before the subway shut down. Even as a foreigner I could find people who were concerned about me as they were for everyone else. Arriving back in Canada, where I'm from, was not what I had expected. The streets are haphazard and practical without a consideration for how it looks. People are louder. Traffic is thick. Litter abounds. Turnstiles, ticket booths, and grumpy ticket booth operators. Pushing... always the pushing. I had to wait a while before Street Fighter 4 would come across the Pacific so I could play it again... and 7 years for Apple to announce that you may eventually be able to buy a Coke with your phone in certain regions. Coming back to Canada felt like walking backwards in time.