1. Japan has extremely low levels of many of the problems that we have in Western nations.

2. The reason WHY they're so unaffected by problems that arise in racially-divided societies with fluctuating gender roles, is because they are a deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles.

#1 plays into the common impulse on HN, Reddit, etc to dunk on the U.S. and the West in general. But #2 undercuts that, because Japan is far WORSE than us on many of the factors for which people dunk on us. They're MAGA Republicans with Pokemon!

People tiptoe around this without really engaging with it in depth. Either because the cognitive dissonance is too strong, or else they're afraid of what people will think if they look at it directly rather than askance from the corner of their eye.

For what it's worth, I'll take the messiness of modern Western society. Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy or misogyny cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.

You're not wrong about the xenophobic tendencies and obvious monoculture, but the situation is far more complicated and nuanced that you're allowing.

An example: I have a black American friend who's lived in Tokyo for 30 years and plans to be buried in Japan. He lives in Japan because he never has to fear for his physical safety due to the color of his skin, like he does in America. While he will never be seen as "Japanese", for him your xenophobia is more typically represented as wariness or caution around foreigners, people not sitting next to him on the train because he is tall and looks different, versus in America having to contend with actual white supremacy, racist police, and hate crimes. His story is far from unique.

(As an aside, I think this is part of why these discussions about upsides/downsides of Japan are so interesting - it defies any simple explanation and the closer you look the more nuanced it becomes)

Foreigners likely don't realize they're participating in the same near/far dialectic that informs the way Black American comedians since the 90s have noted that white folk in America treat people from Africa better than they do the people of African-descent who's ancestors were already here well before the the ancestors of most whites in America.

Your examples are of mixed race people who strive to be Japanese, but are denied due to their mixed heritage. Apples and Oranges. One group cares about integration, the other doesn't.

I'd much rather live someplace where "actual white supremacy", to the degree it exists, is denounced by polite company, than a place where it is accepted in polite company that you're avoided for looking physically different and "no foreigners allowed" in businesses are common.

As one who only came to the States as an adult, it's really confounding to me the degree to which it's understood that America is a racist and white supremacist country. I just don't get it at all.

Per capita, American police kill 3x more than Canada's police, and 60x times more than England's police.

An incredibly massive distance from 60x.

Japan isn't perfect here. Your rights when dealing with the police here are different (and not in a better way). You do not have the right to remain silent, and your silence can be used against you. They can keep you in jail for ~30 days without charges. It's an open secret that the police can and do beat prisoners to get confessions out of them.

That said, if I had to chose an interaction between the Japanese police and the US police, I'd take the Japanese police every single time.

Put aside the sample size of one for a moment. The fact you've only dealt with the police when genuinely committing crimes, and their response was proportional to the crime, is most likely down to your skin colour.

And also due to the fact I was calm, reasonable, cooperative, and didn't point a gun at them. If you are trying to argue that a person's behavior has no effect on how likely they are to be killed by a cop then you are just completely wrong.

What about Charles Kinsey who was as cool and compliant and non-threatening as possible,

What about Donovan Lewis? Is it reasonable to execute a sleeping man?

What about Erik Cantu? I guess eating a hamburger in a parking lot is a capital offense?

BTW, the number of cases like the few I mentioned are FAR too numerous to even keep track of.

If you think that a persons skin color has no effect on how likely they are to be killed by a cop then you are just completely wrong.

you are not black or a minority, are you? systemic targeting is a thing. exarcerbated by media portrayal. it is a real mess that affects real people.

If I’m pulled over while being white and I cooperate, I’m probably getting the ticket and going on my way. Worst case the cop is having a bad day and wants to escalate, they arrest me for something. If I’m black, worst case I’m going to the morgue. Average case is going to be worse if I’m black, all other things (including my attitude) being equal.

When it comes to actually getting killed by cops I don't think this is true. The vast majority of people killed by cops are doing something very foolish like pointing a gun at them or rushing them with a knife.

So the statement by the poster above holds - if you don't point a gun at a cop (figuratively), your chance of surviving contact with police if you are Black are no lower than other races.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/starlight-tours

It's hard to take you seriously here. I've met very few black folks who would agree with you on this. Have you directly asked a black person how they feel about encounters with the police?

> I'd much rather live someplace where "actual white supremacy", to the degree it exists, is denounced by polite company

It's not denounced by polite company. I was recently in Louisiana where someone was talking about why they don't go into New Orleans anymore (because of black people), and about how we have an incorrect history of the civil war because "winners write the history" ("it wasn't due to slavery").

> than a place where it is accepted in polite company that you're avoided for looking physically different

I'm not saying this doesn't happen at all, but I think it's often mistaken for "I don't want to sit next to a gaijin", when it's really "I don't want to sit next to someone really tall because I'll have no room" or "I don't want to sit next to the gaijin who smells like they haven't showered in a week".

I know this is one of the more common complaints on japanlife reddit, so I won't discount it completely, but even there it's a pretty controversial take.

> "no foreigners allowed" in businesses are common.

I've been living in Tokyo for the past 3 years (and have traveled around Japan a lot) and haven't seen a single "no foreigners allowed" sign. I have never been rejected for being foreign. I'm sure you may run into this on rare occasion in the countryside, but this isn't anywhere near the norm, even there.

I've heard this is still the norm at places like soaplands, oppai bars, and such, but that it's not enforced for folks who can speak enough Japanese to clearly state they understand the rules. I haven't gone to any so can't personally verify that (and my spoken Japanese isn't good enough anyway). These places have strict legal requirements to keep their licenses, so this is a case where I at least understand their rationale. I'm sure there's some xenophobia baked into this as well, as it's a common (stupid) stereotype that foreigners bring STDs into Japan.

> As one who only came to the States as an adult, it's really confounding to me the degree to which it's understood that America is a racist and white supremacist country. I just don't get it at all.

As someone who grew up in the south, and who has mostly conservative friends and family, I absolutely get it. There's degrees of racism, but I've heard the phrase "we should turn the middle east into glass" more times than I'd prefer. I know lots of folks who moved away from the New Orleans area so that their kids wouldn't go to school with black children. I've been in situations at work where people would be in a 1-1 with me and be complaining about black people being hired, and how they don't allow that on their team. I know property managers that only do word-of-mouth advertising for rental openings so that they can only rent to white people.

All of those things are just direct experiences I've personally witnessed. It doesn't take into account the historical racism that continues to affect the black community today, like redlining, white-flight, systematic police targeting and imprisonment, the war on drugs, etc.

I'm glad you haven't personally had that experience, but you shouldn't downplay the situation that others less fortunate than you experience often.

Comments like this seem to ignore the fact that a good number of law enforcement officers are black. I guess one could ask one of them?

The problem is, when you say something like that you start attaching other features of the western version and that often doesn't reflect the reality and doesn't have the historical context of the western version.

For example, Turks are much more openly homophobes and antisemitic than people in the West but at the same time Turks were not exterminating the Jews and were not castrating the homosexuals a few decades ago. If anything Turkish academia was practically founded by the Jewish refugees when the west was busy fighting world wars.

The same goes for the Eastern Europeans, a typical Eastern European would be much more racist and macho that a westerner but Eastern Europeans don't have a history of colonisation and slavery. Also, women have much older history of workforce participation and equal rights with men so for an Eastern European men the western culture wars and attempts to "make it right" through affirmative action don't rhyme at all(They are like "Men and women have equal rights? Duh? What's the fuss about"). You will also not find anti-abortion politics, gun rights stuff or anti-tax, anti-government libertarian stuff which you might attribute to typical right winger in the US. The similarities are very superficial.

Just because you can identify a characteristic or two in a foreign person, doesn't mean that they are the same as the group of people from your society who have those treats.

What’s even funnier is that western right wingers sometimes will mistake these things as Eastern Europeans being fascist and will preach how Eastern Europe is the land of the free speech. I attribute their affection for Russia and Putin to this. I had a smirking smile when one of the Chan board admins was disappointed when found out that Russia is not a free speech land, he was able to act however he likes only because it wasn’t bothering the Russians. The moment he touched a local hot button he leaned about the free speech in Russia.

...except full-blown in Russia, which perpetuated slavery until 1861.

...except serfdom Poland (and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) until 19th century.

Regarding anti-abortion politics, see modern Poland :(

> The same goes for the Eastern Europeans, a typical Eastern European...

The holocaust was a specific event and not directly taking part doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Still, thousands of jews were deported to death camps. Wikipedia, as can be expected, has an article on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_and_the_Holocaust . But every minority has their own story. There are yezidis, kurds, armenians and others.

It is far beyond simplification to say that eastern Europe did not have colonialism and oppression. I don't think I need to go into details. The events of the past century are well documented.

It's simply impossible to think in analogies when thinking about nations. It's not even misleading, it's completely wrong.

Eastern Europeans were a part of the Ottoman empire during the colonial age but feel free to point out about that African country which used to be a Bulgarian colony for example. I think you should go into details, I'm very curious about the colonies of Easter European nations.

How do you know that ? I think that what you say is racist and it's oposite, as they

> don't have a history of colonisation and slavery

to see others as resources, to justify it and use that if convinient, or enough of them to make such opinions - but see just other people.

Edit: Ok, what you say is just self-attribution (" would be ").

This comment itself is an example of the western "keywordiness". For some reason, attributing national characteristics is considered racist in the west(Spanish are easygoing, Germans are polite and distant but once you crack the surface they are friends for life, Brits are easy to chat hard to form deep friendship - we have all kind of attributions about other nations and we talk about it openly. According to us, this is not racist because we judge the individual and these attributes are just expectation, not judgements ). Also for some reason if you are from the group you are talking about your are exempt.

Funny stuff really. Whe in the UK, I offended so many people that they decided to leave the EU :) JK - not observing political correctness is our national trait but doesn't mean that Eastern Europeans are your average American right winger.

> to see others as resources and to need justify it and self, or enough of them to make such opinions - but see just other people.

Can you write this sentence in a more legible way please? I don't understand what you are trying to say?

It depends. Mediterranean, Atlantic and Continental people can be very diverse. Rural Basques are pretty close compared to the cheerful and jolly Andalusians. The Castillians are kinda like Basques with a bit on openness, but reservated in lot of questions. 50/50. Spain can have weathers from rainy climates (even more than London across the year, trust me, the North it's like that) to literal desserts, from -30C in top of the mountains in Winter to 45+C in the Southern places. Hitting negative temperatures in Winter on non-coastal regions it's the norm.

> 2. The reason WHY they're so unaffected by problems that arise in racially-divided societies with fluctuating gender roles, is because they are a deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles.

I agree, mostly on 1, but 2? I don't think many people would say their misoginy is in any way responsible for e.g. the order and low crime rates. Xenophobia maybe - it's easier to keep everything clean and orderly if everyone who lives there was born there and was indoctrinated in school to be a good orderly citizen.

However, one of the problems they share with many "Western" nations but much worse, is the birth rate. They're looking at a massive demographic crisis because of their misoginy, and not helped by their xenophobia (e.g. some countries are relying on migrants to "fix" the low birth rates).

> Extreme fasciation with the Japanese way of life has always struck me as roundabout white supremacy cloaked in a cosmopolitan facade.

That is the impression I get frequently too, especially when it's put in a "it's clean and there's no crime because they're racially homogenous" way, which is quite disgusting. Singapore and Switzerland are also clean and with low crime rates, yet they're quite diverse in every possible aspect (cultural, ethnic descent, languages, religions). Haiti is in anarchy, yet relatively culturally, ethnically and religiously homogenous.

This argument about misogny being the cause of low birth rates kind of falls on it's face when you go back in history to when these countries had higher levels of misogny yet much higher birth rates. If you're JUST looking at the correlation, misogny rates correlates with HIGHER birth rates, not lower ones. (Correlation does not necessarily imply causation and all that, but there's a possible argument that could be made here but I won't make it.)

Low birth rates the world over have a much higher degree of correlation with urban versus rural living ratios rather than anything else. When property costs per square meter/foot are high and you can't use your children to help your business there's a VERY strong incentive to not have children for economic reasons. (Historically most Japanese either had children working with their parents on farms part time or children helping run the family shop part time that was underneath the living area. That changed with the post-war economic boom.)

Not that I agree with sofixa’s reasoning, but I also do not agree with this reasoning.

It is possible to have different levels of misogyny. Less misogyny can dissuade women from having children, but they still have the right to not have children. More misogyny could be women do not even have the option to not have children.

Japan now has highest birth rates out of all developed Asian countries.

I’m not sure we can attribute it to either. They were arguably more mysoginistic and xenophobic in the past, and they didn’t have any issues keeping population levels up.

Keep in mind that this doesn't just describe the modern Japan, it also describes South Korea, North Korea, China, and Japan of the past (with various militant/feudalistic governments).

Just like any other region of the world, East Asia has a long history of unrests, rebellions, caste systems, and civil wars going back to the dawn of history. If your thesis is that a xenophobic monoculture society with traditional gender roles prevents "Western problems," maybe you should be more explicit about these Western problems and examine if the evidences really support that.

They just have higher standards.

To me it’s amazing how much people will contort themselves to find disqualifying fault in Japan or Singapore, etc but not also hold their own Western country to a standard. It’s line no one is saying Japan is perfect in every way. But if you’ve been there then it’s plainly obvious how much higher their standards are and their expectations for each other.

It took about a day of being there to see they have the most fundamental quality any decent place has - order. And this is why their society is much nicer because from a foundation of order you can build amazing social systems. Look to Norway for a Western example. Or even a place like Denmark who accept the anarchists but keep them cordoned off and made into a tourism curiosity.

The crux of what I was trying to say is that Japan, with all of it's modern cultural failings(harder life for women, heavy drinking culture, endless work hours) is still much closer to my idea of a modern utopia than anything else the world has to offer.

This is 100% an opinion.

"I'll take the messiness of modern Western society" until you get pushed into train tracks or become a victim of fentanyl overdose, you are actually not taking it, sitting somewhere in Colorado typing these thing is not part of the messiness.

Current approval rating of the Kishida cabinet is about 25%. The disapproval rating is 50%.

To be fair, people are never happy with the government here, and come election time they’re always happy enough to not bother voting at all.

Plus, much of the population is elderly, and their preferences are quite different than the younger people you hear more from.

Fentanyl poisoning is >99.9% a result of the war on drugs. If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.

Only when you are sane. Did you know addicts are willing to walk on street @20F to get some money for drug instead of going shelters?

This is quite common and not hard to observe once you are willing to explore a bit beyond your regular happy life.

If an addict can be high all day for a quarter the cost of a meal, say $1, and can purchase said from a safe, reputable drug store in their chosen location, rather than trekking across town to a shady area to buy illegal drugs from a outlaw dealer, they’ll do that. If only because they can spend more time begging and less time walking.

You have a very skewed view of addicts if you think they are that deranged. A good illustration of that is clean needle programs that provide orange safety tips for used needles. If these addicts were so completely deranged, those tips would end up in the trash not on the ends of needles in the streets.

I had a big post here comparing the black market for marijuana here in Oregon (spoiler: it’s larger than ever, half the cost of retail, and now largely run by cartels) but ultimately the larger issue society seems blind to is that addicts don’t think rationally about their addictions.

So yes, opioid addicts absolutely will risk their lives to get a hit that costs half as much.

Also I have absolutely no clue, and I doubt there is really even data on it, but there are a lot of people who are dying from fentanyl who aren't opiate addicts at all. One person I knew who died last year couldn't afford healthcare, bought their anxiety meds online, and died in their room from fentanyl. Another person I knew died from ectasy, and having talked around it's a common story.

I feel like this rings the same as ‘unrestricted gun availability is good for people’.

Which ones are you talking about? Are you sure they just didn't end up being monocultural ones just because their impoverishedness contributed to a former multicultural country disintegrating along cultural lines?

Not a historian, but that would make sense to me.

I think far more people than you’re probably comfortable with would say that’s a feature, not a bug.

... and without all the war stuff ;)

Thanks to immigration, young generations have all they need and there's plenty of optimism

We've tried that in Britain. Come see how's that worked out for us.

I'm an immigrant to the UK. No-one exploited me. I had a choice of lots of countries to go to (EU passport) and chose the UK voluntarily.

I was on minimum wage. I wasn't exploited, it was a means to an end.

I don't think you would really care about me as an individual. I think you just didn't want my type here.

With Brexit? The UK ended up replacing EU nationals with non EU nationals. Not much changed. Nobody is getting the kind of wages you'd get in Norway or Switzerland for picking trash off the street.

I just pointed out that removing the layer of population that has no other choice than working below minimum wage will not solve the economic and social stratification. The point of my comment is that immigration and low pay are two completely unrelated phenomena that some loudmouths want us to believe they're correlated. The average voter, then, goes on to believe closing borders magically means they'll finally be able afford a mortgage and a better life while doing unskilled work. Less immigration, fewer candidates, they'll have to pay us more, no? If only it were that simple.

For any hard problems, there is a clear, simple and wrong answer, which usually works quite well as a slogan for a political campaign. "Immigration" it's a classic example.

What used to be something only old racists and simpletons would loudly declaim 30 years ago, now it's become a common, yet still utterly moronic, party line.

But it's so easy to blame everything on the brown and the gaijin, when thinking hard about a hard problem takes too much effort.

Not everything, but Paris isn’t what it used to be.

Yeah, now there are bike lines and it isn't suicidal to bike here. Or do you mean something else?

There have always been poor people in Paris, and there have always (ok, not always, but since France has been a colonial empire and since it has been the preferred destination for Portugese and Spaniards to come work here for better wages, so for multiple generations now) been immigrants.

The implication I glean of namdnay's point is that woes could be alleviated by immigration, and the responding user suggests that it's not a silver bullet. That's different than saying "everything is going to shit because of immigration".

Also, being critical of immigration policy is not tantamount to criticizing the immigrants themselves. That's another projection.

There are surely advantages to immigration, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest it has zero potential downsides especially with higher rates as other policies and structures don't necessarily shift in tandem to accommodate it.

For example, wage suppression - it's just simple supply and demand, which should be uncontroversial. But maybe one that might speak to some people more: everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint, and no one moves here to consume less. The things we enjoy and take for granted are what make it a better life. So any conceit of potentially lowering waste/emissions qua consumer choice is wholly undermined by the fact that it is a matter of policy to increase consumption - with more bodies - to boost the GDP. Rates of global emissions are growing not just through growing economies like China (which is probably the largest factor of the last 20 years), but immigration.

> Stop using people who are hoping to improve their lives as a shield.

I'm taking the side of those people, and against the old racist/xenophobic canard that seems to be on the rise again, sadly.

Indeed, it seems like the drag from having an older population does a lot to keep the birth rate down.

Our best forecasts show Japan's population pyramid as still markedly inverted and still shrinking in 2100.

(I don't agree with your other point either, necessarily, but I chose to ask about this one).

Any fertility rate that's below replacement maintains an inverted pyramid, if you don't have a lot of death before old age. (Until the very last person dies, in a long long long time).

Each person in the current breeding population produces fewer people in the next breeding population; this produces an inverted pyramid.

> And there are trivial ways to keep fertility at replacement level and not negative, on par with most other 1st-world countries.

No country that has fallen into population decline has found these "trivial ways" in modern times. (Not sure what you mean here by "negative")

That is incorrect.

(I'm assuming that the life expectancy does not change significantly)

Because of the Dutch port at Nagasaki, there was also a steady stream of Japanese goods into Europe and informed art, fashion, pottery, and other things. Europeans found analogs with their native stories of Kings and Knights, and the militarism of the colonial period was found and reflected by the Shogunate and Meiji governments.

As Japan opened up, Europe found a country that had long been absorbing Western ideas in technology and medicine, but with an entirely different philosophical worldview -- challenging European cultural centrism that Western culture was the secret to its relative global power.

By the mid 1800s Europe was so full of Japanese cultural influence that terms like "Japonism" were formed to reflect daily fashion trends that people wore on the street, and decorated their houses with. Van Gogh famously went through a period attempting to mimic Japanese art he found in news print and posters used to wrap pottery shipped from Japan.

https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-jap...

At this point the West has a few hundred years of this kind of connection and reflection with Japan, and to be fully honest, Japan kind of finds the West as interesting as well.

On a similar note, this cross cultural infatuation bothers my Korean wife to no end. But I have to remind her that we've really been dealing with her people en masse for under a hundred years, while we've been trading, teaching, learning, and fighting the Japanese for almost half of a millenia. It doesn't make her any happier ;)

I've had conversations with Koreans who look with envy at the favorable attention Japanese culture gets. I was many years with Japanese and now many with Koreans, so maybe my perspective is reasonably well informed. My theory is that the main reason is the Japanese focus on the presentation of things. I don't think any other culture in the world puts as much focus on making a good impression. When you come into contact with Japanese culture, the full force of it hits you immediately. Thus, I think it's exceptionally easy for people to be impressed despite very superficial acquaintance with the culture.

This is such an American/Chinese perspective. Both countries where the growth and promising future gets people excited. You are being dazzled by the growth and bubble. Bubble era Japan indeed had that same appeal.

In 1980s Japan young families were worried about ever being able to afford homes. Land and houses had been exploding in price since the 1970s. Yes everyone felt they were getting rich, but assets went up in price faster than wages.

Japan now is indeed the anti-thesis to the bubble era you are glamourizing yes. Now homes are affordable. Jobs plentiful. Overtime has decreased massively. The 1980s had overtime common which would be illegal now. Train lines are plentiful. The bullet train network built, and paid for. You can get a taxi ride at anytime without the need to bribe drivers.

The flash and dazzle of the bubble was fake. The practical affordability and livability of Japan now is real.

Also I don't think the Shinkansen is doing that well atm… it's mostly for business trips, since it's pretty expensive to use, and those are down a lot since we all discovered Zoom calls.

Despite being illegal, it's seemingly still quite common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japanese_term)

It’s not as if our war on drugs has solved the problem.

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC1-sTIbDQc&

while also leading the world technologically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AiYirZPwIs

and not to mention they are still building giant cool things, a style of monumentalism which the western world seems to have largely abandoned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIucUB23zZ4&

The Japanese people that I follow on Japan seem pretty critical of Japan, so I'm not completely sure if Japan actually works for Japan.

One of the best examples of "Japan works for Japan, except when it doesn't" is the intersection of mental health and the Japanese way of solving problems. It's important to keep the peace with people, even if you're only pretending to, and that's a higher value than determining what's actually true in a given situation. So, whereas Western people try to get to the bottom of things and figure them out which requires ruffling some feathers, Japanese people very often simply ignore problems in the short term because it keeps the peace while accepting the long term outcome will blow up into a much bigger problem, but oh well because "there's nothing we can do about it". This kind of behavior is super perplexing as Westerner until you grok how it works on a fundamental level as you try to solve problems in a Western way and people wind up getting upset with you, though they often don't say it directly to you. The mental health situation there sucks because they don't know how to help family members who are experiencing difficulty, so the situation goes from bad to worse but of course "there's nothing we can do about it" and "there's no point talking about it" and this is the best thing to do even if it's all just to pretend everything is fine right. There's a reason they have hikikomori phenomenon. And sadly around half of those in mental hospitals could have avoided it if their family simply helped support them properly during their time of difficulty.

Source: watched my sister-in-law who was by all accounts a normal, and amazing human being, legit be driven insane by Japanese society.

It’s the ones who have never been there that talk shit the most.

Well, yeah, it's a completely domestically designed and produced item.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9OYPWgzDBxE

The manhole covers in my Oregon city are boring and say "made in India". I'd bet their per-unit cost is still in the several hundreds of dollars.

Japan's "lost decade" is a myth:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/08/11/now-...

The examples given in this article are a bit silly. In Japan, the land has value, not the home. The examples in the article compare prices during an insane bubble to present-day prices. You could do that with any free-market county to make things look bad, except I don't know if any county has ever experienced a real estate bubble on par with Japan in the late 70s - 80s.

Japan's population in 1980 was 116.8 million. 126.3 million in 2020. That's an 8% increase.

The USA experienced nearly a 50% increase over that same period.

Meanwhile, Japan's GDP went from 1.105 trillion to 5.04 trillion, all while reporting greater well-being among the population.

It's a myth.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263596/gross-domestic-pr...

I haven't spent nearly as much time there as I'd like. 3 weeks/year or so for the last 10-15 years. But this article is not wrong on at least some accounts. The one super obvious thing is their aging population, and shrinking farming life. Towns are shadows of their former selves, and outside of tourism, you ask what people do, and you get mumbles about "not much", vague gestures towards the farms, or simple silence.

I wonder about a more global perspective on this, and whether it's actually truly a problem in the long run. I assume the unspoken assumption of many who worry about population decline in the developed countries is that it will cause the world to regress in some way (either via instability or without) as the rest pick over the bones and important infrastructure and knowledge get lost.

But must this happen? Can't the developed countries perhaps pass their developed traits on to other up-and-coming countries to also stabilize and then slow their growth, and eventually we arrive at a stable and peaked, or perhaps smaller global pop the planet can actually more easily sustain with a sensible energy mix?

Population decline often seems like a hopeful opportunity to me, if we'd stop obsessing about the fortune and minmax of single nations and start putting humanity first.

Not if you promise the productivity of people in future generations to the current generation, but then find out the productivity of people in future generations falls short (perhaps due to insufficient people).

I don't believe there's any examples of modern countries doing it. Providing lots of childcare benefits doesn't seem to help, though it does make the children you do get healthier.

Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.

So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.

Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.

Except Japan has made nearly all of this absolutely free. So the financial cost argument falls a bit flat.

If you are not able to assure that you'll have a comfortable retirement years with the appropriate social safety nets to try to assure that someone who worked will be able to maintain at least the basic necessities for life, then having kids who make it into adulthood is that safety net.

The "ok, 60+ years old, unable to do meaningful work, move in with a successful child" is a fairly standard approach. This requires that you have kids and preferably enough that one of them will be able to support you moving in with them and isn't otherwise alienated from you.

Note that this only works on a per family basis and if you outlive your children (war can do that), then a more nationalized social safety net is something that because useful to have. By providing that safety net for retired adults, there is less pressure to have kids to support their parents in retirement and less pressure for single people to marry and have a family to fulfill that role.

Economic hardship (increasing the pressure to not have kids) and that safety net (reducing pressure to have kids at all) in both would then have downward force on the fertility rate and also would suggest putting off having kids until later.

Census.gov has a lot of interesting data for the rate - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat...

Also of interest - Multigenerational family structure in Japanese society: impacts on stress and health behaviors among women and men - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15087144/

I'm sure there is a positive correlation with "home ownership, and low debt" with children however.

Because that would make you feel secure about your future.

Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline.

Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time.

Who knows?

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/fertility-r...

https://www.jns.org/israeli-birth-rate-on-decline-government...

>The Jewish fertility rate surpassed the Arab rate for the first time in 2020, with Jews having three children on average compared to 2.99 in the Arab sector.

>At 6.64 children per woman, haredi women had the highest fertility rate among Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 1.96 among secular Jewish women.

Looks close enough to women not belonging to super religious groups in other developed countries.

I remember discussing a buggy application once with another engineer (I could reliably crash the server with a mis-configuration on the client), and I was taking a fairly apologetic stance that after all the workarounds I had to make it work, it worked OK. His response was, "yeah, if you take out all the parts that suck, then it doesn't suck". And now I can never unhear that.

>Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.

Which is what the causal factors seem to be in the fertility rate of Israel’s “modern” economy.

If you look the graph and focus only on purely secular women (split as Haredi > Religious > Traditional-Religious > Traditional-Not that religious > Not religious-Secular) you can see that since 1979 it has been hovering around 2, so it is hard to tell if anything real or recent is actually going on. Though if you also understand statistics you'll see that Israel is heading to its own kind of demographic disaster since the least productive population has been consistently increasing at a very high exponent... (That said, it might be better to have the problem of needing to increase the productivity of the least productive than the problem of having no one to work)

Source (in Hebrew) https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/062/01_22... (The graph I mention is on page 11, so with the above mentioned divisions + a line for all Jewish women that end right above 3 you should be able to parse it even without knowing Hebrew ;))

South Korea but they're pretty consumerist.

Individualism is a problem but the culture as a whole is not very individualistic.

Then late at night, scores of young men dressed in suits were playing arcade games.

I’ve also heard about those that just give up and live in a room in their parents house.

Japanese shops also have the weirdest assortment of products ever.

This might come off as ignorant as I’ve obviously not experienced the ‘real japan’ but I’m not sure this would be the case if what I mentioned would be a fundamental part of the culture.

Disclaimer: I really enjoyed my time there, espectially out of the big cities and was particularly impressed by the cleanliness and how nice the people were.

Move further away from the center, and the cost drops dramatically. A house near a station that's 30 minutes from Shinjuku the same size above costs half the price (~350k).

[0] If you think about a 100 Japanese Yen as 1 "Japanese Dollar". It's not equivalent to 1 US dollar, but if you adjust for typical salaries and cost of living it comes out about the same, when you are considering the price of housing, etc.

It is my perpetual guess that evolutionary pressure alone will be sufficient in the long run. Our society is now strongly selecting for parents who want kids. That choice has only been a choice for a few generations.

Ten generations from now, I think there will be a much larger fraction of the human population who strongly prioritize having kids.

I come from an extremely long line of organisms that had offspring. In fact, it goes back to the beginning of life forms that could sexually reproduce. Are you saying that many of my sentient ancestors who understood where babies came from didn't actually want kids? It's possible I suppose. But I think my reasons for not wanting kids are less to do with my DNA and more to do with experiences I had during my life.

Also, if you're taking about modern changes and their effects on human behavior, what traits do paid sperm donation / surrogacy select for?

Maybe the concept of having that choice is new, but lots of people technically have the choice but don't "know it". They follow cultural norms. All of their friends have babies, so they have babies. Has something happened to the DNA of all these Japanese people who don't want kids? Or is it a cultural shift? I'm betting on the latter.

It seems that many people today who never have kids do so for a good reason, such as unstable personal economy, not owning their home, not knowing as much as possible that their future children will have good lives.

The people that continue to have kids today are often the overly religious, the financially or generally irresponsible who lack self awareness, or just plain stupid people. These are not traits we want to evolutionarily select for. See the movie Idiocracy for an example.

If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone. But your country's economy would suffer over and above the slowed birth rate you'd otherwise have.

In the future though, with artificial wombs, I'd imagine we'd go through a Brave New World type scenario where the government grows children themselves (and maybe has the bright idea to stratify the children's gender, race and intellectual capacity as well, but the latter is unlikely if we have AI and robots that do the jobs instead of needing perpetually content Street cleaners).

The important part of this is making sure women lose their agency over having children by both removing access to effective contraception and their financial independence.

I think it is simpler than that: abolish any state-sponsored retirement plans. People used to have a lot of children so that someone could take care of them in their old age. Now that you have retirement savings you have no need for kids anymore.

Pay large sums of money to promising young intelligent couple to have kids. (and no, the govt should not do it)

Yes it has to be large (several millions), enough so that the couple never have to work again for their entire lives. I would add a whole bunch of other things, ( like delegating the bulk of childcare to somebody else, with a couple only overseen what care is being taken) but it's a good start.

My larger point is that this is not exactly the unsolvable really hard technical problem.

In terms of human assets intelligent people and their offspring are the most important assets that society can have. ( agreed this has negative connotations of eugenics, but the overall concept is sound IMHO)

In large parts of Western Europe, at least, these systems were robbed and then slaughtered in the 90s.

it's just that most of the world is using archaic thorough/continuous model for pension system which is basically pyramid scheme everyone would avoid if it were used in any other area, but somehow is acceptable for pensions

if you really worry about pensions, you could start with children contributing to their parents pension and nobody contributing to childless people, that should solve declining population very fast, your can combine it with raising retirement age and raising fees everyone pays towards their own retirement

Investing internationally changes some things. Retirees bring in money from abroad, but that does not increase domestic production. Prices will go up, as there is more money competing for the same goods and services. The people doing productive work will want more money for their services. Imports will be relatively cheaper, but the economy suffers, because the exports will be less competitive due to higher wages.

Saving for retirement is rational for any individual if the demographic structure cannot support the pension system. But while anyone can do it successfully, it's not possible for everyone at the same time.

Those investments still need workers to work in the underlying companies, and that doesn't count products that don't usually get covered by pension income e.g. healthcare. Those investments _will_ go into terminal decline if the labour and demand provided by the non-retired starts collapsing.

Pension is a privilege I doubt I’ll get to enjoy, but that’s ok. I’m glad my parents, and maybe my children will.

excuse me? pensions need a robust young population to work. otherwise who is going to be providing all those goods and services the pensioners want to pay for?

pensions don't need young population at all, you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension

No, that won't work. Money is only worth as much as the goods and services it will pay for, and those goods and services have to be provided by the labour of the working young. If there aren't enough young people to meet that demand for labour, prices will rise, and the purchasing power of those pensions will evaporate.

(This is why the "triple lock" and other such schemes are so evil; by pegging state pensions to inflation, they unfairly lock in the purchasing power of a lucky generation, in defiance of all economic logic.)

If so, then yes, getting rid of that societal agreement would solve the problem of decreasing productivity.

your kids can help you voluntarily without any system involved

if you didn't work/save and don't have kids them you can get some basic support same as people in productive age get, but it's not really enough even to survive

Why would you want to pump birth rates up?

So fixing that would be a good start.

Don't get me wrong the standard of living in this country is very good, we have a great public health system, our education system is good and crime rate is generally low but it comes at a cost.

Cities like Sydney and Melbourne regularly rank highly as some of the most expensive places in the world to live. It is really not affordable to have children, especially at a young age. As a result most of my friends, work colleagues etc. have waited until their 30's to start a family.

Immigration has not done a lot to bring down the cost of things. Personally I think if they want people to have more children they need to make life in general more affordable.

I'm not Japanese, but in objectively thinking about what's best for Japan, "immigration" is not on the list. In fact it's on the list of things to never ever do. I don't mean it as in "do not accept foreigners". I mean do not adopt the policy of mass immigration to offset the shrinking population.

Indeed, it’s doubtful to me that immigration is a fix even for Western Europe. Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos. For whatever reason, European countries are starkly different from the United States, where immigrant groups have long enjoyed similar economic mobility to the native born (which continues to be true for the contemporary wave of Latin American immigrants).

More generally, it just outsources the problem to immigrants. You’re compensating for a culture that has become broken in a key respect by importing people from a culture that isn’t b

Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work. Come to London and tell me immigration is an outlandish idea - your barrista, your off-license shop keeper, your NHS keyworker and your TFL underground marshall will all laugh in your face.

I’m not talking about individual experiences, but aggregate statistics. In the UK, poor Muslims get more education than poor whites, but that doesn’t translate into better jobs: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-muslims-and-black-p.... They have lower income mobility than similarly situated whites.

The statistics are much worse in continental Europe, where Muslim immigrants are stuck in inter-generational poverty. Turkish people started immigrating to Europe in significant numbers around 1970, around the same time Vietnamese people started immigrating to the US. Half a century later, Vietnamese Americans have fully caught up with British Americans in terms of income. But the situation for Turks in Europe has been starkly different: https://theconversation.com/many-turkish-people-who-migrated... (“By the third generation, around half (49%) of those living in Europe were still poor, compared with just over a quarter (27%) of those who remained behind… Migrants from three family generations residing in countries renowned for the generosity of their welfare states were among the most impoverished. Some of the highest poverty rates were observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.”).

To an American those statistics are unbelievable. Germans, Italians, and Irish all came over a cheap labor and reached parity with British Americans within three generations. The Latin American immigrants coming to America today are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Several groups of immigrants who came here as impoverished refugees, such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Cubans, achieved parity even more quickly.

Your point about “class struggle” and the “barista, off-license shop keeper, [and] NHS keyworker” underscores my point. In Europe immigrants take those jobs, and then their kids take those jobs. That creates a politically and socially volatile situation. In America that doesn’t happen because immigrants have relatively high economic mobility. Irish and Italians did those jobs, and a lot worse, when they came here in the early 20th century. Today there is no meaningful class struggle centered around Irish or Italian identity because those groups fully integrated. In fact it’s a consistent struggle for US Democrats to build durable movements. Irish and Italians got FDR elected, but their kids and grandkids favored Reagan in a landslide.

Japan's population decline appears to be caused not by women giving birth to fewer children, but by an increase in the number of childless women. It appears that 1 in 3 women remain childless into their forties, compared to 1 in 20 in prior decades.

Women remain childless for several reasons, but my guess is they can't find a man who can support them financially and/or who they find themselves attracted to.

The traditional household arrangement is the man is at the office 24/7, the wife gets his paychecks and uses them to raise the children and occasionally go on vacations, and the man gets an allowance (but doesn't go on the vacations because he has to be at the office). Not much room for a harem there.

It's traditionally pretty normal for a married couple to drift apart over the years. People marry for appearances, social status, and to raise a family. They then seek gratification elsewhere.

The men who engage in this aren't looking to knock up more women. They already have a mother to their children. They want gratifying sex and emotional connection.

Either one would be an example of "things women don't actually enjoy".

Though Takehiro Sakurai and Aya Hirano both had career limiting scandals about dating 3+ people at the same time, so I guess some people try it.