These Japan threads are always so fascinating to read. When pressed, everyone seems to roughly agree on two main ideas:
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.
> 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)
I’m also a black American who lived in Japan and who frequents Japan for business and vacation; in fact, I just returned from my eighth trip a few days ago. I feel an indescribable feeling of freedom and even acceptance in Japan that have eluded me in America. By “acceptance” I don’t mean being accepted as a Japanese person; I mean being accepted as a person. I gladly prefer the treatment of being a “gaijin” to the treatment of being black in America.
That's great that it worked out for you but ask mixed-race Japanese folk like Ariana Miyamoto what it was like growing up (or Naomi Osaka what her Japanese grandparents had to say about her mother loving a Black man), they will tell you eerily similar tales and are quite the opposite of being treated as a person despite the fact they were born there, are culturally Japanese, and have spoken Japanese their entire life. You can also check out Yuya From Japan's channel on Youtube where he interviews mixed-race Japanese folk.
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.
I think OPs and parent posts are more content with the fact they will never be Japanese, and feel comfort in that they still get treated with more dignity and respect than 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'm a visibly nonwhite minority here in the deep south of America with friends of every skin tone, including those who are black. Not once has anyone younger than 40 been afraid of his physical safety due to the color of his skin, other than being in places where physical safety was questionable to begin with. Perhaps the true point here is that in Japan it is very rare that anyone has to fear for his physical safety for any reason.
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.
I'm not american so I have no experience with it myself. But I thought for example the birth of black lives matter movement was directly linked to black people feeling physically unsafe.
Are US criminals also 60x more violent? I feel like these stats are related. You can probably correlate them with guns and economy in some way as well.
Police interactions are quite infrequent among non-criminally adjacent people. Keep in mind lots of those policing minorities are minorities themselves. Police kill thousands of white people too. So in a sense your question is why doesn’t everyone leave America because of fear of police?
Everytime I talk with other non-Americans about traveling in the US one of the main fears that comes up all the time is fear of the police. So I can't imagine the Japanese police being nearly as much a cause of concern and or fear.
I think people should have a rational fear of police everywhere, including Japan. Police have a state given power over you, and that can be abused no matter where you are.
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.
Aren't Japanese police just as likely to target "the foreigner" in the neighborhood anyway? They're not going to shoot on sight the way an American cop would but their ability (and legal leeway) to extract confessions is infamous.
Only if you are a criminal. Don't point a gun at a cop and you won't get killed by one. If you don't break laws or speed you will not actually interact with cops in the US. I'm 45 and the only times I have ever interacted with police is when I got pulled over for speeding, or something wrong with my car.
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 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.
Those are 4 people out of many thousands that have been killed by police in the US, they are hardly representative. A persons actions have hundreds of times more impact on how likely they are to be killed by a cop than his race.
Without putting words in their mouth, I think they are arguing that in the US, one’s skin color plays a larger role than their behavior, when it comes to whether their interaction with the police results in brutality or not. While they are both factors, one is a stronger predictor than the other.
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.
"one’s skin color plays a larger role than their behavior"
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.
Please do a few google searches on this topic so that you can change your worldview. I know it's tough to challenge your core beliefs, but part of intellectual curiosity is also personal growth, especially around topics that you have an emotional attachment to.
I actually did, a few months ago. In my state, out of the 10 non gun-carrying people killed by the cops in the past 10 years, 2-3 were Black, 5 were White, the rest Hispanic and 1 Asian (matching the racial makeup of US).
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.
reflexive shame towards the nation is the only cultural practice americans are still taught.
in contrast to japan who have pretty much eroded their past atrocities from the public consciousness, the intelligentsia seem fixated on wallowing in ours.
i leave it to you to decide which strategy has created a more cohesive public.
> Not once has anyone younger than 40 been afraid of his physical safety due to the color of his skin, other than being in places where physical safety was questionable to begin with.
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.
I think this is a false equivalence as result of the attempt to fit what's happening there in Western mental models. I don't know anything specific about Japan but I see it happening all the time with Middle Eastern or Eastern European nations.
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.
My ancestors in Eastern Europe were usually attached to the land and belonged to the landowner. They had no rights: they owned no property, they could not move, and their owner could treat them any way he liked, including unrestricted violence. They could be bought, sold and inherited as any other property. How is this not slavery?
I get the feeling you are trying to simplify the world so massively it ends up being non recognizable. Colonialism brought oppression, but oppression isn't necessarily colonialist. Only some countries has been colonial powers, but Turkey certainly was one of them.
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.
Turks are by no means a saint, after all they used to run a hugely successful empire for centuries but the way they governed was much different that the western ones and that's why doesn't translate 1 to 1 at all. Many of that culture was transferred to modern day Turkey and many was lost and changed but the gist is that it was very different(not better or worse). When France finally let the women elect and be elected, that was 30 years after Turks did it. In the 50s Turks were like "Those French showed big progress in women's rights, good for them!". Turks were over the women's political rights since generations but Turks had very different problems than the French.
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.
Is this a question or are you trying to claim something? Why are you talking as if we both know something and you are trying to make me spill the beans?
I'm born in Eastern Europe, our ways are perceived as very racist in the West. Quite a minefield trying not to offend someone but it's also easy to learn because in the west people are still racist but they distilled it to some forbidden keywords. Like Kanye West crossed the line when said the forbidden words and Musk closed his account but before saying the keyword, he was the same guy expressing the same opinions for a long time and everyone knew what he was talking about.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.)
>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.)
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.
Correlates nicely with their location on the economic parable. Korea started to grow later than Japan (because of the civil war) and is now where Japan was about 30-35 years ago: still booming, with insane real estate costs, etc. Japan has had 20 years of stagnation - people got poorer, so now they're making kids again.
It seems much more likely that the driving factor behind their low birth rate is their very high rate of overwork. There have been a number of articles about how impossible it is for a typical salaryman to have enough free time and energy to even care about sex, let alone find a partner.
> They're looking at a massive demographic crisis because of their misoginy, and not helped by their xenophobia
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.
> deeply xenophobic monoculture society that restricts immigration and promotes traditional gender roles
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.
As someone who has traveled many places, and also an American.. I have no loyalty to America and would leave the moment my career allowed for it; straight to Japan.
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.
It is an extreme, but it's fair. I would not fight unless I was forced to fight. I am quite passive even though I own guns for sport purposes. If I was forced to enlist because of something traumatic, I would have to be in a indirect combat position(drones, communications,etc).
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.
You really can not simply categorize asking people to do good work/not legalizing drug/keeping a valid border as MAGA.
"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.
describing a highly competent, domestically popular & highly trusted government as 'MAGA' is perhaps one of the most pro MAGA statements i have ever heard. the fact that in spite of all of it's problems and what is essentially at this point a whole generation of recession, japan continues to be a high trust society with civil services and infrastructure that is the rival of the rest of the world speaks very highly of the japanese system's integrity. consider that at the peak of our prior recession, many us state & local governments essentially ceased to function.
Japanese people complain about everything, especially when it's anonymous. Just look at Google maps reviews, or product reviews on amazon.co.jp: you'll see 1-star reviews for stuff just because something wasn't quite perfect. It's probably the same for the politicians; they complain, but the alternatives are worse in their minds.
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.
Yes. I actually knew and frequently talked with many of the homeless people who lived near me when I lived in downtown SF. The thing is that opiates are naturally cheap, and most of the current cost comes from heavy regulation.
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.
> If you could purchase any drug OTC at a fair price, virtually no one would be risking their life on dodgy street drugs.
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.
Right, that's why I said a "fair market price", not "heavily regulated and taxed to pay for facilities for junkies and pay for drug education". My understanding is that opiates can be produced dirt cheap.
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.
1. Is verifiable from data, but 2. Isn’t obvious. It’s also a bit of a leap to equate Japan with MAGA, or at least in totality. Stance on immigration sure, but other aspects not really. Japan isn’t trying to ban abortion, or make a push for laws based on religion for example.
> Some of the most corrupt or impoverished countries are also monocultural.
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?
America is no more diverse than Singapore because every country is made of individuals each of which is unique and therefore perfectly diverse. We have chosen other arbitrary things which is weird since we say we are a melting pot.
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.