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?"
Please don't bring Norway into this. I'd rather not see it inspire yet another subthread with a bunch of cocksure foreigners who think they know what this country is like. Their analysis tends to be shallow.
I live in Norway, and I think it's pretty close to an utopia.
Not that there aren't flaws, but people tend to complain for the sake of complaining.
This often makes outsiders think that it's all just a facade and that behind the scenes it's actually terrible, that Norway can't just be a good place to live, there has to be some sort of dirty secret that undoes all the good things about the place.
Are you a native or have you moved there from somewhere else? I think the dual to "the grass is always greener" is that you might not realize that some things are problematic, or that there are better alternatives, unless you've have the chance to look at it from another perspective.
I moved to Norway when I was 5 (from Sweden). While I technically qualify as a foreigner, I would say that I'm a vanilla Norwegian guy.
I can't really comment on being biased or not, that's obviously not the sort of thing I would know myself, but I do have a lot of friends all across the world that I talk with regularly, and find that they have to deal with a lot of small crises and huddles in life I don't have to deal with (saving up for college, paying hospital bills, high insurance costs, etc).
I know that if I suddenly lose both my arms in a car accident, or otherwise get long-term sick, the social safety net is there to get me back on my feet.
When I've interacted with the police, they have been polite gentlemen who genuinely care about their job and their community, I've never come across the power and trigger happy psychopaths that the US unfortunately seems to attract for their police jobs.
And I know by experience that even somebody who has a "low" job like working at McDonalds is pretty well off, able to buy more than just the bare necessities. Stuff like people having two jobs just to survive is unheard of.
As I said, nothing is perfect, but when I do hear people complain about Norway, it's usually from an outsider perspective, getting things like our taxes completely wrong, or from an insider perspective, complaining about dumb politicians or bad weather.
"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.
I can understand why some people would like more a more quantitative exploration of the issue than the opinion piece that the article is. I hate to say it, but I think the the article is spot on. I lived most of my life in Canada, moved to Japan for 5 years, moved again to the UK for 2 years and have now moved back to Japan (hopefully for good).
Japanese culture is drilled into people at school. This is something heavily criticised by foreigners who pity the lack of freedom that Japanese school children have. It is a double edged sword, but this strong cultural upbringing (enforced by teachers, not parents) does have a lot of advantages.
I think one of the biggest thing I like about Japan is the lack of societal angst that I perceive here. Many, many people here are "poor" (I live in the countryside where jobs are not plentiful, or high paying), but I never hear anyone complaining about their salary. You just make do with what you have. Especially the "American Dream" is practically absent. Hardly anybody tries to strike it rich. They just try to make a nice life within their means.
When I lived in the UK, the sky rocketing housing market split people into 2 camps -- those speculating in order to make it rich, and those who were wondering if how they were going to be able to live on the pittance of a salary they received (and complaining about the injustice of it all).
I'm sure many people prefer the western approach, but I will happily live in "poverty" in Japan instead.
Even during the deepest point of the post-1980s recession, unemployment never exceeded 6%. In fact, the highest level of unemployment Japan has experienced since 1953 was 5.6%: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate
It is interesting that they managed to preserve low unemployment and increase the standard of living during about 20 years of flat economic growth, but they've done it. Part of it can be explained by the fact that layoffs are rare (companies almost always assign employees to do unnecessary work rather than lay them off), but that is not sufficient to explain how Japan maintained the world's second-highest GDP during the "lost decade."
Japanese GDP (PPP) per capita is only about 70% of US GDP per capita. If they have the world's second-highest GDP, that is mostly because they have the developed world's second-highest population.
Some argue that Japan fudged its numbers to hide the drop in GDP following the crisis, and was waiting for reality to catch up whilst reporting stagnation for a few years.
Depends on your definition of credible evidence, and your personal theoretical bias, as with most things in economics (see: China bull vs bear case).
My position on the matter is "I don't know, and I'm unwilling to invest the effort to know"; the extent of my interest in Japan is how the ever lowering JPYSGD makes for good value holidays. But it was an interesting theory worth chucking in.
I've also seen some interesting playing around the components of CPI in Japan and elsewhere, taking them in and out of the index as required to obtain the right result. Can't find a link, unfortunately; it was probably a paid bank research report and I've been out of the field for half a decade.
>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.
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.
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.
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)
That makes me wonder if it's a good time to start up some mountain tourism in Japan. The landscape is magnificient, the culture is unique, and if the prices are falling a bit you could attract a lot more of budget-ish climbing/hiking/trekking/paragliding/younameit traffic both foreign and local. Especially hiking, trekking and trailrunning is quite big.
The only downside being that the Yen is a strong currency, which kills the whole budget idea. The central bank has been trying for a long time to induce inflation, without much success.
That piece doesn't really contradict the article. Yubari is shrinking but it's maintaining strong public services, low crime, and a high quality of life for its residents.
It's desperately attempting to, yes. However, it will fail, sooner or later, because every single rural city in Japan will soon be like Yubari, and the central government can't prop up all of them.
The following piece, also on Spike, is much slower/less flashy reading, but nonetheless pretty terrifying.
The reason I brought up the areas surrounding train station stops is because those areas are the prime commerce locations where things are supposed to be at their best. Things like homelessness exist everywhere in the shadows of society. To have buildings that contrast sharply with the glittering skyscrapes that symbolize Tokyo exist adjacent to train stations is a signal that not all is well everywhere in the country, even within greater Tokyo.
That happens to be a wrong assumption. Homelessness happens mostly in the most expensive areas of Japan, which are roughly the same as the prime commerce locations.
In terms of housing and basic needs, rural Japan is far ahead. But this doesn't happen just in Japan, it's a common theme. If all you aspire to is a full time job and a modest life, it's easy to have just that in many small towns in Japan where literally only the mentally impaired may need support to achieve just that. But a lot of people are addicted to urban life, and urban life in Japan is tough.
The thing that I find most disconcerting when riding the train from Narita are all the gaudy signs that read "本" with the kind of lowest-common-denominator flashing lights and gaudy font that I expect from sex shops or gambling establishments. It's weird to get off a plane, where I previously thought "reading: the activity of the smart and elite" and show up in Narita where it's "reading: the lowest-common-denominator activity that appeals to everyone".
(I get a similar feeling when going to London. I can read all the signs and overhear all the conversations, but everything is ... different. It's weird.)
'"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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 … ).
> 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.
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.
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.
If and when it happens, a sharp transition would include seizure of debt assets owned by your father-in-law's generation. Either through default or inflation.
Furthermore I understand, but cannot provide evidence, that 10% of true believers is enough to revolutionize a whole population. Indeed the Meiji succeeded with only around 10% support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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!
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
"Soshoku danshi" is literally "grass-eating (herbivore) man". "Soshoku-kei danshi" is "grass-eating-group man". The latter is slightly more correct, but both are in common use.
You are correct. The calligraphist got the inclusion of the "kei" right, just not the article text. I don't think that "soushoku danshi" is wrong, though. Also, sometimes just "soushoku doubutsu" is used (literally, "herbivore").
I don't think it's literal; it just uses meat eating as a metaphor for aggressivity and drive. Just like in English we have "carnal act" for sex, referring to the flesh. Or whatever.
It's not even a word denoting vegetarians, but rather herbivores. A vegetarian is called 菜食主義者 (saishoku shugisha), not "soushoku" anything. "soushoku danshi" comes from "soushoku doubutsu", or "herbivore".
Japan's unemployment rate is 3.6% vs 5.5% for the US: http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/roudou/results/month/inde... vs 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=front... vs 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-p... vs 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.