Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#201

Post by abellerose » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #113

brazzy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living with their parents is a symptom of not being able to afford living on their own.

I could afford to move out sooner, but it would be waste of money. Instead I gave parents something out of what I earned to cover what I eat and some. It just was not an issue in any way. What exactly would I gained if I moved elsewhere to live alone or with roommate?

Not everyone has parents that are normal people. Some people have parents that are abusive. Unsure if you're looking for why some people do want to move out as soon as possible but that's a main one for a lot of people. I know a lot of college adults cannot afford to go to university while having a part time job and living alone. Sucks for them if their parents are abusive. Not so much if parents are okay.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#202

Post by ensiferum » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

langitbiru wrote: post #18

pmlnr wrote: post #4

Japan has the problems now we, Western society will be facing in 20 years. This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it.

> not follow it. How? Any idea?

A hard reset through a conflict aka war (and war preparation) on some scale has historically been used to reboot economies. Should Things get bad enough economically it'll happen again.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#203

Post by T-R » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #126

gsk22 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true at all. Japanese Kanji comprise only a few thousand characters (~2000 being considered sufficient for functional literacy). Chinese has well over 50000 characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

I just realized something. I have no idea how one deals with the rest of the kanji one doesn't know. Upon encountering kanji one doesn't know, how does one find out the meaning? How would you "look it up?"

Kanji are composed from a much smaller set of radicals, so you look it up by the radicals that compose it. Some dictionaries also divide characters up by stroke count. For the past 15+ years, electronic dictionaries with handwriting recognition have been popular, and now you can just use your phone keyboard.

In practice, sometimes you can also kind of guess at the pronunciation (since characters with the same main radical often have a similar pronunciation) and see what autocomplete lists; maybe that's less true outside of the joyo kanji, though.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#204

Post by inglor_cz » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #44

roenxi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy". Sure there is. If nothing else, at some point you have more people than can be physically fed with the available land. Each additional person uses up a certain amount of resources. If the marginal resource gain of adding another worker is smaller than that; then economically there are too many people. There is no principle saying that cannot ha…

> If nothing else, at some point you have more people than can be physically fed with the available land. The malthusian argument has been used since the old ages to argue for fewer people because of resource shortages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Modern_Malthusia... ). It has not eventuated. The more people there are, the more minds there are at looking for solutions to problems, the more able the h…

Well, water shortages in some places are coming dangerously close to the Malthusian problem eventuating.

Drought has contributed to the Syrian civil war and Egypt threatened Ethiopia with war over their megadamming project on the Blue Nile. Places like Yemen have an order of magnitude more people than in 1950 while relying on the same water resources.

This is not an easy problem to solve, water is too heavy to transport in significant amounts to places like Sanaa (elevation 7000 ft, over a million people, mild desert climate).

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#205

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:43 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #171

saagarjha wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the scenario you've mentioned does not describe these households. The problem here is that there are adults who are partially or wholly supported by their parents in a house where they are not living with (nor was it designed for them to live with) a spouse or children.

And what happens when their parents die and they cannot provide for themselves housing?

Yeah, that's really the crux of the problem: an inadequate safety net for these folks.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#206

Post by prewett » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #62

ginko wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've traveled a fair bit, and every part of Japan that I've been to feels like I've timed-traveled 20 years into a better future That's strange. To me traveling Japan feels like entering an alternative history where the 80s never ended.

Japan seemed to me a case study in hiding sociocultural problems with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition and specifically some sort of perverse derivative of Confucianism. Korea has the same problem. It's a dead-end culture: China and Vietnam finally threw off the shackles in the 20th century at great cost, but Northeast Asia's sociocultural and political economies are apparently still largely running…

Japan seems fairly adaptive. Unlike China in the 1800s, they recognized that they had to open up to the West and did so, taking the West at their own game. They were pretty successful at that for about 100 years, going from feudalism to a modern colonial power faster than anyone else, until the people in charge decided to bomb Pearl Harbor. Contrast with China, which refused to open up, got invaded several times, and then embraced Communism which destroyed their economy, and they are still lagging behind Japan in many areas (fashion, literature, manufacturing quality, building quality, general living standard, etc.) It's hard to say that living in Beijing/Shanghai is a better quality of life than Japan, and outside those two cities Japan is definitely better.

China hasn't thrown off Confucianism, either, just pieces of it, and not really so much in the rural areas. The Confucian solution to conflict by avoidance and/or top-down control is still there, and women still have it pretty rough.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#207

Post by inglor_cz » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #35

paganel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Malthus was in a sense right, as the “too many people” issue has showed up constantly since he wrote his stuff. And before anyone comes and tells me that “he was wrong because the Earth can sustain 8-9 billion humans, like it does right now”, I’ll say that there’s no way Earth’s actual ecosystem can sustain a major part of that population regularly eating beef, or regularly flying, or having scattered individual h…

You're awfully pessimistic and ignoring human creativity. And also human capacity for accepting compromises. When Malthus lived, there were about 1 billion people. It's hard to estimate, but I'd guess at most 10% of those were living non-miserable lives, so about 100 million people at most. Now the world middle class is 4 billion (40x) and the world upper class is probably around half a billion people (5x). I'm willi…

We have also incurred some ecological debt.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#208

Post by skim_milk » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

offtop5 wrote: post #130

>Under Katsube’s direction, Junko also enrolled in a program that helps shut-ins learn social skills by engaging in activities such as gardening, music, sports, and volunteering. America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house. I did find it…

>America desperately needs this

So why the finger pointing like all the other commenters on HN? Go out and fix it! If this problem could be solved with some NOSQL, a Raspberry PI, and soldering, this forum would collectively rally behind the solution. But suddenly when a problem is deemed "social" our hands go in the air and it's not in my backyard?

We're both techies, myself I'm pivoting my career into psychology 5 years after I thought I was done with college. We need more techies fixing this, and you clearly have some interest this problem, why not join the solution?

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#209

Post by wahern » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

seehafer wrote: post #115

decafninja wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of Western society, or maybe just outside of American society, this is completely untrue. In parts of Asia, and even in Asian enclaves in the US, you can even see high earning people (say...hedge fundies, or FAANG SWEs) living with their parents. In these cultures, marriage is typically the point where you move out, not graduating college.

Small nuclear family domiciles (as opposed to multigenerational family domiciles) are a particular feature of Anglo-Saxon-influenced cultures. So it's more common to see this in Mediterranean Europe (e.g. the Italian 'mammone') https://www.thelocal.it/20180619/italy-mammone-living-at-hom... as well.

Not just Anglo-Saxon but Northwest Europe, and the pattern goes back at least 400 years. I haven't seen any maps but I think it probably very roughly corresponds with the Hajnal line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line

Of course, modern American notions of the nuclear family are a little different from the historical norm as wealth and health put limits on its expression. Modern, middle-class East Asian norms are probably closer to the pattern hundreds of years ago in Northwest Europe.[1] But in terms of comparative culture the distinctions are crystal clear across time.

[1] Of course, hundreds of years ago (or just 100 years ago), many East Asian cultures had uber multigenerational clan households and even entire villages. I heard a story over dinner once from an elderly Chinese-Singaporean. His parents were migrants from China. His father died when he was a baby, and his mother died when he was about 8. Every night his mother had him sing and memorize a song that described his [paternal] family's village. Fast-forward to his late 60s, he finally has the urge to travel to China to find his roots. All he had to go on was the general region and the song, which described some kind of confluence of mountains and rivers. He got close enough that a local was able to recognize the details and tell him the precise village. When he got there the villagers--mostly cousins, and even an uncle, IIRC--already knew all about him and his parents. Both his parents' death as well as his birth were recorded in the clan books, even though they happened in Malaysia and he has no idea how news traveled back to the village. They even showed him the shrine to his father, which was tended to by the new occupant (presumably a distant cousin) of the house his father had previously lived in.

Re: Japan’s lost generation is still jobless and living with their parents

#210

Post by inglor_cz » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #21

langitbiru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not follow it. How? Any idea?

The obvious method would be to have more children.

Biology puts some limits on that. Fertility of women goes down in the fourth decade of life. The # of aneuploid ova rises sharply.

It is possible that there will be scientific development solving that, but so far, we do not have enough young fertile people to practice your obvious method, unless they were ready to have 4+ kids each.