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Japan has changed in important and visible ways

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Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#31

Post by idiocrat »

idiocrat wrote: post #19
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…

> the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people Sorry, I need to disagree with you. The process is fairly straightforward and formal. You need to fit very few and fair formal criteria, but if you do, then there is nothing special about the process. For a sincere applicant, there should be severe reasons why citizenship is not granted. There are statistics by nationality. I thin…

https://www.turning-japanese.info/2021/06/naturalization-sto...

Excerpt:

[...] the seven requirements [...] .

    1) Have continuously lived in Japan for 5 years or more?

    2) Be 20 years of age or above, and be a legal adult in my home country?

    3) Be of upright conduct? [///]

    4) Have a way of supporting myself and my family?

    5) Be willing to give up my other nationality/ies upon acquisition of Japanese nationality?

    6) Have never plotted to destroy the current government of Japan?

    7) Have a Japanese skill level enough to go about daily life, and be a functioning member of Japanese society?
Note: Requirement 7 is not explicitly written in the Nationality Law of Japan, which has only 6 requirements. Nevertheless, as a prospective citizen, it is still a good idea to know the language, as it indirectly affects requirement 4 by affecting what kind of jobs you can take.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#32

Post by Fordec »

tstrimple wrote: post #26
Fordec wrote: post #16

A fertility rate of 1.3 is still a demographic crisis. Just because the neighbors degraded to the same level also isn't supposed to be a point of pride. Japan at 1.3 and China at 1.2 are both far below replacement rate of 2.1 and both are heavily detrimental to a nations economic and demographic outlook and on par with only the European with the worst outlooks like Spain, Italy and Ukraine.

I wonder how long it will take our societies to stop asking questions like how can we make people have more babies, and start asking questions like is it smart to plan our entire economy around continuous exponential population growth.

2.1 is steady state of just one for one replace those dying with new people.

What numbers around 1.0 are are logarithmic decline as the population functionally keeps halving which is also hard to plan an economy around paying for two old people and child on the taxes per single worker.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#33

Post by willbudd »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…

As far as I know, naturalization only involves a basic language test at around the level of N3; which should be very easy if you picked up any Japanese at all during the years spent living in the country.

The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent residency status.

1) Citizenship is needed in order to vote. Important for the health of any democracy; but in a country where it seems to be LDP all day every day anyway, immigrants can hardly be faulted much for not placing much value on this aspect.

2) For Americans, Japanese citizenship allows them to revoke their American citizenship, in order to avoid double taxation. (Not an issue for other nationalities, where the ludicrous concept of double taxation doesn't apply.)

That's about it as far as I can think of. Add to that the fact that Japan doesn't recognize dual citizenship, it's no surprise most immigrants are satisfied to just stick with permanent residency.

Note that the bar for permanent residency has been lowered in recent years, making it more easily attainable than an equivalent status in most other industrial nations.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#34

Post by creakingstairs »

I remember having a discussion with a Japanese friend where he bemoaned Japan's failure to adapt to the new digital economy. I urged him to look on the brighter side. Despite the bubble crashing and (perceived) stagnation, Japan is still an economic powerhouse. I think Japan can only improve from here as younger generations takes over.

Also, as I get older, I seem to appreciate traditions and things not totally being driven by efficiency. Those "menial" jobs may not be strictly necessary but I love interacting with actual people.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#35

Post by diebeforei485 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…

> Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.

It depends on what living on a visa acually means in practice. Under what circumstances can you lose your visa? If it can happen overnight if you lose your job (like the H-1B in USA) that is bad. On the other hand, if renewal is pretty much guaranteed until retirement age unless you did a crime, that's perfectly fine.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#36

Post by golemiprague »

What's so great about immigration and growing population? Japan is a small country without any resources, why would they want to share what they have with immigrants? What good did immigration do to western Europe? All I hear about are problems and all the good things happened even before immigration, otherwise immigrants wouldn't have come there in the first place.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#37

Post by jmole »

tstrimple wrote: post #26
Fordec wrote: post #16

A fertility rate of 1.3 is still a demographic crisis. Just because the neighbors degraded to the same level also isn't supposed to be a point of pride. Japan at 1.3 and China at 1.2 are both far below replacement rate of 2.1 and both are heavily detrimental to a nations economic and demographic outlook and on par with only the European with the worst outlooks like Spain, Italy and Ukraine.

I wonder how long it will take our societies to stop asking questions like how can we make people have more babies, and start asking questions like is it smart to plan our entire economy around continuous exponential population growth.

replacement rate is steady-state, not exponential growth.

when you have a country with 80 million homes, and 50 years later you only need 30 million of them, you're basically inviting decay to set in.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#38

Post by warning26 »

> But in reality, depreciating real estate is one of Japan’s biggest strengths. Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway.

It makes me wonder if other countries could adopt a tax policy like Japan, to encourage property values to depreciate. Would it finally kill NIMBYism once and for all, if people stopped treating houses as an investment and started to treat them as actual places to live?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#39

Post by fomine3 »

rippercushions wrote: post #28

> Shopping centers, bars, clubs, and glittering zakkyo buildings (the ones with all the signs) continue to multiply. How could you live in Tokyo for a decade and miss all that? Emphasis on Tokyo, which was basically the only place in Japan that's still growing, until it too started shrinking during COVID. Go to any second-tier city, or even much of suburban Tokyo, and you'll see urban collapse in action: emptied-out…

fix: all businesses not catering directly to agriculture or AEON have already collapsed.

AEON is the culture in suburbs

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#40

Post by midoridensha »

YouMeWeThem wrote: post #14
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship: > Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years. I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people…

This is a common misconception. The reason you don't hear more about English-speaking westerners gaining Japanese citizenship is because they don't recognize dual citizenship. Renouncing your non-Japanese citizenships is a prerequisite to gaining Japanese citizenship, which is understandably too big a hurdle for many.

Technically, it's not a prerequisite, but a requirement. You can't renounce your old citizenship before gaining new citizenship. Japan requires you to renounce within a certain time after gaining Japanese citizenship, with a few exceptions (like Iran where you can't really renounce).
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