Japan has changed in important and visible ways • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#51

Post by throwawaaay129 » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:38 AM UTC

Ironically both articles come from a very typically western patronizing perspective

A lot of expats come to asia and get frustrated with many small cultural details. It's especially prominent when the person doesn't speak the local language (as this BBC corespondent... shocking). The general reaction is "why can't you just be more like the us/europe/etc." It's really miopic. There is always a larger broader cultural context for why things are the way they are. Things that have developed organically over generations and aren't exactly planned

Just a couple of examples:

"Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan, and it’s a big reason why Japanese people earn such low and stagnant wages.“

Yes, this is very common in Asia. They also will work extremely long hours. However the productivity (as also pointed out in the article) is much lower. People are a lot less stressed at work. This ties into other aspect of work culture.. where East Asian cultures have a lot less of a fixation on professionalism and it's more of "friends hanging out" at work. You go out to drink with the boss, and you sit playing on your phone at work sometimes. Okay, you might not like that yourself and you'd like to just do an intense 8 hours and clock out - but that's how things operate and a lot of people enjoy it. If your KFC has twice as many workers as it technically needs - do you work less and get paid less? Yes. That's the tradeoff

"I think an equally or even more important problem is corporate gerontocracy .."

This ties into some very fundamental cultural priorities about caring and respecting elders. Yeah you get a bunch of morons promoted b/c they're older and "more experienced" - but the flip side of the coin is that people generally really take care of the elderly. I took my grandmother to visit China once and she was blown away at how respectful and kind everyone was to her. Could you somehow have people care and respect elders and yet have CEOs that was 22yrs old? Maybe - but the two things are a bit at odds.

Living in Taiwan now, I can see the effect of westernization and it's a mixed bag (You have waves of US-educated Taiwanese reshaping the cultural landscape). It's very interesting to contrast with how things develop in China - which has gone for a more Japanese-style modernization and has been more selective about importing western ideas. I don't necessarily think the changes the writers want are bad (and I haven't really lived in Japan, so I wouldn't dare to have an opinion), but the way they're presented shows a very shallow understanding of what's really going on. At the end of the day you can't tweak one cultural irritant without affecting the whole cultural edifice.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#52

Post by csdvrx » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:39 AM UTC

Fordec wrote: post #32

tstrimple wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then maybe the welfare state is no longer suited to the country population profile, and each person show be saving for their own retirement and children?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#53

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:39 AM UTC

warning26 wrote: post #38

> 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…

The real issue isn't the tax policy. The tolerance for depreciation of housing prices is grounded in the fact that housing is not bootleg social security. Both the Japanese state and companies take care of their people, so housing is not seen as an anti-poverty insurance.

If you want that kind of model you'll have to create the conditions for it first which means getting rid of the homesteading mentality.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#54

Post by danielscrubs » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:39 AM UTC

> Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan, and it’s a big reason why Japanese people earn such low and stagnant wages.

Median wealth in Japan is 119,999 USD whilst in USA it is 93,271 USD.

I see way more misery in American cities than I ever seen here. I also had an ex (with a masters degree mind you) who was a cleaning lady for a short while, and they worked her to the bone, 12 hour shifts, and she literally had to run from company to company to be able to make it. Sure the company earned more money but that didn't mean that she earned more!

CEOs have smaller salaries in Japan than in US and shareholders make less to compensate for having more workers, is this really a bad thing? Do we really need more Jeff Bezos in Japan to be called productive?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#55

Post by willbudd » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:41 AM UTC

deepGem wrote: post #43

willbudd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So Indians are on the top of the emigration food chain and I wonder why Japan is not one of our top destinations. There are like 50K Indians in Japan, mostly Tokyo. This is a surprisingly low number. Sure there is the language barrier but that barrier holds true for Germany also which has a lot more Indians. My hunch is education - Japan does not have too many universities to attract young talent, as compared to Germ…

Student visas and work visas (the stepping stones on the path toward permanent residency) are admittedly relatively tricky. Lots of pointless bureaucracy, and requests for "guarantors". Which basically amounts to finding some random Japanese acquaintance or employer to put their signature (hanko) on a piece of paper.

Still, I expect the numbers from Asian countries to steadily increase—unless we go into some pandemic lockdown again.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#56

Post by monting » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:41 AM UTC

I recently spent 3 months in Tokyo and I have say, that the quality of life, service, food, consumer products, safety, air/noise pollution, are the best I've seen anywhere.

It's especially pleasing given that the prices are very low in comparison to other world-class cities. I did, however, witness prices rising during the time I was there.

It's hard to see how Tokyo might have been stagnating given the quality of life I witnessed. It saddens me to say this but, I'd visit Taiwan to see what economic stagnation looks like - it feels like time-traveling back to the 90's.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#57

Post by throwaway0x7E6 » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:42 AM UTC

golemiprague wrote: post #36

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.

[flagged]

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#58

Post by Fordec » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:43 AM UTC

csdvrx wrote: post #52

Fordec wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then maybe the welfare state is no longer suited to the country population profile, and each person show be saving for their own retirement and children?

That's what people do, but to do so they need to work in growth industries and geographies. Otherwise you don't make enough to do just that. Thus they go somewhere that does, in this case Tokyo mostly. Which makes the situation worse for the prefectures that they leave causing brain drain, and now those that stayed need to have the taxation to cover for the two they were already on the hook for, and now the two that the person gone to individualistically "save for their own retirement".

This generally leads to services and infrastructure getting shut down. Not more stuff spread out to less people because certain modern lifestyle features, things like hospitals, need a minimum level of patients and experts to function well above zero.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#59

Post by jeffbee » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:45 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #8

asiachick wrote: post #5

I like all the rebuttals but the top still strikes me as mostly unsubstantiated claims > That (gerontocracy) in turn has caused Japanese companies to fall behind foreign rivals as they miss technological revolution after revolution — microprocessors, smartphones, semiconductor foundries, battery-powered cars, etc. smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft.…

And it’s not like the iPhone is made without Japanese parts. Sharp has featured heavily in a number of iterations of the phones. Also Teslas were made with Panasonic batteries before the gigafactory was created, thank you very much, and I’m not so sure the thin film they are using isn’t still sourced from Japan and they’re just doing assembly.

Every battery that has ever come out of "the gigafactory" if you mean Gigafactory Nevada is a Panasonic battery. All the equipment in the factory belongs to Panasonic. All the money to build the factory was invested by Panasonic.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#60

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 5:47 AM UTC

famahar wrote: post #29

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…

I know some people with citizenship. All it requires is fluent Japanese. They came from a d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶e̶d̶ developing country so getting citizenship was an almost no brainer for them. There's no real complicated test, it' just that the whole process is done in Japanese so you'll have to fill out paperwork and do interviews in Japanese. >Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while,…

Well, it kinda sucked when they wouldn’t let the permanent residents into the country during the first year of COVID, so you were essentially unable to visit family (or worse, unable to return to your life, home and work after such a visit).