almost anything related to japan will go to the top of HN. is this a weeb board...
Japan has changed in important and visible ways
71–80 of 459 posts
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#72I 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.…
> Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special. Japan used to be on the leading edge of microprocessor design. They aren't anymore. > semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? Because they used to be a contender. > smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone…
> Because they used to be a contender.
Yeah and it's easy to forget. Every big Japanese company used to make their own silicon. It was easy for them to make knock-off 6502s and the entire Texas Instruments product line at half the price (See: Nintendo). Japan had almost the whole global DRAM market by the end of the 1980s. Americans, in a panic, formed a quasi-governmental bailout scheme called SEMATECH to re-establish the competitiveness of the moribund domestic computer industry. People seriously feared Japan was going to eclipse the American economy. Their kids, after all, were good at math tests.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#73Earlier 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…
Japanese university entrance exams are also notoriously difficult; if it weren’t for the declining birth rate, the exams would probably be a push rather than a pull factor for students, the same way large numbers of South Korean and Chinese students try and opt out of their similarly hard exams.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#74Earlier 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…
For Indian migrants, Japan is not nearly as attractive as the US, Canada, Australia etc. Wages particularly in engineering/IT are comparatively low, working conditions are tough, the language is difficult, and Japanese society is known for being xenophobic. Politely so, for most part, but still: you might not get beaten up, but neither nor your children will you ever be accepted as Japanese.
It's no coincidence that the biggest groups of immigrants to Japan are the Chinese and Vietnamese, who have a leg up on the language (Chinese characters for the Chinese, obviously, but Vietnamese has a lot of Chinese loans shared with Japanese too) and blend in better in terms of physical appearance and culture.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why can you not repurpose the land used for those 20 million houses back into green space or better uses for the remaining 30 million? Not to mention that there is much less competition for resources when the population is 60% of what it used to be. You're acting like this is a major problem, but it seems like a great opportunity.
The depopulation is not even. You can’t really abandon a few people in a neighborhood without services ethically or legally, and the last holdouts may not move for anything.
Similar issues occurred in Detroit and other Rust Belt areas, and those had extreme population declines but could not abandon services and infrastructure.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#76I've dealt with two large Japanese tech corporations that people here have probably heard about. One thing that I found extremely unusual (on both companies) is that many (most?) people in high level roles got rotated every two years or so to completely different parts of the company. Building good relationships and then having to restart from scratch was complicated.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#77I 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…
> we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here
Welcome to the life of a lot of people on visa in the USA, country made by immigrants which makes it stupidly hard to become a permanent resident!
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#78I've always wondered what would have happened to Japan if the US forced them to allow EU-style free movement between the two (or more?) countries while they were drafting their new constitution.
Please note I'm not suggesting the US should have done that, just noting it wouldn't have been that wildly different than the US and Puerto Rico just a few decades earlier.
I'm not a history buff and I'm sure it's way more nuanced than that, just surprised US imperialism didn't swing for the fences like it had done before. Considering the atrocities Japanese-Americans faced during those times I can see why neither party would've been keen on opening up like that, I know.
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#79A 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.
Reading "The Limits to Growth" and having a passing understanding of the consequences of global warming will have you start to ask these kind of questions fairly quickly.
The Shift Project [1] did exactly that for France: they elaborated a plan to completely transform the French economy with the explicit goal of not wrecking climate further, aptly called "Le Plan de transformation de l'économie française" (I assume the name is understandable to an English speaker).
An interesting take of this plan is that instead of thinking in USD (or EUR, being in France), they reason strictly in terms of physical resources available, like land, water, oil, wind, sun, crops, wood, various ores, etc. Resources available within the next few decades, not in many centuries with future techs...
Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways
#80Earlier 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?
> each person show be saving for their own retirement
Saving where, the stock market? I wouldn't be surprised if a shrinking population means a shrinking stock market too.