> 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…
> Go to any second-tier city, or even much of suburban Tokyo, and you'll see urban collapse in action
And this is different from the old Rust Belt cities in the US, how?
Cites are growing. Anything outside of that is collapsing. There's no bloody in-between.
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.
Sure, but the people saying Japan needs to become more like western Europe, or like non-Japan countries generally, to solve its demographic crisis, are barking up the wrong tree.
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…
> People are a lot less stressed at work
Are we talking about the same Japan here? Karoshi (death from overwork), black companies etc is not just a Western news trope, and all the Japanese salarymen I know hate the work culture.
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…
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…
Both India and Germany have much stronger cultures of English usage than Japan -- and Australia and the UK are English speaking countries. Educated Indians learn to use English in a business setting, but this is not really as useful in Japan; and German has a lot more common with English (and with the many Indo-European languages, like Hindi and Sanskrit, that are familiar to people in India even when they are not their spoken language) than Japanese has with either language.
> 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 s…
>>> I see way more misery in American cities than I ever seen here.
The grass is always greener on the other side. Even Japan has misery, but due to their cultural norms you are not supposed to show that publicly, you are just supposed to eat it and grin.
Compared to all that the "anything goes" culture of the US is always preferable. (Ofc the US has its own problems)
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.
This has little to do with economics.
Age 0-18: You are under the care of society.
Age 18-60: You are a productive member of society.
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).
> You can't renounce your old citizenship before gaining new citizenship. Often you can and in those cases Japan generally requires you to. However it would depend on the citizenship in question.
Huh? Renouncing first would make you stateless, which is against UN resolutions. I've never heard anything like this about Japan's naturalization process, just that you're required to renounce after acquiring it (and if you don't and they find out, they'll revoke your citizenship).
> 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…
“Shutter-gai” shopping arcades are a special kind of depressing because you know that just 20 minutes away by train business is booming in the hip new downtown shopping malls.