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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

#91

Post by quartesixte »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #78

I'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 nu…

Probably just pure logistics. No one thought of it because getting to Japan in any kind of reasonable time frame was physically impossible.

Even today, a flight from the US west coast to Japan is ~11 hours one way and involves losing a day due to the international dateline. So you lose about 3 days just flying back and forth. And costs nearly a thousand dollars for economy class.

For most people, it’s not really an easy trip in the same way a hop to Lisbon from London might be. Now imagine that with prop planes.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#92

Post by hogepiyo »

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language.

Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it.

Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't sit right with me.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#93

Post by karaokeyoga »

eric4smith wrote: post #27

Visited Japan and loved it. BUT. The rest of the world treats Japan as something "special". All the media/manga/anime/pr0n/temples/culture and people. What I've learned traveling to various countries in the region? There's nothing really special about Japan, it's people, or it's media. The country and its denizens have been blown out of proportion with a kind of reputation that's out of this world... for the past 50…

I've lived here for over ten years and generally agree with you. I love it here, but I also feel that some westerners treat Japan with a "specialness" or "exoticness" that it doesn't quite deserve.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#94

Post by quartesixte »

lmm wrote: post #50
asiachick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan was world-beating in what categories 30 years ago (1993)? It wasn't computers. Cars? Toyota is still #1 in the world. What else? Phones (no). > Japan has dozens of payment systems but how many of them are competing outside Japan? Why would they? Japanese companies speak Japanese and make things for Japanese. The exceptions are just that, exceptions. And to be clear, my point is why is Japan called out for this?…

> Japan was world-beating in what categories 30 years ago (1993)? It wasn't computers.... Phones (no). Japan was top or near-top in most of the portable electronics markets that mattered at the time, the ancestors of today's phones. Digital cameras, portable music players, PDAs/personal organizers, video game consoles, heck even the pedometer. So why are they barely competitive on the portable electronics of today (p…

>One of the big worries about the Japanese economy is a sense that Toyota has massively missed the bus on electric cars. Especially after building the first really successful hybrid, how have they fallen so far behind the likes of GM or Mercedes/BMW/Audi? Why are they still pushing hydrogen decades after everyone else has realised it's a failure?

But are lithium-ion skateboard cars a success? People are rightly fretting about the lithium supply chain and the sheer weight of these cars raise eyebrows for many observers. We’re not completely in established territory yet — it’s still a frontier out here.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#95

Post by gkanai »

breput wrote: post #41

An interesting view of Japan, outside of the big cities, is blog written by Richard Hendy (an English ex-pat) back in the early 2010s called Spike Japan[0]. He focuses on areas such as Hokkaido where there are glimpses of past prosperity but due to an aging population and the younger people moving to the cities, the communities that remain are crumbling, but in a very Japanese way. Hendy has a great sense of humor an…

Spike Japan is great. He needed an editor though. It's a great reminder of the collapse of rural Japan- that's still ongoing today. Those parts of rural Japan should never have had the development that they did have during the 80s/90s bubble years.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#96

Post by rullelito »

hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

> Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it.

You haven't been to Sweden then.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#97

Post by Thorrez »

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?

You can save money but what are you going to do with it? If there aren't enough young people providing the goods and services the retired people need in retirement, the prices of those goods and services will skyrocket and many who saved won't be able to afford the goods and services.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#98

Post by quartesixte »

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…

Kind of related, but the slightly odd thing about a lot of Japanese commentary is that people forget the suburbs exist.

And these suburbs are very car centric.

The major difference is that the suburbanites will not visit the major city by car, and most young people do not become stuck in the suburbs and instead leave for Tokyo or any of the other big cities.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#99

Post by wk_end »

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…

> Emphasis on Tokyo, which was basically the only place in Japan that's still growing, until it too started shrinking during COVID.

A few days ago I commented the opposite of this: most of Japan's major cities ("Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and more"), per Wikipedia, have been growing. The inaka is shrinking, but that's part of the same migration away from rural areas that's happening across the developed world. Are you basing your claim that everywhere in the country - besides and now including Tokyo - on data that contradicts Wikipedia, or is it just intuition?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#100

Post by gkanai »

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.…

> semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country?

Japan did have a thriving semiconductor industry early on but key Japanese companies made wrong choices wrt technologies and obviously TSMC ran away with the market. Nikon was a competitor to ASML until the EUV revolution, etc.

see:

https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-peak-of-japa...

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