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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

#131

Post by nohuck13 »

vasco wrote: post #111
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…

So if you live in 4 countries over four decades in your adult life you will learn 4 new languages? I don't think you must've lived more than one place abroad, or somewhere with good English. For example I speak 4 languages, understand another 2, but don't speak the language of the country I've lived in for the last 3.5 years, and I'm not even learning. At some point it's just absolutely not worth it and I'm just gonn…

> I'm just gonna occupy memory that will be more useful for work or life.

Well said, though presumably if your work was _BBC Tokyo correspondent_, that would be a weird argument.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#132

Post by midoridensha »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #35
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 guarante…

Losing your job on a HSP visa means you need to find a new job in 3 months. For a regular work visa, there's no such requirement; you have until the visa expires, whenever that is (which could be less than 3 months, or much more). The regular work visa is also not tied to an employer (HSP is though).

It's not nearly as bad as the US. And yes, from what I've heard, renewal is pretty much guaranteed unless you badly fuck up somehow.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#133

Post by FredPret »

junofan wrote: post #110
woahitsraj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent about half my year in Japan and half my year in Sweden and I speak both languages. It's always shocked me how many expats feel it's not necessary to speak the language but the justifications are totally different. In Sweden they say "Everyone here speaks English anyway" In Japan they say "All of my friends are expats anyway" I think if people don't want to learn a language they will come up with any excuse.

N1? You mastered 敬語 in 6 months?

I think he spent half a year every year

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#134

Post by midoridensha »

ngc248 wrote: post #86
danielscrubs wrote: post #54

> 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)

Things you don't see publicly in Japan are lots of homelessness, crime, and general bad behavior. It's pretty hard to hide homelessness and (violent) crime.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#135

Post by astrange »

Xixi wrote: post #79
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.

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 t…

Degrowth is completely false and is basically cope invented by the British to explain why it's actually good that their economy is so bad.

Economic growth does not mean using more resources (because that's expensive), it means more productive use of the same resources. The US emits less carbon and uses less water than it did in the 60s with a much larger economy.

(70s US degrowth environmentalism, like Limits to Growth, Cities as Growth Engines, The Population Bomb is the main cause of the US housing crisis due to NIMBYism, but also caused China to doom itself via the one-child policy, so the US wins yet again.)

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#136

Post by danielscrubs »

astrange wrote: post #119
danielscrubs wrote: post #54

> 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…

> Median wealth in Japan is 119,999 USD whilst in USA it is 93,271 USD. Median Japanese person is 10 years older than median US person (48 vs 38).

Good point. But I wonder how much of the American wealth is gotten by raised property value which would also be considered “productive”.

Half of my personal wealth comes from owning an apartment.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#137

Post by astrange »

monus21 wrote: post #87
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.

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. Age 60+: You are under the care of society again. This is always how humans have lived.

People 60+ are productive for society because they can be grandparents. Otherwise we wouldn't have evolved living that long.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#138

Post by savanaly »

woahitsraj wrote: post #103
rullelito wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I spent about half my year in Japan and half my year in Sweden and I speak both languages. It's always shocked me how many expats feel it's not necessary to speak the language but the justifications are totally different. In Sweden they say "Everyone here speaks English anyway" In Japan they say "All of my friends are expats anyway" I think if people don't want to learn a language they will come up with any excuse.

>I think if people don't want to learn a language they will come up with any excuse.

In a world where it was actually true that you don't have to learn the language wouldn't it appear that they always have an excuse not to? So how does your experience give evidence we're not in that world?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#139

Post by petodo »

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…

Have you lived in country with completely different language with characters instead of simple It's one thing to see everywhere words you can memorize when seeing it every single day in shops and online and very different thing when you see just bunch of strokes.

I lived in China for 5+ years and didn't learn the language because the characters are huge barrier. In a few weeks with Duolingo I learned more Spanish without ever visiting Spain than Chinese in few years living there. Same while travelling in Indonesia (where you are/were forced to learn Indonesian), I picked up comparable amount of phrases within few weeks as in China in few years. Of course I learned some basic Chinese characters at very beginning, so I can read at least menu in restaurants and bunch of phrases (how much does it cost, where is nnn,etc.), but I couldn't have any conversation at all with anyone not speaking English (or my mother tongues) and honestly I was not really interested in people who don't learn at least English as I had to learn as well since it's not my mother tongue. It probably helps I've found girlfriend (wife) who can be my translator if needed (which was not really needed even when dealing with paperwork most of the time).

But if author is journalist then I agree there should be set a higher bar for them, so they are able to research independently and make interviews with locals. It's one thing to be journalist covering the country and other thing just living your life working in English speaking enviroment without writing stories for thousands of people abroad.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#140

Post by marci »

junofan wrote: post #110
woahitsraj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent about half my year in Japan and half my year in Sweden and I speak both languages. It's always shocked me how many expats feel it's not necessary to speak the language but the justifications are totally different. In Sweden they say "Everyone here speaks English anyway" In Japan they say "All of my friends are expats anyway" I think if people don't want to learn a language they will come up with any excuse.

N1? You mastered 敬語 in 6 months?

I think they meant for the past x years, they've been spending half of it in Sweden, the other half in JApan, in chunks of 6 months.

edit: and you can be fluent in one or more languages without knowing how to read/write them.

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