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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

#421

Post by Tainnor »

lmm wrote: post #341
petodo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German is not lingua franca spoken by people all around world, so yes, this comparison is ridiculous comparing lanugage taught everywhere in world with niche language, which is less popular than Chinese as foreign language.

There was a time when German was the language of science and widely studied in many countries. (Japanese has disproportionately many loanwords from German, for example).

Tragically, it was in no small part the fault of the Nazis that led to the decline of German for science. A huge number of German scientists emigrated to the US in the 1930s.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#422

Post by samtp »

jahewson wrote: post #213
samtp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who’s going to pay to repurpose the land? There’s zero economic value for anyone involved. Plus the workforce is half what it was, they have other things to do. That’s assuming they’re not already broke from spending 20 years supporting retirees that outnumber them 2:1 while watching their own businesses halve in size.

Saying there is 0 economic value in repurposing land is just silly. And just because a business has half the customers does not mean that the standard of living gets cut in half. You're only looking at one side of the economic equation.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#423

Post by golemiprague »

Hamuko wrote: post #212
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.

> Japan is a small country Small by what metric? By land area, it's comparable to Germany (with 5% more land) and it's the 11th most populous country in the world.

[dead]

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#424

Post by samtp »

bobthepanda wrote: post #75
samtp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the last holdouts may not move for anything

I mean eminent domain has been used for centuries (even pretty regularly today) for this exact purpose.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#425

Post by hinkley »

jeffbee wrote: post #59
hinkley wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, so it's a bit like the rich kid bitching about his parents and how financially independent he is when he's had one job.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#426

Post by meowfly »

petodo wrote: post #388
meowfly wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to China for that long and not trying to learn Mandarin is a misstep. Chinese is spoken by a lot of people, but spoken fluency isn't that high. Moreover, outside of the major cities, you will meet very few English speakers. Where I lived, Shanghai, there was a western community that essentially interacted with each other in their enclaves and never developed any meaningful relationships outside maybe dating som…

> Going to China for that long and not trying to learn Mandarin is a misstep. I went to China with intention to stay there one year to save some money and continue travelling. Then after less than a year I met my future wife. > Where I lived, Shanghai, there was a western community that essentially interacted with each other in their enclaves and never developed any meaningful relationships outside maybe dating someo…

I share a bit of that experience when trying to make Chinese friends. The first place I lived was with a family who had a son around my age. He was solely interested in practicing English but he had virtually no life outside of school.

I moved into a foreign students dorm and most of my classmates were Korean and Japanese, but I spoke to them in Chinese. The friend I hung out with the most was Korean and I didn't feel like there was a gap in hobbies. We had a group that would go out and play pool, drink soju, and sing KTV. I never had good opportunities to meet and hangout with other Chinese students. When people go to bars, they really don't go and socialize with others. Socializing is usually contained to the group you are in.

I think I'd say though there is still a big advantage in just being able to converse with taxi drivers, retail workers, etc. People are pretty chatty because westerners speaking Chinese is kind of novel. It is a great way to better understand what I consider a fairly misunderstood country.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#427

Post by digianarchist »

pjmlp wrote: post #149
digianarchist wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't authorities require evidence that you have given up your previous citizenship? Singapore does.

I wonder how that works for countries where it is a crime to give up the citizenship, does Singapore make an exception? I am aware that Germany does.

Some countries have no provisions for giving up citizenship (Argentina I think) so I wonder what happens in those situations.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#428

Post by fomine3 »

Tainnor wrote: post #417
soraminazuki wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retro Japanese games displayed text in all katakana because of technical limitations. But it didn't stick, for good reasons. It's incredibly hard to read. Like, imagine reading an ASCII text in hexadecimal representation. That's how it feels when reading a sufficiently long text in all hiragana or katakana. Abolishing kanjis might've worked for the Korean language, but Korean isn't Japanese. They're entirely differen…

It would work fine. Japanese people can read Kana-only text - foreigners often can't because they aren't as used to it, but Japanese children read books mostly in Hiragana and they know what things sound like because they speak the language long before they know how to read it.

can read, inefficiently

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#429

Post by fomine3 »

vintermann wrote: post #408
314 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take is a bit basic.

I suspect that most people who proclaim sentiments like that in this thread (of course, just learn Japanese!) do not speak a second language at a conversational level at all. That people grossly underestimate how hard it is to learn languages, is why Duolingo is in business. And Berlitz, Pimsleur, and Rosetta Stone before them. The guy didn't say he spoke _no_ Japanese. He said he spoke _little_ Japanese. And for an…

Isn't it opposite? IMO English natives tend to think that English should be okay in everywhere. European multilingual may think "just learn Japanese" but it's harder compared to european language for europeans

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#430

Post by lmm »

petodo wrote: post #377
lmm wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, I really doubt that you can move to Japan with zero Japanese and in half year learn enough to hold normal conversation and be able to read/write Japanese, all that while working full time and not being immersed every day in Japanese language course. If you're working full time in Japanese you could absolutely get conversational Japanese within half a year. Indeed I suspect that's the most practical way.

> If you're working full time in Japanese you could absolutely get conversational Japanese within half a year. I fail to imagine scenario where Japanese company hire non-japanese speaker who will then be working full time in Japanese language to learn it.

Happens all the time with menial or physical jobs where they're desperate for labour - construction, fishing, forestry, that sort of thing. You can't get a work visa for that kind of job, but if you have a visa for other reasons (spouse, child of Japanese national, etc.) they'll take you.
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