Japan to introduce six-month residency visa for 'digital nomads'

The typical explanation given is poor economic policy - good times led banks to start lending excessively, excessive lending drove speculation, speculation drove bubbles, those bubbles burst, everything collapsed, and they just never managed to get back up again. But that last part is what most interests me.

Most of the Soviet Bloc type nations you named had reasonable fertility rates under the USSR, only collapsed once the USSR collapsed in 1991, and are inching back up again. Japan, by contrast, never had a particularly great fertility rate post-war. Then it just collapsed in the 1970s and simply kept going down. [1]

Fertility rates just determine so much. With a good fertility rate companies grow naturally because their market size is constantly naturally increasing. And vice versa for poor fertility rates. It also determines the overall age distribution of a population, such as how in Japan now 10% of the population is over 80. When an ever larger chunk of your population is leaving the labor force with not enough people to replace them, and then an even smaller taxpayer base to provide the social benefits necessary to sustain these people in their elder years - everything just becomes completely unsustainable.

And, again, none of this will ever get better such as, for instance, when the older people start passing en masse. This is because fertility rate determines the ratio of distributions within a population. You can see this quite clearly in this [2] population pyramid. The only solution is for them to suddenly start dramatically increasing their fertility rate.

[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...

"Employment" on that list is among other items of "Not permitted travel purposes" that hint at an obvious implied context for the said purposes, i.e. the United States. You are not allowed to visit the United States for the purpose of employment while on a visitor's visa. A digital nomad typically is already employed and doesn't visit countries for that purpose.

Having traveled to the US a number of times and been asked by border agents, I've explained that although employment not being the purpose of my visit, I often work on my computer for my own business, in my own country. After a brief exchange to clarify that my activities in no way involved US businesses or clients, I was cleared. I agree with you that the rule might seem fuzzy, but based on the questions asked, the intent has never been.

In the many years that I've traveled, it's historically been the same in any countries that I've visited. Even the ones where it's currently suggested that the issue might be blurrier (coincidentally after they start issuing nomad visas). Meanwhile, no one can tell you specifically what exactly constitutes a "digital nomad" and what makes them "not a tourist". I think it's unfortunate that instead of asking for more clarity from regulators, travelers are playing along by repeating the suggested tropes.

  > The reason being rich non-Samoans would quickly buy up the entire island and there would be no Samoa / Samoan culture anymore. 

isn't this more of a class (rich vs non-rich) issue than an immigration issue?

  > I don't know how to resolve that.

allow only people who live long-term and actually reside there to buy property might be one strategy?

  > On the other hand, something will be lost, something that seems to have value, which is the cultures of the people there currently.

its true but its also true many of those cultures most prized traditions come from the intersection of native and foreign creating something new in the first-place... something might be lost but another gained...

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btw, slight tangent but i think there is also a contradiction with immigration policy in regards to attracting rich foreigners: many countries want them because its supposed that they bring capital/money with them in the hopes of spurring investment and local economy but the flip-side is what you describe where the rich foreigners start owning/dominating things to the detriment of locals... and countries conversely don't want the non-rich to stay long-term because they aren't perceived as high-class/desirable yet they are the ones that work in the 'productive economy' which might help the locals more in the long and short term....i think there is an issue there as well...

We're not talking about the US judicial system here.

And your statement is nonsense, murdering someone is illegal whether it's proven or not.

> Genocide is explicitly defined as "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." The immigrants are not arriving onshore and butchering the natives.

No, but when immigrant/coloniser diaspora becomes large enough in numbers they rise up against the natives and start displacing them, most often violently. As seen almost always throughout history, or in the news tonight.

> It's just Nature.

Nature is nature, and human policy is separate from that. Displacing enormous amounts of people to "fix" some imaginary GDP number is as far from nature as can be, unless we argue that war and genocide is a natural behaviour among human beings. Which unfortunately I think we can. Then again if it's "just nature", then why do people here argue for organising mass migration to Japan. Let nature have it's course then?

As for the rest of your comment, you are arguing automatically based on what you have imagined that I wrote, even though I tried to clarify to you. I don't know how I can get my point through, so you can understand that I connected organised foreign colonisation / mass migration to Japan with genocide. Because one usually follows the other.

Even an outright military invasion can be less of a threat to a nation, since some conquerors only want to extract resources and tributes without taking over the land by putting their own population there.