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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

#41

Post by breput »

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 and the photography and storytelling is top notch.

This is a rabbit hole you won't mind falling down if you're at all interested in different cultures and comparing decaying rural areas to those in your own country.

[0] https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

and a few sample blog posts to give you a taste:

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/spike-hokkaido-2/lake-toya-...

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/requiem-for-a-railway/

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#42

Post by midoridensha »

YouMeWeThem wrote: post #18
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…

FYI, The length-of-stay requirements for permanent residence are actually longer than for citizenship. Guidelines for Permission for Permanent Residence [1] > In principle, the person has stayed in Japan for more than 10 years consecutively. What are the conditions for naturalization? [2] > The person must have been domiciled in Japan for five years or more consecutively [1] https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/93000349…

If you score enough points on the HSP visa (you don't even have to get that visa, just look at the point scoring), you can apply for PR in 3 years (70 points) or 1 year (80 points). Anyone on this forum probably can easily score at least 70 points just be getting a decent tech job in Japan.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#43

Post by deepGem »

willbudd wrote: post #33
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…

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 Germany, Australia or the UK. I'm not sure if this is by design or if there are some other factors at play.

If Japan built a lot more universities and made it easier and relatively affordable for foreign students to sign up with English classes etc, perhaps there will be a lot more immigrants from countries such as India, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#44

Post by wwweston »

fomine3 wrote: post #39
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…

fix: all businesses not catering directly to agriculture or AEON have already collapsed. AEON is the culture in suburbs

Can you expand AEON (I assume it's an acronym)?

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#45

Post by midoridensha »

tstrimple wrote: post #26
Fordec wrote: post #16

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.

Societies are asking questions about how to maintain a stable population, not achieve exponential growth. As it is, they're facing exponential shrinkage.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#46

Post by samtp »

jmole wrote: post #37
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.

replacement rate is steady-state, not exponential growth. when you have a country with 80 million homes, and 50 years later you only need 30 million of them, you're basically inviting decay to set in.

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.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#48

Post by vajrabum »

wwweston wrote: post #44
fomine3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fix: all businesses not catering directly to agriculture or AEON have already collapsed. AEON is the culture in suburbs

Can you expand AEON (I assume it's an acronym)?

It's apparently a retail business in Japan. https://www.welcome-aeon.com

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#49

Post by yed »

wwweston wrote: post #44
fomine3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fix: all businesses not catering directly to agriculture or AEON have already collapsed. AEON is the culture in suburbs

Can you expand AEON (I assume it's an acronym)?

It's a shopping mall conglomerate. They specialize in massive multi-level shopping malls.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#50

Post by lmm »

asiachick wrote: post #21
lmm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country? 30 years ago Japan was world-beating, today it isn't. You could say that to not be excelling is the norm, and the causes of success 30 years ago are the things to be investigated; nevertheless, this feels like a decline. > I watched several large bitcoin startups um, startup. I saw what must have been 11 different payment system appear (PayPay, D-Pay, ...),…

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 (phones, but also smartwatches and the like)?

> Cars? Toyota is still #1 in the world. What else?

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?

> Why would they? Japanese companies speak Japanese and make things for Japanese. The exceptions are just that, exceptions.

It didn't feel like it 30 years ago. And for internet businesses, it's not going to be good enough.

> And to be clear, my point is why is Japan called out for this? Where's the article that Germany is a failure because they don't have a global payments competitor? How about France? India? China? Why is only Japan that gets this special "you're a failing country because you don't have a global payment offering"

I think insular startup cultures in those countries absolutely do get called out. German and French companies tend to try to at least serve the whole EU if not more. India and China are bigger markets than Japan. Even so, companies from those regions that lack global ambition absolutely do get called out for it; there's no shortage of articles in the European press worrying about how few European companies are playing on the global stage.

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