71–80 of 202 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting—thanks for your in-depth perspective. I didn’t mean to imply that nobody tries in Japanese university, of course, especially since I have no first-hand experience. I’d just heard that the culture is, in general, less rigorous than in Western universities. The point about networking through professors is really interesting to me. Alongside other replies about the intensity of the job hunt for Japanese stud…
Someone told me that the hard part about universities in Japan is getting in. Once you're in, you have to try to fail. Conversely, High School, while rote, is hard. In that sense, it's a bit opposite of other places like the Us where High School is not hard but typically University is hard.
Most Japanese high schools are ridiculously easy to graduate from.
That said, most of the _competitive_ Japanese high schools -- that is, the ones who send their students to the best schools -- require quite a bit of work to graduate from. There is a reason for this.
High schools are divided into tracks in Japan via entrance exams, so the competitive high schools get students who are largely on board with rigorous study. Their goal is to crush the college entrance exam, and the best schools are quite good at test prep (and often go beyond test prep into "proper" learning of the topic). The students know they will have to work hard, and they mostly do. I humbly suggest that the students in these high schools work about as hard as high school students in the US who are trying to get into highly competitive universities.
That said, most high schools in Japan are not terribly competitive to enter and don't have high academic ambitions for their graduates (and that's totally ok). These students often have a lot of fun in high school, much like American high school students who are aiming at low competitive universities or no university.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting—thanks for your in-depth perspective. I didn’t mean to imply that nobody tries in Japanese university, of course, especially since I have no first-hand experience. I’d just heard that the culture is, in general, less rigorous than in Western universities. The point about networking through professors is really interesting to me. Alongside other replies about the intensity of the job hunt for Japanese stud…
Someone told me that the hard part about universities in Japan is getting in. Once you're in, you have to try to fail. Conversely, High School, while rote, is hard. In that sense, it's a bit opposite of other places like the Us where High School is not hard but typically University is hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, and maybe immigration could actually be a good thing by creating problems to solve... a circular logic, but it may help unravel centuries of mono-culture and its idiosyncrasies such as mistrust and racism.
so all japan needs to do is completely destroy their own culture, its so simple now
I can't see why a unique culture ought to be 'preserved' as people say, either. And I can't see why the 'bad' parts cannot be slowly eroded over time. Nor do I see why certain 'races' ought to be kept. This has always been an argument that's been relatively ignored - why exactly is it desirable to keep a certain race or culture, especially when certain elements of that culture are horrible?
Please do not misinterpret me; I do not speak in terms of some 'white man's burden' in a colonial way. It is ultimately the decision of the Japanese citizens. But I do not see why they should be motivated in the name of nebulous and vague concepts of pride rather than what is best pragmatically.
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>There's also a case to be made for culture, and preservation of unique ethnicity. These are two different things. Make the case for the latter.
I'm not making the claim in question, but I thought it might be interesting to try to give a not-obviously-completely-wrong line of reasoning for why a /variation/ of the claim could be plausible. Could there be some advantage in having multiple populations with some positive and non-negligible but still not super high amount of mixing, over having a single population which, uh, mixes with itself "uniformly" ? Like,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, and maybe immigration could actually be a good thing by creating problems to solve... a circular logic, but it may help unravel centuries of mono-culture and its idiosyncrasies such as mistrust and racism.
so all japan needs to do is completely destroy their own culture, its so simple now
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The question should be does that report have merit, not which nationality produced it.
How would you measure if it has merit? No one can know for sure if the report has merit, it's their opinion based on their metrics and what they consider to be important properties to measure, like I said it's not an exact science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, and maybe immigration could actually be a good thing by creating problems to solve... a circular logic, but it may help unravel centuries of mono-culture and its idiosyncrasies such as mistrust and racism.
so all japan needs to do is completely destroy their own culture, its so simple now
14th amendment.
VE Day. VJ Day.
The collapse of the Soviet Union.
I would characterize the Japanese social changes after world war 2 as far... far... more intense than the destruction of cultural institutions described by the comment above yours.
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> I really don't see a way out for Japan that's not immigration. That's a pretty small-minded and dogmatic statement; it basically amounts to "copy US policy, it's the only way." At some point, someone in the world is going to actually have to solve the problem of stagnant or declining populations, without copping out and just importing new populations from elsewhere.
I mean, the US way works. Immigration, especially of skilled labour, lends real tangible benefits to the US, its growth, and its culture.
However, drowning your citizens in a sea of immigrants is cultural suicide. If your culture is such that it has allowed your ancestors to build a country that immigrants want to flee their own countries to live in, then your culture is worth preserving, rather than allowing it to be replaced by the culture of those who would happily flood into it.
That means, you can't solve your demographic problems by opening the floodgates. Instead, you need to fix the economic problems that are making people hesitant to have children in the first place.
If Japanese universities are failing, how they are leaders in science?