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Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

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Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#81

Post by mikekchar »

jpatokal wrote: post #58
mikekchar wrote: post #49

This is an opinion piece backed up with practically no information whatsoever. If you want to know about immigration policy in Japan, you need look no further Japan's ministry of foreign affairs website. For example, here are the categories where you can get a long term visa [0] You will notice there is a points system [1]. You need 70 points to get in. A degree gives you 10 points. A salary of ~$100K gives you 40 po…

Japan's primary problem, though, is not a lack of skilled professionals (although as someone involved in hiring bilingual IT professionals there, I can assure you that's a problem too), but a lack of unskilled/low-skilled workers to work in agriculture, nursing, etc. And Japan is not at all keen on this type of immigration. As a simple example, Japan invited a bunch of Filipino nurses to work in Japan for a while, an…

Yes, the Filipino nurse situation was a debacle (and for the most part continues to be). However, the government has been routinely extending visas for those involved [0].

The reality of the situation is that it is very hard to live here if you are a foreigner with that kind of job. In the town where I live something like 22 of the 130 or so foreigners who live here are Filipino nurses. I've met some who have stayed for 4-5 years, but most cycle through pretty quickly -- not victims of immigration policy, but more victims of not being able to live and work in Japan without speaking Japanese. My wife used to work at the retirement home nearby and it is a hard job. It is completely unrealistic to bring in foreigners to do it unless they have extensive experience with the Japanese language and Japanese customs.

The same can also be said for other kinds of "cultural" visas. I've only ever met 1 person on a cultural visa and her stay was a disaster. I know some people on the city council and they decided never to do it again.

As for migrant workers... or even non-migrant workers who are willing to farm. I have no idea what the government intends to do, but it's getting desperate out my way. I live in Shizuoka prefecture and we're losing something like 10% of our population every year and nobody wants to farm. I've met a couple from England who got visas to farm here and they have done very well by renting land (which you can get virtually for free). But I agree that something needs to be done.

So, no, it's not nirvana by any stretch of the imagination. But I think the image that people have (fuelled by stories like the one that started this thread) is grossly misaligned with reality.

[0] http://news.abs-cbn.com/overseas/02/03/17/japan-to-extend-st...

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#82

Post by matt4077 »

rdtsc wrote: post #72
matt4077 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany comes to mind as a counterexample: a homogenous nation until the late 1950s, with no colonies to speak of, and jus sanguinis. Yet it transition to a functioning, diverse society today. And Japan is arguably paying a steep price for keeping their blood oh-so-pure: it's a society frozen in tradition and fear, with an economy in what is essentially a 20-year recession. Making robots care for the elderly will jus…

> Yet it transition to a functioning, diverse society today. Do you think it is functioning because it is diverse or diverse because it is already functioning well? Or maybe the two are just correlated and there is something else causing those two things?

I was mostly arguing against the idea that Japan would be unable to embrace some diversity. But yes, in the long term, immigration is probably important to sustain a dynamic economy with new ideas.

I posted the list of US companies founded by immigrants elsewhere. It includes Google, Apple, Tesla, Intel and others.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#83

Post by fzeroracer »

rdtsc wrote: post #68
ericdykstra wrote: post #63

Here's a more in-depth look at the issue of immigration vs automation as it relates to Japan, from 2 Japanese economists: http://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/archives/economy/pt2014103018... My commentary with support from that article follows: A country with the population of Japan has no chance of maintaining a higher absolute GDP than countries with multiples of their population and more land to expand population. A po…

> Is Japan a magical land of far-advanced technology Is the technology really that far advanced. I understand it was in the 80s maybe? None of the devices I have are made by Japanese companies. None of the software I use is developed in Japan primarily. My car is but that's about it, but I picked it because of reliability not because of high tech features.

Software development is still viewed as being a 'lesser' or 'menial' career in Japan by larger corporations. That's why you see so little software come out of Japan these days and also why so many Japanese websites are disasters of design.

Granted this has been slowly changing because of startups spinning up as well as foreign company HQs. Still, wages for developers in Japan are terribly low in most scenarios.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#84

Post by alphaalpha101 »

matt4077 wrote: post #70
alphaalpha101 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone from NZ: we have an election in about 4 weeks, and this is a serious issue here. We know that this immigration-driven growth is not real growth.

> We know that this immigration-driven growth is not real growth. Do you? Here's a list of US companies founded by immigrants: Google, Apple (2nd gen), Intel, Tesla, ebay, Yahoo

Lol. I'm not anti-immigration, don't be so defensive, and I'm also not talking about the US. Stop bringing up the US. This is a thread about Japan and I'm talking about New Zealand.

The New Zealand government really wants people to believe that we're experiencing 'economic growth'. But while they might be technically right, they're effectively wrong. Economic growth that is so much entirely from immigration that we're effectively in per-capita-GDP recession is not real, useful, good growth.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#85

Post by neptunespear »

comstock wrote: post #77
neptunespear wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked closely with one of these companies... Perhaps they were just not suited to the project we were working on, but I found them quite dis-organized, lacking in focus and mostly buzzwords and fakery. Kind of sad. You can't just drop an anecdote like that without naming and shaming.

Honestly, I'd rather hear evidence supporting the argument that any of these companies could be called "the future of automation". Anything I say, will by its nature be anecdotal. But do you have anything to support the assertion that they're actually doing amazing things?

I never said that Preferred/Mujin/LeapMind would be the future of automation. I just said that in my uneducated opinion, having followed these companies for some time now, I feel like they may be better equipped to handle "new economy" automation--shift from hardware to software, shift from closed-off proprietary standards to open collaboration. Aka the anathema of Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, KDDI, etc.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#86

Post by neptunespear »

icanhackit wrote: post #40
neptunespear wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's open-sourced their driverless car tech - anyone with wheels on the ground and a car you can buy? Some advanced mechatronics will be required to fill a lot of voids in the manual labour space. Whose battery tech and engineering prowess will we be using in these vehicles and machines? Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware, its education system spits out lots of factory workers. But…

> Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware [...] I have a hunch that AI and automation, in the future, will emphasizing hardware a bit less [...] it's not a 100% proprietary locked-down atmosphere on the software side; open source collaboration is encouraged What you're saying doesn't make economic sense to me: won't open-sourcing the AI and software components commoditize those things, lea…

This would be true if Japanese companies were eager to embrace the open software revolution. However, even as companies in the U.S. and Europe democratize AI, Japanese companies have stubbornly plodded along with closed-off, proprietary standards just like in the 70s and 80s. Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sony, KDDI, and so on. There needs to be a cultural shift.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#87

Post by matt4077 »

alphaalpha101 wrote: post #84
matt4077 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know that this immigration-driven growth is not real growth. Do you? Here's a list of US companies founded by immigrants: Google, Apple (2nd gen), Intel, Tesla, ebay, Yahoo

Lol. I'm not anti-immigration, don't be so defensive, and I'm also not talking about the US. Stop bringing up the US. This is a thread about Japan and I'm talking about New Zealand. The New Zealand government really wants people to believe that we're experiencing 'economic growth'. But while they might be technically right, they're effectively wrong. Economic growth that is so much entirely from immigration that we'r…

Lol yourself, and don't be so wrong.

Here's per-capita GDP growth in New Zealand, showing that there is real growth after normalising for changes in population: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#88

Post by fiblye »

mikekchar wrote: post #81
jpatokal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan's primary problem, though, is not a lack of skilled professionals (although as someone involved in hiring bilingual IT professionals there, I can assure you that's a problem too), but a lack of unskilled/low-skilled workers to work in agriculture, nursing, etc. And Japan is not at all keen on this type of immigration. As a simple example, Japan invited a bunch of Filipino nurses to work in Japan for a while, an…

Yes, the Filipino nurse situation was a debacle (and for the most part continues to be). However, the government has been routinely extending visas for those involved [0]. The reality of the situation is that it is very hard to live here if you are a foreigner with that kind of job. In the town where I live something like 22 of the 130 or so foreigners who live here are Filipino nurses. I've met some who have stayed…

Are you speaking specifically about your farming town losing 10% of its population? Because I also live in Shizuoka-ken near the countryside and population decline is nowhere near 10%/year. It's been pretty much the same for 20 years now.

http://www.citypopulation.de/php/japan-admin.php?adm1id=22

But there is a definite decline in the liveliness of small towns, but that's due to migration to other towns and cities.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#89

Post by icanhackit »

neptunespear wrote: post #86
icanhackit wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, but that's on the hardware side. Japan is excellent at hardware [...] I have a hunch that AI and automation, in the future, will emphasizing hardware a bit less [...] it's not a 100% proprietary locked-down atmosphere on the software side; open source collaboration is encouraged What you're saying doesn't make economic sense to me: won't open-sourcing the AI and software components commoditize those things, lea…

This would be true if Japanese companies were eager to embrace the open software revolution. However, even as companies in the U.S. and Europe democratize AI, Japanese companies have stubbornly plodded along with closed-off, proprietary standards just like in the 70s and 80s. Sharp, Toshiba, Hitachi, Sony, KDDI, and so on. There needs to be a cultural shift.

Whether a Japanese company is closed off software-wise or not doesn't make a difference in terms of hardware profitability. Sony's camera sensor business is doing particularly well due to their sensors being in almost every flagship smart phone. They might not play a part in the software used by the owner of the phone - but I'd say competing against Google in the software space when their product is free might not be a winning strategy.

Re: Aging Japan Wants Automation, Not Immigration

#90

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

matt4077 wrote: post #37
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #16

Japan has never been one to shy away from high-tech industries, and as the article notes, aesthetic sensibilities towards kawaii robots make this a natural progression for a high-tech, ethnically homogeneous, aging nation. Although Japan was once an imperial power, its reconciliation with its past has not included a transition to a multicultural post-colonial state promoted by intellectuals and practiced by widesprea…

Germany comes to mind as a counterexample: a homogenous nation until the late 1950s, with no colonies to speak of, and jus sanguinis. Yet it transition to a functioning, diverse society today. And Japan is arguably paying a steep price for keeping their blood oh-so-pure: it's a society frozen in tradition and fear, with an economy in what is essentially a 20-year recession. Making robots care for the elderly will jus…

(West) Germany's ascent to a multicultural nation began accidentally, as the post-WWII economic miracle and the closure of borders with the GDR led to a shortage of workers which was to be remedied with an import of guest-workers from the Republic of Turkey.

German employers' lobbying and the worsening of global economic outlook in the 1970s led to these temporary measures being made increasingly permanent, with a path to permanent residency, but not citizenship.

In the 1990s (and in a process that continues today), Germany relaxed its jus sanguinis citizenship laws, and German society, influenced by the political approaches of its western neighbors, debated profoundly about how to reconcile its historical notion of Germanness with its desire to participate and show leadership in an increasingly multicultural European Union, all the while showing proper human compassion to its decidedly different residents of foreign descent. In Germany's case, this was particularly interesting, because the German people have long been a nation split between several sovereign states, yet a shared sense of German belonging has transcended centuries of political upheaval; nonetheless the State of Germany -- in its various guises and predecessors going back before the Unification of 1871 -- has been the one polity that was always intrinsically German.

Today, this questioning of what it means to be [nation] in a classic nation-state is ongoing Sweden and beginning in Denmark; it's also causing angst in Austria and Hungary, where the recent rise in immigration (or transiting migrants) is causing conflicts with a national identity that was built -- both by domestic and foreign forces -- in the aftermath of the First World War to emphasize maximum contrast with conflicting nations who would go on to gain their own nation-states.

Japan's outlook on immigration is not entire unlike those practiced by small European states defined solely around the self-determination of a single nation bound together largely, but not exclusively, by ethnicity, shared language, and implied lineage to predecessor states somehow connected to the nation in question. It's under demographic pressure, but its past experiments with immigration have shown that widespread assimilation foreigners is out of question, and it can only import people if it's willing to re-examine what it means to be Japanese. Given their high-tech economic base, they may opt to pursue that solution instead, while less economically fortunate Eastern Europe can't pursue as much automation, and will have to opt for immigration.

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