>Japan has a pretty long history of autocratic rulership..
What does any of that have to do with Japan as of 2018? Unless you are arguing that their clean streets and robust infrastructure was some sort of lingering effect of an emperor from 2000 years ago, and not due to post WW2 liberal democratic reforms, this has nothing to do with anything.
> My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
That's a bit suspect considering a lot of pre-WW2 Japanese governments were based off Chinese models (not to mention, as another commenter mentioned, there are other examples of Asian governments with low corruption, maybe even less than Japan's). In China's case, if we're going back hundreds of years, I suspect the explanation is a bit more complex, you know, having to deal with all that sheer area in the age of horses, no natural sea barrier against foreigners, not to mention a population size that easily dwarfed Japan's (and most countries in the world).
> If these aren't enough - look around Japan outside of the 5 major cities. So much of the mid tier and smaller parts of Japan have been starved of cash. Cities built at the peak in the 80s and 90s with no signs of new development in 20-30 years.
I live in a small Japanese city of 40k people, and your comment is... way too gentle. Yeah, outside of the major cities the infrastructure was never very good to begin with, and now is seriously decaying, which combined with the extremely chaotic Japanese urban development results in a level of ugliness that is pretty much unthinkable in a normal developed country. But the worst part is that you tell the local people, and nobody seems to care or even realize that something is wrong.
Japan as a unified nation in the modern sense is newer than the United States of America. Prior to the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s Japan was a feudal society lead by warlords. The rule under the Tokugawa shogunate was relatively stable, but it was still a feudal society.
I don't think anyone is claiming Japan will cease to exist as a country and that the Japanese people would die out, but something with as radical a change as the Restoration (Which included multiple civil wars...) would probably not count as the nation just correcting itself. It is the effective death of one form of the nation and the birth of the other.
In this specific case, I'm not certain there is a trivial answer. Having worked for a Japanese company, the unshakable hierarchy is unknown to Western culture.
> So maybe there is no conflict, but it is hardly functional.
You do realize this is a pretty condescending and closed-minded statement to make no?
It's been said that any developing country going through accelerated economic improvement will have their birth rates reduced by quite a bit. That doesn't make it their society any less functional than say the NRA vs mass shootings, or political gridlocks between parties.
And last I heard Japan was opening up to foreign sources of labour. They are slowly changing their minds and adapting.
> But would Japan be Japan when Japanese culture is replaced by an admixture of foreign cultures?
Is Japan of 1950 also Japan of 2050? Its a sort of ship-of-Theseus issue, but when we recognize that cultures evolve, grow, mix, adapt, and continually become something wonderful, it's less of a concern in my mind.
> Tibetans are better off with the lesser dictatorship of the CCP over the theocracy of a Dalai Lama.
Oof, I doubt this is anywhere close to true given the treatment of minority groups under CCP policy. Sovereignty, forcibly taken, is rarely an improvement and is detrimental both to the people whose sovereignty was taken and to the people who took the sovereignty. Much better to engage in economic trade and diplomacy.
> Japan was able to endure a lost decade(s) due to immense social solidarity that few countries, perhaps even the US, possess.
Your points make no sense. Civil war, countries breaking up etc. almost always happen only when people's basic needs (food, water, clothing, heat, electricity) are not being met. Even during its lost decade, Japan has been a top 25 country by per-capita income.
> Preventing immigration (both permanent and temporary) has been a political priority in Japan for centuries.
Implying that the very immigration friendly modern Japanese government is the same as Tokugawa Ieyasu is almost as absurd as implying that Britain is a divorce crazy country due to Henry VIII.
Japan is not really doing OK. They are literally going extinct, have an awful and destructive work culture and have a ton of problems with sexism, to the point where it is necessary to have gender-segregated train carriages to stop groping. The only reason Japan seems to be doing OK is because their news are mostly inaccessible to the rest of the world.
If you were around in the 1980s, when Japan was at it's economic peak, Japan has slowly been passed by China and continues to tread water (i.e. stay in the same place, as China has passed it.)
Japan is a poorly performing economy in that there's been little to no growth since the bubble burst in the late 80s. Other economies have gone through growth stages and we had the Asian financial crisis and then the '08 global crash, but Japan has just kept the status quo. So from the perspective of economists, who expect growth, Japan does look bad.
In Japan, life is largely as it has been since the 90s. In fact with deflation, prices are largely the same as they have been for more than 2 decades. This is not a good thing mostly- healthy economies should have some small amount of inflation each year.
Well if I look at Japanese history in China in WWII and before , that portrayal might actually be justified. Especially given Japans stance on it, where museums in the country conveniently leave out Japans actions in China at that time. Coming from Germany that attitude seems… dishonest at least.
What does any of that have to do with Japan as of 2018? Unless you are arguing that their clean streets and robust infrastructure was some sort of lingering effect of an emperor from 2000 years ago, and not due to post WW2 liberal democratic reforms, this has nothing to do with anything.
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