> Japan is undergoing civilizational and cultural collapse.
Certainly doesn't seem this way when you visit Japan. Sure, they haven't experienced wildly growing excessive consumption like some American states in the past couple decades, but their society is far from undergoing any sort of collapse.
> it's also built on momentum and institutions left over from when Japan was the industrial power of Asia, stuff that just hasn't broken yet
Do you have the feeling that it is likely to break, or just noting it as a risk?
My gut feel is that despite the significant demographic problems, Japan has one of the better societies for weathering the increasingly rapid changes modern societies are subject to. But keeping it that way I have no clue how they do it (or got it the way it is now for that matter).
> Japan is, of course, just a place. The people there are ordinary humans. Fetishizing a particular culture is both cringeworthy and genuinely harmful. Their country and society have plenty of problems, just like any other. There is nothing magical about Japan or any other place.
Japan, by your own description, isn’t just a place. It’s the place of a people who share a long and deep culture. If you substituted New Yorkers for Japanese in Tokyo, it wouldn’t be like Tokyo for very long! (Feeling like a “clumsy, nasty barbarian” is certainly an apropos description of how I feel returning to New York after visiting Tokyo.)
Most Japanese wouldn’t describe Japan as “just a place.” A Japanese acquaintance of mine (a law professor) and I were once discussing the issue of government corruption in Asia. My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
Of course it’s not “magical”—just as there is nothing magical about Apple under Steve Jobs. But it is an achievement—the achievement of a group of people who share a particular culture. When my dad was born in 1951, Japan had a GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) similar to Bangladesh’s today. Within a generation they had become a first world country. You shouldn’t fetishize their culture, but it’s okay to marvel at their achievement!
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.
> It’s fairly easy to make a case that Japan is a good example of what the stage before post-scarcity looks like though. Yes there is poverty, but it’s unusual.
Is that true? Everything else I've heard about Japan says poverty is common and severe there.
> I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system.
A good example is housing. Japan had a gigantic housing bubble a decade in advance than the USA and Europe. It is also interesting to see that meanwhile declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city, it has made many town houses almost free. I would expect this to be replicated elsewhere.
Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Japan is not the world, but it seems reasonable that can give a heads up for many problems that other places will experience in the future.
To me it’s amazing how much people will contort themselves to find disqualifying fault in Japan or Singapore, etc but not also hold their own Western country to a standard. It’s line no one is saying Japan is perfect in every way. But if you’ve been there then it’s plainly obvious how much higher their standards are and their expectations for each other.
It took about a day of being there to see they have the most fundamental quality any decent place has - order. And this is why their society is much nicer because from a foundation of order you can build amazing social systems. Look to Norway for a Western example. Or even a place like Denmark who accept the anarchists but keep them cordoned off and made into a tourism curiosity.
I find this is mostly because the West can't fathom that Japan might have different values -- for example their unwillingness to sacrifice cultural homogeniety on the altar of economic growth.
> 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.
> Not saying I agree but it's proof a country can do relatively well despite many disadvantages
Japan is far from doing well. It's in recession now, its demographics profile is going down the toilet, they have a massive public debt that they can never hope to repay, and a social security system that's constantly in the red. It's not going to end well no matter how optimistic you are.
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.
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.
> Japan is doing better than most developed societies
As far as I know no country including the depopulating Western European countries face the demographic crisis that Japan faces. Its a crisis at a totally different level.
> So far, history has not been kind to those civilizations exhibiting declining populations over sustained multi-generational spans.
And yet Japan has some of the highest quality of life, a huge economy despite very few natural resources, some of the most innovative companies in the world and the longest lived people on the planet. It's been the poster-child for westerners as a failed economy with a lost decade and yet they keep on doing fine despite 30+ years of this narrative.
Try moving somewhere with rampant population growth and tell me it's great. The underlying general trend for the vast majority of people on Earth is to get the fuck away from other people and move to low density countries where the mineral and agricultural wealth is spread much thicker. GDP growth means nothing for the average person and most realise this.
>That homogeneous and mostly pleasant culture is killing itself, apparently.
No, this is literally the post-WW2 boom dying off. Occupied Japan underwent a period of extreme population growth in the few decades after WW2 ended. They currently have 125mm people living in a land area the size of California which is 75% uninhabitable (mountains).
> 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.
> If anything, society here is reverting more to a norm after being in a massive economic bubble.
So, you're agreeing that Japan is on a long downward slope to economic and technological irrelevance, but you believe the average Japanese would rather accept this than immigration?
> 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.
Most of the west has seen the same stagnation, they've just papered over it with immigration. Why would anyone care about economic growth when they are not receiving the benefits of it?
Certainly doesn't seem this way when you visit Japan. Sure, they haven't experienced wildly growing excessive consumption like some American states in the past couple decades, but their society is far from undergoing any sort of collapse.
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