> 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.
> Is Japan of 1950 also Japan of 2050? Its a sort of ship-of-Theseus issue
Is a house the same house if your tear it down and build a factory?
> but when we recognize that cultures evolve, grow, mix, adapt, and continually become something wonderful, it's less of a concern in my mind.
It should be noted that's the opinion of Western liberals, who are pretty culturally imperialistic and expect and demand that other cultures adopt their values and adapt to their preferences.
> All this is clearly against the western values that i often hear quoted when I hear the same people talking about "China". But Japan seems to be ok for them.
I think you're jumping to conclusions here.
Are people in Japan disappeared for criticizing the government? Do they have their organs harvested / altered for believing the wrong religion?
I'm OK with a society with very different defaults than my own. In fact, I prefer it - real diversity doesn't come from mixing (like we do in the West - the mix of all colors is shitty brown), it comes from people being strongly different, yet managing to coexist.
So Japan is OK. It works as a society. Also for the "different" (well... somewhat - there are problems with overworking, herbivore men, low natality etc. but the West has analogous problems). China doesn't work; people aren't free; it's a repressive regime.
Not commenting on your other points, but think you're misguided with this. Culture is not something that stays the same and needs to be preserved; it lives and changes with people. UK today isn't the same it was 30 years ago, and neither is Japan. Trying to set a culture in stone will lead to some quite undesirable undertones.
>The isolation provided by being an hard to reach island has, in my opinion, made their culture quite differentiated and useful to contrast my own culture with.
Not really. Vast portions of pre-modern Japanese culture was borrowed from China. From fashion and art to language, philosophy and religion. Even the "very complete Shinto deity mythos" is not what you claim:
>Even among experts, there are no settled theories on what Shinto is or how far it should be included, and there are no settled theories on where the history of Shinto begins[0]
And true Shintoism has been dead for centuries.
>I learned from the Japanese that children are much more capable than my own culture thinks they are.
It's actualy the opposite. Modern childhood innocence, to the extent that it is a new development*, is a western export that has it's roots in romanticism. It isn't really unique to Japan to not have it to the same extent.
People like Japan because of anime, which does have it's roots in Japanese art, although it has become somewhat overstated and in any event was borrowed from Chinese.
What it is in my opinion is that Japan was the first of the east asian countries to become rich. So people who like east asian culture "found" Japan first, then came up with all this Japanese exceptionalism. Which is really shockingly ignorant being that China was the culture for almost an entire millennium. Chinese silk, jade, tea, and what else, fine china were found in all royal palaces around the world. You can even see it's effect on fashion in some 16-17th century english art.
None of this is to say thag Japan doesn't have a unique culture, but it is heavily overstated in the last two decades. It was also used to explain Japan's economic rise in 1980. Now that Taiwan and Korea have done the same that element has been conveniently forgotten.
*That is, to the extent that it didn't already exist before. High childhood mortality prevented the concept childhood innocence as it exists and is manifested today (such as coddling).
> Regarding social development, my feeling is that Japan is one or two generations behind Western countries.
There are a great many “western” countries where this is even worse than Japan including the one so often named the primordial “western” country.
I have no idea idea why so often when Japanese culture specifically is discussed the idea is sooner or later proffered that there is some homogeneous “western” culture with common elements that supposedly exists. It certainly doesn't seem to rise when, say, Russian, or Indian culture is discussed.
> What’s better: being culturally distinct and having a failing society (it’s certainly failing for some people), or allowing some more immigration and adapting? I find your comment curious considering the context of this article
Japan will be fine. it's already an overpopulated Archipelago so they do not need immigration. There is nothing wrong with wanting to preserve one's culture and way of life. Japan isn't a failing society by any standards, and certainly not the american one.
> They are anticipating a difficulty maintaining their culture against mixing with the world.
Of course. If you don't have children, then you need immigration from countries that do. That will obviously change your culture.
A nation is made up of people of a shared origin, history, culture, ethnicity, language. If you replace the people with immigrants and they create a new culture, the nation is no more.
> Japanese people will come to include all sorts of people, who will happily live together and move forward.
That's like saying white people will come to include all sorts of people.
> Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences.
I lived in Japan for some time and this sentence is a gross generalization. Some right-wingers in Japan are attempting to maintain their traditions, but the rest of the population either couldn't care less, or has fully embraced western culture. You don't have to look hard (or at all, really) to see the evidence. Speaking English is (and has been) considered "cool" and you can find popular music artists dropping the occasional English words in songs, in their mangas, anime or in their dramas. A walk around any city with over 20k people and you can see western influence quite literally everywhere. Nobody is rushing to tear it down or even denounce it.
There are a few extreme right-wing nationalists who might, but they're the fringe. They're smaller in size than America's Tea Party and should not be taken seriously.
> Thus, when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity.
No, this is incorrect. At the very least, it's extremely misleading. China and Japan were fighting and both countries attempted to snatch up Korea as part of the first Sino war. It had nothing to do with their "restoration of legitimate arrangement of antiquity". That may have been their reasoning long after but it's not something any historians worth his salt would say was the reason for China and Japan's interest in Korea. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War#Conflic...
>Because Japan is so culturally homogeneous I think they'd have a very easy time picking an outgroup to blame for problems.
The US is the opposite, and its diversity doesn't stop them from doing it. Often, fully justified too, like in the case of the Soviet Union or Communist China. So I'm not very persuaded by this reasoning.
> 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?
> Put another way, no one wants to be the next Japan. Capable but ultimately stagnant.
Huh? I would LOVE to be the next Japan, as opposed to the next South Africa, Israel, India, Philippines, or Brazil.
Because with the massive demographic changes caused by immigration into Europe, they are ensuring unending ethnic conflict. The best they can hope for is that the different people can carve out their own enclaves and leave each other alone, only having small wars flare up occasionally.
The problems that Japan is facing are a BLESSING compared to the rest of the 1st world.
Nobody talks about the upsides of Japan's population decline. Japan is going to experience a major redistribution of wealth, as fewer people inherit more things. Land that was locked up for centuries is going to be sold to new people. Housing will become more affordable. Already, the chronic crowding is becoming less of a problem, as Japan has essentially "finished" their major infrastructure, and there are no new plans to build any new train lines or anything like that.
Something like 30% of our jobs are going to be eliminated in the next 20 years as self driving vehicles are rolled out.
Even if immigration were cut to 0, we are still facing a work crisis regardless.
> 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.
No it isn't. The culture shock for a westerner is no more than you'd find going to any other country in the far east. Sure, you'll find it less in countries with which you share a cultural heritage. That's sort of obvious and irrelevant. Is Japan any weirder than China, or Vietnam, or Thailand? No.
>From the mere fact that you can go back and find your laptop you left for a couple of hours in a public square...
Not actually true. At least, not true enough that you'd want to chance it in real life.
>...attitudes towards work
Less foreign to me than attitudes in most of Europe.
>...marriage
Not strange at all.
>parents
Only strange if you'd never been anywhere else in Asia.
>individualism
Again, no more foreign to me as much of Europe.
>size of the average house
That's just Tokyo. And London, too, for that matter.
>That's not how it works. It's not a simple act of deducting people. The demographic changes that would have be in work for decades to make the population shrink by 35 million would also mean that the remaining 90 million million will be much older (in average) than back in the past when they were 90 million again, and this also has effects in society, economy, pension systems, etc.
Which I didn't think I had to spell out. Yes, it will cause some difficulties. No, that doesn't mean they can't take it in stride. Again, Japan is a wealthy country, and these are problems that can be papered over with wealth.
Will Japan's GDP be smaller as a result? Sure. Does it matter? No. What matters is GDP per capita.
>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.
> 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.
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.
reply