Who mentioned black people?

I read it as people with family history in Japan, but living in Brazil and wanting to move to Japan.

I’m guessing that they mean extending access to Japanese citizenship to descendants of Japanese expats abroad. Brazil in particular had a substantial wave of Japanese settlers in the early 1900s.

That is still miles better than japan, I could actually work towards that. To get japanese citizenship I would need to be born again

line must go up forever

I know the left really (and rightfully) hates capitalism, but this isn't a capitalism problem; it's a society problem. You'll always need a certain amount of labor to sustain non-working portions of the populations. Thanks to advances in technology the necessary working person percentage is decreasing but you still can't have the majority of the population be elderly people who will never again be productive.

But do we want to keep heading to capacity? We could have artificial scarcity eliminated with wealth redistribution and waste reduction (cars, fast fashion, food waste, many many etc). The more humans on the earth, the less possible this becomes.

Here’s what happened in America.

In the 1960s the “Women’s Lib” movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn’t actually change things a lot.

In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn’t enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.

The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.

Which is the plot to Idiocracy and why the movie is no longer a fantasy and it is now a prophecy.

It’s either developed countries or the US, you can’t have both

they are literally killing their own population growth with their racist national policies, I'm not killin em, but hey, sucks to suck

Same here! This morning’s hangover, as just one example, 100% attributable to Covid! Definitely not the decision to have highballs #5-8 last night.

I’d like to take the part of the baby churning plan where a homemaker is part of each household. Like, subtract the misogyny where it’s automatically assumed it would be the woman but households with children take a lot of work.

They want the fantasy of a one income household but aren’t willing to increase wages to make it reality.

The right wing uses this as a dog whistle to rally the uneducated.

Yeah, and not only paying in but actually working the labour intensive health/elderly care jobs.

Sure, but that still sounds like a self-correcting problem.

That scheme sounds familiar. If you drew a diagram to represent the repayment of investments, does it resemble a geometric shape?

And that’s a problem, how, exactly?

It means things change, because that’s what humans do. We adapt. There are still 750k children born in Japan in 2024, vs 1.6m that died.

To me, it sounds like the obvious solution is to make life better for the young. That doesn’t have to come at the cost of the old, but that’s what the wealthiest will choose.

So we should be able to get by with less labor, right?…

Sure. Or everyone could get more stuff for the same amount of labor.

Suppose your boss told you, “You’ve been doing a great job at work. We could give you 10% raise, or we could keep your paycheck the same and cut your hours by 10%.” I don’t know which you would choose, but most people would take the raise.

Even if you provide good living conditions and incentives to people they will choose to not have enough kids to sustain the population if they’re given the choice. Statistics from the past 100 years clearly show it in all rich and even poor countries.

We reached 8 billions humans because people, especially women, didn’t have any other choice.

There’s a surprising amount of green for major cities that otherwise look like concrete jungles. There’s usually plenty of parks and kids are in general very safe. Maybe this is just my comparison from originally living in the states, but it is super safe for children and the amount of expected unsupervised travel kids do in Japan is astonishing.

In Japan they let kids go outside without supervision starting a really young age.

The reasons for the low birth rate are purely due to government policy.

That’s an American point of view

Dude, Japan is so safe the cops are largely overglorified tourist and traffic guides. The kids run around alone all the time.

Do you have any links to studies/articles about that?

No, that would be barbaric. But even if you can’t fix birthrates quickly, if you don’t have women and partners in positions where they feel like they can safely have kids, you’re going to compound the issue. My understanding is they’ve had this cultural issue where if you want to work as a woman that kind of really negatively impacts your career long term, and in terms of long term financial security that’s awful.

They actually have quite a bunch of programmes to bring foreigners in. That’s not to say that the cultural issues aren’t there but that’s a separate problem regarding integration rather than immigration.

fair enough. i picked those out as sort of ‘mainstream’ countries that this kind of article doesn’t get published about, while i’ve seen them about japan a few times now. be interesting to contrast immigration rates to countries with similarly difficult language and cultural barriers but that’s a bigger job i haven’t the time for now

to this article’s credit it does end with a couple of paragraphs on the korean government attempts to support “work-family balance, childcare and housing”

The weird thing is that once you get a foot in the door, Japanese immigration policies actually aren’t that strict. You just need a guarantor (company) to be willing to hire you.

The language barrier and hesitancy of companies to hire non-Japanese is the actual barrier, not so much the immigration policies themselves. The government could ofcourse encourage companies to hire foreigners…but Japan changes at a glacial pace.

I’m sure they’ll be ready to deal with the new world under trump by 2035-40

Most likely themselves…

i heard alot of them get"abandoned" because theres no one left, or they commit crimes to get taken care of in prison.

I mean, the way things are now we’ll be living 3-4 generations in a household anyway.

Thats not necessarily true. Pension just needs the economy to grow and even with less people the economy can be stimulated through technology. If 1 japanese with technology can produce product equivalent of 1950s 3 Japanese than that’s growth.

You make the mistake of assuming that pension plans have to be paid by the next generation. Why not use a wealth tax instead?

And also, new technology is still being developed

So it’s not even that all progress has stopped, things are still moving forwards

This is just like a stock crashing because the quarterly profits did not exceed the very high growth expectations more than a lot, they only exceeded a little.

pure Japanese

No such thing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

They don’t care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.

It’s the classic “we don’t care if the valley floods, we live on the hill” mentality. They think that if/when the world devolves into chaos that they’ll be safe because they’re well off.

It’s not that there don’t care as much as they don’t believe it will affect them personally. They believe they their wealth will protect them.

It was the government doing window guidance that caused their mess, how do you blame the people who made successful companies that gave Japan its first world living standard?

countries have mostly abandoned climate action change,

Elysium but in New Zealand

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That’s exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.

We’re already slaves. They are just making it more obvious.

This is an interesting point. So apparently the problems of having that terrible working culture are solved for (ish) to promote procreation, but it’s not helping. Gee, I wonder if possibly creating a society of miserable people and making it easier for them to create more people they presume will be miserable doesn’t work because they just don’t want to do that.

But what about housing? If you live in a shoebox with no hope of getting a larger place, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna have kids.

I’m not sure why all the sarcasm. I mean, America’s problems have all been solved.

I mean, Japan is one of the more isolationist countries on earth. And racism is a massive issue. Christianity isn’t a major factor, but traditional views on the roles of women and the set up of the household are a major challenge.

Is this supposed to be a jab at people criticising Christianity? Because the same problems can be found in non-Christian countries, does not mean Christianity didn’t have a role in what happened elsewhere

slightly worst off

worse* off

That an average situation? perhaps you were financially better off than the rest

With Japan, they only have so much inhabitable land anyway. It’s a mountainous island where all viable land is already pretty much taken.

The olds expect women to quit basically when they marry or get pregnant. Worker protections are better these days, but the view is still there with some. Some couples do have to have one spouse quit because of the whole daycare thing in some areas, though.

There is a wage gap between men and women and fewer women are in positions of power, though the latter at least is slowly getting better.

Not having a child won't cancel societal expectations of the older generations. Women are often still expected to serve tea and do other things in older/traditional companies.

My company is a westernized Japanese company and we do have a number of women including in higher roles (though none on the board, I think). I'm in a remote IT role so I don't generally hang out after work with non-IT staff to hear real opinions or the rumor mill, though.

My wife was treated well and fairly by her small japanese company, but she has experienced some discrimination previously.

In our village, we do have work we do in the community every month or two (mostly cutting grass, litter picking, and maintaining shared spaces). Some things are definitely typically done by the men or women with women doing the inside cleaning and cooking at events with men doing the outside work. We've already broken that mold some as I'm also the cook (I baked things to bring to our last event).

week, plus you have to have drinks after work with the boss,+ all the busy work. and then theres the child rear aspect, woman recieves very little if any support for being a mom, often time its chatised. and lastly HCOL. Yes. The societal structure is too rigid and is collapsing. IMHO

You seem sarcastic, but biologically speaking, the children of rich parents are much more likely to be born rich themselves. Isn’t that a direction we want to evolve into for humanity, given that being born poor has so many negative outcomes?

Literally: they don’t go home, that’s how

Hearing about salary men sleeping on the streets or in train stations is one thing, but when I actually finally saw them in person it broke my fucking brain

Imagine the homelessness issues of a major Californian city but instead of homeless people it’s a bunch of clearly drunk dudes in suits who all vanish by morning

My wife cried hard because the realization hit that hard

Oh? You could optionally expand instead of just stopping at what the problem isn’t.

Isn’t it interesting that the more “developed” countries have the lowest birth rates.

Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species

It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.

On a separate point, there’s plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.

Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR’s economic advisors were Marxian economists.

That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.

If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you’d have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You’d also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn’t mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn’t mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.

I’m not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven’t.

Japan is historically an extremely racist empire. That contributes to anti-immigration.

yeah, racism is totally cool, if it isn’t here /s

Making children :) Having children :(

i heard there’s more sexy time without kids

I love my kids and my life with them. People who pridefully claim they don’t want children is similar to people being prideful of not eating pizza.

No one gives a shit about your preferences.

it’s a good thing some people like kids because otherwise im not sure what happens

Javan has a lot of anger towards tourists too but people still vacation there. Seems the war is a scar that needs healing. I can tell you I still haven’t healed from emotion scars from decades ago. The difference between Japan and Hawaii is land accumulation. Japan has a lot of abandoned area that would benefit from immigration. A cultural town would be an idea. Lots of Americans in one area. It’s 2025 and we weren’t even around during the Vietnam or Cold War. I mean the change needs to happen somehow and it’s mutually beneficial. Maybe after trump leaves office tho

Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.

Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.

As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.

I am lucky enough to not have an English teaching job, and never have. But unless you are highly specialized, or somehow manage to start your own thing here, there seems to be limite scope as a foreigner to really have a strong career.

I am actually moving to Shiga Prefecture in a few days. It’s going to be a big change from living on the outskirts of Tokyo for the past six years. Excited to see how my perception of life in Japan changes from the move.

You mean The People’s Republic of Korea? They’re a communist utopia, aren’t they? /S

Not really relevant. I mean technically there are countries with child slavery so I guess if you want to entirely miss the point on purpose you could go with one of those.

requiring 100 year multi-generational loans

This is the first I’ve heard of this and the fact that it’s real is insane to me.

…and most other countries that aren’t in Europe.

I’d be more interested in altering the material conditions that lead to low birth rates than relying on churning through the global population. We’re already doing immigration like you said and have been. It still sucks to live in these conditions.

China is also capitalist though, and they’re also starting to suffer from the same issue.

Well-said. They don’t see people as people, they see them as farm stock plotted on spreadsheets that they can manipulate by pulling levers.

And happiness just isn’t a variable they would ever think of pulling a lever to increase. In fact I suspect they see a lack of it as an effective motivator, as long as it’s managed properly through division and distraction, and those desperately upset little data points don’t start assembling guillotines.

Babies are expensive and time consuming to develop into useful serfs. The US is not yet hitting most of the consequences from low birth rates because it’s balanced out by immigration. As long as they keep encouraging and welcoming immigration ….

Wait, you you’re saying the solution is… being back child labor? We truly are living in some times when that isn’t considered a unique statement.

Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them.

You mean you can’t do anything profitable with them. Maybe people should be able to have a family for other reasons than profit

Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans?

True, but no other system disincentives children like capitalism.

There’s plenty of research out there that shows educating women leads to reduced rates of teenage pregnancy and total number of children. Like its pretty damn solid evidence that educating women helps them make informed family planning decisions.

I think a bigger problem is increasing infertility rates and how many people need to use IVF to conceive in the first place. Something worldwide is disrupting our hormones and affecting our ability to reproduce. Even if someone had everything they needed and wanted to support a child, they might not physically be able to create one or carry a pregnancy to term.

America has a individualist culture. Thats why we have unions and stuff (for now, anyway…) and don’t have to blow our bosses ego until 11pm every night.

Japan has a very…conformity driven culture. You conform to expectations around you, or you get ostracized heavily and treated like an outsider.

Which is a big driver for this kind of “I ahve to work till 5, then drink with my boss/coworkers until midnight, because if I dont I’ll lose my job and be ostracized” stuff.

It’s got nothing to do with megacorps, that’s just run of the mill Japanese culture/society.

There is no dignity or respect to the worker by the sound of it

Young people would have time to take care of the elderly if they weren’t forced to work 60+ hour weeks consistently

No they don’t. They just have to adopt a culture of euthanasia. I don’t say that to be cruel or indifferent. I assume state assisted programs are in a lot of countries futures assuming they can stomach it. It’s not something I’m advocating for. I just think the rich are cold enough to push it to try to fix the problem.

Oh no, having to spend time with my family oh nooo /s

If rent weren’t so damn high and you didn’t have such a squeeze on every moment of your life to make as much money too survive, spending time and supporting each other efficiently maybe wouldn’t be a problem.

Values are defined by our parents? Is it a caste system? Is extended family more or less efficient? What is the goal: sustainability, B R E E D I N G, vacations, wealth compared to others, power over others, power over ourselves? Etc…

Inside capitalism, people aren’t having children because captialism isn’t giving them the economic capability to do so.

The west’s population boom in the 50s to 80s only occurred because a single wage earner could, with a high school education and a wage just a little over minimum wage, be able to own a decent home, have a non-working SAH spouse, several kids, two cars in the driveway, and still have enough left over for a decent holiday once a year as well as save generously for retirement.

This all got stolen from these latest generations. What 90+% of the population was once capable of achieving is now only (largely) available to less than 20% of GenZ. A large proportion have given up on retirement, home ownership, or children. And this is WITH degrees and extensive career experience.

If you want to solve population crashes, start with income inequality: start taxing the wealthy and bring back a 90+% top tax rate. Get this money back into the hands of people who actually generate that wealth, and families will follow.

The fact that our planet’s resources are finite is a matter of physics. Capitalism may come up with some innovation or another that adds more lifespan to it, the way that digital spaces and the financial industry have done, or it may have another global war that creates room for a new period of traditional growth at the cost of countless lives, but it will inevitably hit an insurmountable wall.

You describe capitalism as a finite system

No, I did not. Capitalism demands infinite growth. This planet is a finite system

and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.

I don’t imply. I simply state a known fact. Anyone with even a passing exposure to economics and resource extraction would be very familiar with this fact.

For example, 100 years ago, the energy within a barrel of oil could extract an additional 300 barrels of oil from the ground. These days, despite technology that has made the process massively more efficient, we get barely 10 barrels of oil out of the ground for that same amount of energy expended.

These days same goes for almost every other resource you could possibly shake a stick at, from minerals such as steel and copper, over harvested materials such as fish and wood, and all the way down to agriculture, where the topsoil that almost all of our crops depend on will be completely depleted within the next 60 years, and will be depleted in most agricultural regions within the next 20-40.

Capitalism is a cancer, and it’s killing the planet.

Easy, just make it legal.

Problem solved.

Jokes on you, I don’t have healthcare.

Known I am a bit obtuse, or perhaps litteral, but I am Norwegian and have more words for snow. Think English have more words for snow. Think texture. Powder, sleet, sugary, slush, crusty, hoar, rime.

Yeah but it’s not exactly fair to compare the US to a developed country

It’s cultural. Japanese are less individualistic than the west. They live their lives that is more geared toward what will help the community and not just themselves. Less than hundred years ago they viewed their emperor as a living god. So back then the Japanese were indoctrinated to live their lives in service of the emperor. Basically how North Koreans treat their leader today, which is a cultural remnant from Japan since Korea was a Japanese colony. (That the imperial family are descendants from gods is an 8th century myth and was reintroduced during the Meiji restoration. Before the Meiji restoration the Japanese didn’t give a fuck about the imperial family)

So that cultural attitude still lives today in a watered down form. Instead of serving the emperor it’s about serving the community and country. And of course corporations can’t help themselves but to exploit that. That attitude has been fading with every generation after the war but it’s still so deeply ingrained that corporations can easily manipulate their workers.

South Korea allows women to be fired if they 1) want, or 2) have children.

They are courteous and very respectful. It’s built into the culture and even their language. One simple sentence like hello, how are you have multiple ways of saying it depending on who you’re addressing. Addressing incorrectly is very disrespectful. So the culture overly respectful.

Yes absolutely. The Japanese has a heavy influence in Taiwan culture. They ruled Taiwan for 50 years. My grandparents only spoke Japanese and Taiwanese when I was growing up here.

That is why there is so much love for the Japanese people. Our cultures are pretty aligned.

What we different is how we view kids in society. In Taiwan, when my wife was visably pregnant, people from all walks of life would give up their seat for her. Even before she was visably pregnant, the government gives you a ribbon to wear and people will let you go first on an elevator and congratulate you.

The government has designated parking spots(marked in pink lines) specifically for pregnant and anyone with kids 6 and under. All larger malls are required to have a clean breastfeeding/pumping room with some malls going the extra mile and having free childcare while you pump.

The people in Taiwan view children as everyone children and everyone has an obligation to bare that burden.

While there are major upsides, the downsides is that people have opinions on how to parent your kids with some parenting for you.

I was in Kaohsiung at a beach and my 3 year old son was taking a stick and hitting it against rocks and the sand. A bunch of grandma’s felt it was too unsafe for my son to be walking around with a stick in his hand and took it out of my kid’s hands and told me that my kid could lose an eye. I know the gesture comes from a good place, but man. Mind your own business.