Poverty in Japan
japaneseruleof7.com
japaneseruleof7.com
Pretty much everything I hear about Japan - whether it be news, or talking to Japanese friends - makes it seem like the country isn't doing so hot as far as the top 10 or 15 countries in the world go. Authoritarian government with poor freedom of press, social and mental health issues out the wazoo, aging population combined with xenophobia/refusal to open up or otherwise encourage mass immigration, poor gender equality, salaryman issues, etc.
It feels like they peaked in the early to mid 90s and have just sorta been stumbling around since then.
The point is, we will need to figure out how to keep society going (economically, or specifically from a population welfare point of view) despite declining populations.
There is no reason a Japan of 70 million should not be a viable society. It's still one of the densest countries on earth, given their usable land --it's mostly unusable, non arable mountainous.
Nobody has that figured out. For now the answer for developed countries involves allowing in immigrants to make up for the deaths.
What happens when China enters pop decline? Pump more people into an already overpopulated country --that does not scale. Or when that hits India?
As people become wealthier, they consume more resources and want bigger houses --taking up more resources, including land (suburbanization). So even while suburbanization of China will be much more muted than in western countries, there is still a demand and expansion into previously arable lands.
[1]http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2747/0272-3638.21.3.20...
Considering the cultural context of HN and the phrasing of your post I consider that a fair inference.
Europe circa 2050 should be a pretty interesting place.
No - this is false.
There's nothing to 'figure out'.
We simply don't need as many people.
We'll have to deal with it a some point in the future, but there is no imperative for America to keep adding more people willy nilly.
The 'we must add bodies' ideal is just an extension of national corporatism.
Yes, but it does not have to be this way.
It's just the way it's designed for now.
I suggest it's probably not a huge factor for most people.
But there's a huge amount of information embedded into culture - ideas, mannerisms, forms of education, language, social strata - it goes far, far beyond 'language and cuisine'.
Large scale immigration wipes that out and does not replace it with a new culture, rather, a 'globalized' set of values - and a Starbucks on every corner.
So in the interests of having actual 'diversity' on planet earth, because as of today we are witnessing an 'extinction event' of culture, we might want to consider the impact of some of our policies.
Immigrants (and FYI I've been an immigrant at stages of my own life) are mostly just regular people, and so we don't want to play into the hands of xenophobes or 'racial purists' or whatever, but at the same time, we have to recognize the imperative of culture itself. Is all.
To be sure, a large group of immigrants can change the host culture (for instance, in American English we have any number of Yiddish-derived words that, in my experience, are not really commonly understood by English people), but I think the idea that the result has to be a homogenized, corporate, ersatz culture is wrong. Japan itself, as it exists today, is clearly the result of tremendous, unmistakable foreign influence -- most notably, but hardly exclusively, Tang Dynasty China and post-war America.
Ultimately, I guess you could say that as a person married to a foreign woman of a different ethnicity I have some personal investment in the opposite ideal.
FYI I live in an area where I'm a tiny ethnic minority English speaker among a sea of people who are of a different culture, including my GF and most of my friends. I've also lived around the world as an ex-pat/immigrant/minority.
I think global mass immigration will lead to a single (or maybe a small group of), globalized, commercial civilization(s) without culture, and we will lose most of what makes us great.
It's happening right now - and quickly.
We will eventually defeat climate change - but once we lose culture, it will never come back.
So that's a real thing.
There's no reason that a nation must continue to have 'more people' so I don't see why people must continue with the arbitrary demands of 'more people'.
The motivation for 'mass immigration' is mostly commercial and partly social - there are globalist forces who wish to move masses of poor people to rich countries.
This is not a crazy Breitbart conspiracy, here it is on the UN's web site:
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migr...
The title alone is Orwellian.
And just as there are xenophobes/bigots out there, there many who relish the thought of wiping out successful cultures for various reasons.
When we think about 'retirement' or even 'retiring early' often that's a little bit aspirational ... where would we want to live, if we had the choice? Well - people don't chose to live in the 'suburbs' near an 'IKEA' and a 'McDonald's' and a 'highway'. Generally, I think most people, from most backgrounds, chose to live in a place that has some kind of cultural context - either their own, or another, but certainly not the globalized Starbucks Suburbs.
Our 'global policies' right now are focused very much on the material, not the things that ultimately matter to us because they're a little more intangible.
And one has to wonder, of course, why previous waves of migration were OK, but this time it's beyond the pale. A lot of the rhetoric you hear about the subject suggests the problem is the current migrants are somehow inferior people -- you can see, I think, why I'd associate this with racism and xenophobia.
I didn't imply that new cultures could not be created by the blending of others.
But it's glaringly obvious that this is mostly not what is happening in most places in the world.
What I am describing is easily demonstrated in various ways:
+ The most obvious is the lack of diversity in language, and the 'Anglicization' of many places in particular. For example, there were dozens of languages spoken across France: Nicoise was spoken in Nice, Monegasque in Monaco. This is gone now, standardized into French or Italian. The European B-school, INSEAD, used to require English/French/German - now just English.
+ Architecture: using ironically Monaco as an example, the newest area of Monaco is indistinguishable from a North American suburb, which is sublimely funny because most of the rest of Monaco has a very specific and interesting aesthetic.
+ The suburbs of Singapore, Toronto, parts of Europe - are are starting to resemble one another in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. You can be in a shopping mall in either or and it might take you a few minutes to know in which country you are in. Same stores. Nearly the same food. Same soft drinks. Same products. Similar holidays (!).
+ The globalization of brands and commercial products is a huge thing. Have you been to North Africa? They are now plastering Monoprix stores across there with the exact same merchandise that you find in France, and frankly, pretty similar to what you find here.
My father motorbkiked across North Africa in the 1970's and it was a very different place. Now - even the Tunisian youth dress effectively the same as the kids in Paris.
In storefronts across the Magrheb, Coka Cola is trying to market people away from regular Tunsian tea - this 'works' for country managers because a $2 can of coke adds more to the GDP than a 50 cent glass of tea - even of those are not good measures of intrinsic value to Tunisia.
Everyone - in every country - is now being conquered by a specific set of products band brands, representing an ever narrowing set of cultural ideals.
... and as for the UN objective - yes, it's nice that we care about people in the developed world. But
A) There is no long term economic reasoning behind the need for 'constantly more people'. This is pensioner/ponzi scheme economic problem. Pension shortfalls based on perpetual growth scenarios are obviously unsustainable ...
So ... B) Replacing one culture entirely with another is genocidal.
There is no way to replace 10's millions of Germans with people from various parts of the world, and for Germany to be German. The German culture would be extinct, and they will have bequeathed a functioning state to a nice bunch of newcomers - who might speak German - but are not otherwise German.
Were this to have happened over 100 or 200 years - possibly - this would be the evolution of culture. Sure - I get that. All cultures evolve and absorb over time.
But on the scale that the UN is proposing - this is not about 'poor people becoming Germans' - it's about 'poor people replacing Germans'. As Germans are literally replaced - well - they disappear forever. This is Orwellian.
The thing that differentiates 2017 from any period before is really one of scale. There has always been migration, there has always been movement - of course we all live in something akin to a 'compound culture'.
But that is history - what's happening now is happening 'light speed' and there is no time for cultural acclimatization. Toronto - the most diverse place on planet earth - is absolutely not developing it's own cuisine, or it's own language, or behavioural norms, musical styles. It would - over time - in a more regular scenario. But culture takes time to form, and we're moving way too fast.
Starbucks will not stop until they have 'total global saturation' - and neither will Amazon, Facebook, Coka Cola.
They will displace everything in their path, change behaviours ideas and norms to conform with their own profit motivations.
Government administrators everywhere are looking for GDP maximization and will focus on things that apparently 'increase efficiency' - like speaking English - but which mask an underlying existential cost of losing value due to lost cultural attributes - i.e. how much does the world 'lose' when people stop speaking Nicoise? And Monegasque? And various Aboriginal languages? And Slovak? It's hard to know, but it's something - and when you add it all up, it's a 'big thing'.
Are you kidding?
Extremely low crime rates?
Exceptional innovation, powerhouse industry, dozens of cultural imperatives, engineering marvels?
It's one of the most civilized places in the world. Not easy.
"refusal to open up or otherwise encourage mass immigration"
And why would Japan turning into Brazil or America be a good thing?
Why do so many people think that it's a cultural imperative to wipe out one's culture and join the globalized morass of cultureless consumers, killing themselves over the latest Nike's and deriving their identity via their smartphone brand of choice? Constantly warring over what historic culture owns what neighbourhood? What constitutes progress? No thanks.
What you might consider to be 'authoritarian' - they might consider to be 'social cohesion'. Whereas you want to 'do whatever you want' they might consider 'one's responsibility towards society' as a more important social function.
And FYI they don't have 'social issues' out the wazoo - the opposite.
Mental health - it's an issue that is still considered taboo, moreover, with an aging population, amply problematic, no place is perfect.
In US, you buy a 3-bed house with garage and a big yard for $500,000.
However that $500,000 house with 30 Year mortgage at %4.125 actually %872,892. And that's if don't default on the house and lost it all in.
And look at the cars being driven on the road. How many drive cars that they own outright?
Japan is in a strange zone. Their economy is mature and developed like major Western powers, so some people project onto them Western values. They have their own values, different than ours, they don't impose them on us, nor seek to impose them on us, yet, many a westerner critiques Japan through western values and philosophy (as they do China).
I think that's a big issue in (mis)understanding Japan.
That isn't entirely accurate. Their published statistics on crime are very low.
[1]http://www.newsweek.com/yakuza-gang-members-japan-arrests-57...
e: Also, for reference, the American mafia supposedly has about 3k members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mafia
There's always stories but personally I've found that there's a fetish for "actually Japan is secretly falling apart" that never really aligns with reality, or is usually more indicative of the person's lack of experience with other countries.
Having said that, I don’t gamble or visit host clubs and avoid making enemies in general.
I often see your response about manipulation of statistics, but it is simply indisputable that crime is negligible in Japan compared to Anywhere, USA.
It's also changing. I only really started regularly seeing random (not artistic) graffiti around 2010... and that's after visiting for almost 20 years. Certainly, I've known about poverty in Japan (mostly seen in Tokyo) since the late 90s and 2000s bust. The late 80s boom/bust priced a lot of people out of housing and they've been slowly cut out of the workforce as well.
The kids really started changing in the 90s and by the 2000s a lot of the creatives were wearing t-shirts and tennies to work, which was a huge change (although some traditional places still wear uniforms today). They've (as a cohort) changed some of the norms of work and life (not getting married or having kids!), but have also hidden themselves in weird little sub-cultures (anime, videogames, shopping, karoshi).
I should know what's going on in Japanese social media, but I really don't. Anyone have comments on that? It can't be as weird and twisted as Korea.
The response to that disaster was very poor and unprepared.
I don't claim to understand and maybe it's just some of the high-pressure "elite" schools, but the commentary didn't make it seem rare. Personally, I think the psychological pressure of a very military mindset (spying is a normal part of both social and business experience) and having the threat of the North just beyond the DMZ outside of Seoul is part of it... along with the pressure parents put on their kids to succeed. Watch some Korean films and you will see in it a self image that to this American feels darker and more disturbing than similarly bizarre things that happen in Japan (think more on the GangLife/Neo-Nazi side of the US, but better educated).
Facebook is popular in some circles, but not nearly as active as in the US. It's almost closer to LinkedIn, like your professional face (even if not strictly about business like LinkedIn).
People often have multiple Twitter accounts for different purposes and it's incredibly popular. Maybe the only country where Twitter's still growing?
Instagram use is basically the same as the US I'd say. It's helped erode the privacy obsession, with more people posting selfies and such.
And LINE is the juggernaut being the primary social graph of Japan. It's the default for one-to-one and group chats, and some people use the other features like the wall-like feature, shared albums, etc.
Outside of that WeChat is absolutely critical in China and everyone who needs to work with China. However, not having a bank account in China makes using many of the Wechat capabilities impossible.
At the beginning it was a bit inconvenient for me because I use it mainly to communicate with family and friends, but I solved this problem by opening a secondary account where I add all the people that I don't want to have access to my private life.
Part of the reason that people stay in subcultures much longer is the payoff to adapting a straitlaced image and seeking work as a salaryman just isn't there anymore. Also a major reason people aren't starting families.
I mean the basic MO here is to throw endless amounts of money at every problem and the results are at best mixed.
Until we invent replicators, everyone’s gotta work to eat. Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that. What people in the US admire about Japanese culture is their attitude to the work they’ve got to do to survive. It’s not like folks in the US don’t have to work to eat. But if you’ve ever been in an airport security line in both places you can tell the difference.
Note, many of the people that don't need to work are extraordinarily wealthy, hundreds of thousands of times over what would be required to lead a reasonable life, their wealth bases usually built, directly or indirectly, from the efforts of the same people that have to work until they are 70.
But yeah, in the future, somehow this arrangement will change into a magical utopia, not a situation where those same wealthy horde an even more absurd amount of power, while everyone else struggles to scrape by, or is just discarded entirely in the face of cheaper and better automation that is owned by the wealthier rentier class.
You see this callous disregard on HN every time an article about Uber or Amazon treating their employees like shit, remarks to the effect of "they shouldn't be complaining, cant wait till they are replaced by robots", and I think its disgusting, but its a telling remark about how employees are going to be viewed increasingly in the future.
If we don't even want to bother broaching the serious wide-cutting issues we have right now with poverty and inequality in our society, I fail to see how the hell technology that effectively massively magnifies the economic power of whoever can afford them the most will do anything but make the situation far, far more dire.
And then the next reply was saying we don't necessarily need replicators to solve this problem.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking
And I'll add this, in light of how the comments that have value regularly get greyed out, while the gimmicks get discussed endlessly:
> Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.
-- Traudl Junge
Any bright teenager can notice the rising inequality and extrapolate trends, and do quick thought experiments about throwing hi-tech into the mix. Any decent (and intellectually honest) adult would have to concede it when pointed out to them even if they didn't already see it themselves.
Continue to chose quality over quantity. Continue to "weep with the wise rather than laugh with fools". You may not be able to save the world, but you can prove with every breath what cowardly traitors to themselves and life so many people are, and that in contrast to them at least some people would deserve living in a better world. I salute you.
> Of course, if you saw it in your own country, you’d recognize it for what it was—people working their asses off, even well into old age, not out of some perverse industriousness, but simply because they’ve gotta eat.
Even if Japan had a more robust safety net, people would still need to work to eat (and they have welfare). Not necessarily any given person, but people generally. Indeed, we would be counting on exactly the opposite point from what the author makes: that most people would be industrious enough to work these jobs notwithstanding the fact that they could eat if they didn’t. Particular in Japan, which is facing an unprecedented imbalance between working age and non-working age people.
But hey, people are nice to you when you stand in line to go to your high status job, that's all that matters eh?
> never show their emotions, put the group's desires above their own
I get really tired of these smug judgments of East Asian cultural values.
And after we've invented replicators, we would no longer live.
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Replicator
(That was just my first thought. For balance, I think you meant Star Trek; http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Replicator)
The US for example spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on all of its poverty & welfare assistance programs at the local + state + federal level. The total cost is greater than what is spent on the US military (and most of that isn't spent on bombings or weapons, but on soldier housing, salaries, VA benefits, etc).
One bombing campaign in Libya or Iraq wouldn't cover the cost of just the SNAP food program for one day. That one program costs as much as all US military war-related operations in eg 2016.
> SNAP benefits cost $70.9 billion in fiscal year 2016 and supplied roughly 44.2 million Americans (14% of the population[2]) with an average of $125.51 for each person per month in food assistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...
> NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary/iraq...
"The $720 million figure breaks down into $280 million a day from Iraq war supplementary funding bills passed by Congress, plus $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09...
"SNAP benefits cost $70.9 billion in fiscal year 2016 and supplied roughly 44.2 million Americans (14% of the population) with an average of $125.51 for each person per month in food assistance. ... Each month, SNAP food stamp benefits are directly deposited into the household's EBT card account." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...
70.9 Billion / 0.72 Billion (720 million) is 98.4722
So ... basically, 100 days of the Iraq War could cover all of SNAP for a year. So, for a year, supply 14% of our vulnerable fellow citizens with food versus 100 days of ... what did we get out of the war again? For some reason I can't remember.
You're changing the goalposts on both ends. Instead of "one American bombing campaign in ... Iraq" it's the cost of the Iraq war overall. And instead of "feed[ing] and shelter[ing] the children and elderly in need," it's the $125 per month average SNAP benefit. That's not even enough to feed children and the elderly, much less house them. SNAP supplements peoples' income, as well as school lunches (for children) and Social Security (for the elderly).
This thread isn't about whether the Iraq money could've been put to better use. It's about whether people need to work to eat. And we do. Just to feed and shelter the 14% of the population on SNAP we'd need to spend six or seven times the cost of the Iraq war. (That's not counting education, medical care, etc.) To do the same for service workers like waiters, baristas, cashiers, cab drivers, and garage collectors (who earn around $20-30k per year on average), we'd have to support fully half the population with the labor of the other half. That'd be twenty times the cost of the Iraq war, just to maintain those folks in poverty-level conditions. To pay for that (and nothing else), you'd have to tax the other half of the population 64% of their income.
We're not in a post-work economy. Far from it.
And that’s just the really poor people. The McDonalds employees and Starbucks baristas we’re talking about here make almost double that. Making it so they didn’t have to work to eat would take much more money than the defense budget.
Not sure why you would assume that. I know people in their late 40s who could retire.
How could you possibly know that? It's certainly not true of everyone (retired people exist), and there's no way to get an average unless someone does a survey.
More generally, nobody is in a position to compare the US and Japan based on personal experience. These are both big countries. An airport security line is a highly biased sample.
Well, yeah, they like that because they're the customers and not the workers who have to make it happen. I guarantee you those same Americans would not like to work in a typical Japanese work environment.
Maybe that's one of the cultural differences this author is missing. Most people in Japan, even when they are far more wealthy than their neighbors, still live exactly the same lifestyle.
I kind of have trouble parsing this post, as I'm not sure if it's the author's own romanticizing of things, or someone Japanese is telling them this.
The characters in this story are all figments of the blog author's imagination.
You all have fallen for yet another Japan hoax. Like the bagel heads or LED braces.
I've tried to administer CPR a couple of times, but the Japanese going from point A to point B, (as polite as they are normally), just shrug and move on...
I imagine this is more of an urban vs. rural issue than anything specifically Japanese.
But, that said, I do remember having to get a dead guy out of the way to be able to use the pay phone in west Shinjuku. (Lest you think I am heartless, my first call was to the 911 equivalent).
I've lived in tokyo a year now and SF 2.5 years and I don't regret my move at all.
The guys lying in the street like that (even if not homeless) is actually culturally accepted. You see people sleeping in all sorts of places in Tokyo.
I won't comment on whether that's "good" or "bad" but it's definitely different than the US. I still heavily prefer Tokyo despite that (I don't see it that often in practice)
The worst areas are by far Roppongi and Shibuya. Admittedly, I don't go to Shinjuku as much.
It isn’t. It, however, is precisely what the blog talks about: newcomers explaining things away as “cute cultural quirks”.
Let me correct myself a bit. I guess what I should have said was public places? For example cafes or mcdonalds you can find tons of people sleeping in there, another example is train stations.
Obviously yes these are very different things, hence my correction.
But, you know, it's still warm! And people go there. And they are kicked by some of the teenage thugs at night and rousted and moved by the police. And are often found dead by the phone banks (all of two last time I was there) closer to the hotel, above ground).
I've never lived in SF. And I was friends with a couple of structural-choice-homeless guys in Japan. But - still - having to step-over or recusitate dead people every morning seems grubby to me.
EDIT: I said "the station". I meant Shinjuku. I actually lived out past Wako, and commuted to north of Shinagawa by a bus I picked up in Shibuya every day. There is no "the station", so I apologize.
Thank you.
(Not my photo, but it's from the place I remember)
Why are things so bad for them in NT? I was under the impression they had much better access to welfare and education than the rest of us. Am I wrong? Are they not partaking of it? Are they discriminated against and unable to find housing/schooling?
I mean the entire ring around Paris is a ghetto - as grungy as any American city.
Murder rates are not as bad - but petty crime and other forms of violence are just as bad.
The level of social malaise due to lack of integration of newcomers from the Maghreb and M/E is growing quite quickly.
And Marseille? Lyon? Even worse.
So yes - the American 'hardcore ghettos' are the worst, but beyond that I don't think Europe is that higher.
And the US has a considerably larger middle/middle-upper class of aspirants, which is a difficult proposition for most Europeans.
Full time median income in the US: ~$47,000 (about 50% higher than Japan; the US also has a GDP per capita about 50% higher).
Income in the third world: sub $2,000.
The US has a dozen states with median income levels on par with Switzerland. The US median income is so high, Germany and Britain struggle to match the very poorest US states.
That doesn't sound very third world to me.
Most of the US is absolutely nothing like a third world country in fact. Most of the US is absolutely nothing like Detroit or Baltimore. Most of the US has: a murder rate on par with Canada, extremely low unemployment, extremely high incomes, violent crime rates lower than Europe.
Yet taxes are pretty damn close to the same price as back home!
So if you fall you crash.
Poverty rate is notoriously hard to measure. You can't look at GDP per capita, even GDP(PPP) per capita doesn't give a good measure.
Going by the OECD's official numbers, the USA has the third highest poverty rate, behind Costa Rica and Israel. It has a higher poverty rate than Mexico.
Australia, with the highest minimum wage and fourth highest median income (PPP) in the world, has a higher poverty rate than the Czech Republic.
I would not classify the USA has having extremely high incomes. The income disparity in the USA is phenomenal. Not to mention that income is not the only measure of quality of life, or even a measure of disposable income, especially when you have to shell out thousands of dollars per year in health insurance premiums.
Also entrepreneurial homeless people, actually trying to earn money by making themselves useful however hard that may prove. That's something I never saw in central Europe -- where I think someone like that wouldn't ended up in the street.
The safety net in the US is non-existent, and that seems pretty much primitive to me.
That being said, yes of course third world countries are worse, as far as the average or median of the population is concerned. But frankly, I'm not sure if I would rather be a normal citizen in a third world country, or fall on hard times in the US.
On the subject of Japan: people overestimate its wealth. It industrialized much more recently than the West, and even pre-industrialization, was behind economically and technologically. What the society has accomplished in such a short period of time is impressive, but looking at its buildings it's clear that it still trails the West in capital concentration.
In any case, there's more to a society than wealth. The orderliness and safety of Japanese society makes for a standard of living that is much higher than it otherwise would be. There are a lot of intangible and hard to quantify benefits to feeling safe in person and property when outside your home at any time of day or night.
It's also more ethnically and racially diverse, which will contribute to greater disparity.
Given poverty is a relative measure, this greater variability in socioeconomic status between regions will lead to higher poverty rates in the US.
So Alabama shouldn't be counted as a developed country?
> It's also more ethnically and racially diverse
aaand now it's the black people's fault
> greater variability in socioeconomic status between regions will lead to higher poverty rates
Yes inequality leads to higher poverty rates. Hence why economic redistribution is a useful tool to reduce inequality.
Do you understand what poverty being a relative measure means? If Alabama were its own country, the poverty line would be much lower than the US poverty line.
>aaand now it's the black people's fault
Why would you deliberately make such an offensive strawman of my comment? What's your motive?
I think this may be a part of othering or being able to live on cognitive dissonance?
Edited for clarity; I think people thought I was saying Japanese people are white serving, not that there is a false perception of such.
I'm just noting that so we don't fall into the trap of letting our Randian overlords pre-emptively limit the bounds of our imagination.
Why would we? I note that my father is deteriorating faster now that he does not work. Is it unreasonable to think that work is actually "good for us"?
But there's a world of difference between working because it gives you meaning, and working because if you don't you'll starve to death in your unheated apartment. No older person is benefiting from having to dig through trash for bottles to recycle for nickels.
Agreed. But I think we are squandering the wealth of experience that old people can bring to the work-place by essentially aging them out. They have something to offer - and we need it - and (in Japan) the safety net, it ain't so safe!
EDIT: I lived in Japan a long time, but I realized (at some point), that no matter how much I payed into the retirement system, as a retiree, I would lose my visa and be kicked out (just the way it is). So I moved "back home", so that I would have the opportunity to work until I die.
It has been awhile since I researched this, but is becoming a permanent resident after 10 years the way to avoid that?
By law (although behaviors are changing in contrary ways to the law), I am not even allowed to sign a contract. Say - movie rental. Without a sponsor - I can not (legally) rent a movie. Now, I know, practically, I can. But not legally (with the full power of the courts behind the video shop if I fail to return a VHS tape).
What does that mean? It means that I can not and should not expect that the Japanese retirement system that I have spent decades paying into would necessarily consider it their obligation to fund my retirement.
Is this changing? Yes, it is. Slowly. Do I want to wait for it? No - I do not.
I would rather leave and become independently safe (monied) and return to Japan (because I love it) when my own ability to fund myself is in my own hands.
That sounds like the kind of a decision a paperclip maximizer would make to me.
"Societal resources" not being squandered is a perverse thing to optimize for.
Consider two worlds: 1) A world that automatically makes N widgets, and people could add an additional N widgets but choose not to 2) A world that automatically makes 0 widgets, and people add an additional N widgets because they choose to
If you're going for "not squandering societal resources" as the main metric of a society's value, world 2) is strictly superior, because people waste less time on frivolities like leisure and pleasure.
I'm open to arguments, though, that we should spread more leisure and pleasure around the age distribution instead of backloading it. I expect I'd be convinced, even.
Japan is not a post-scarcity society. Even if income we distributed completely evenly, it would be about $43,000 per year. That’s comfortable, but not so much that Japan could afford to produce a lot less and still enjoy the kind of lifestyle people associate with a developed country.
I'd go about optimising the use of healthy young workers away from endless hours of presenteeism to short more productive hours before declaring the well empty and moving on to putting old people to work.
Last time we were on a business trip together, about 5 years ago, we waited about 15 minutes to be seated at a chain diner type place. Nobody acknowledged the three of us. A group of 4 college kids walked in and a waitress appeared and seated them ahead of us within 2 minutes.
Lots of casual bullshit. It’s sad.
The more enlightening thing to look at is pervasive systemic/institutional racism. I'd recommend doing some googling on those terms if you'd like to learn more.
> is pretty taboo in most areas of society, and, even in private situations, it's rare in my experience
English is not my native language so I may be misreading the subtext, but it seemed contradictory
I don't see much outright hostile "blacks suck" racism, at least in the Bay Area, it's more people holding the wrong expectations/biases. For example seeing a person of Spanish descent at a counter and assuming they don't speak English or seeing them walking around and assuming they're a repairman or cleaner.
I think the real problem is that it's hard to break out of poverty in general and all Spanish speaking/African Americans started that way, while the same isn't true of people of European descent. Whites are also more likely to have relatively affluent friends/family to fall back on or help them out while others aren't.
Also I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it but at least working in tech as a foreigner, it's easy to develop racist biases here. When _every_ time you notice an African American is because they're shouting/yelling in the streets or asking for handouts, you unconsciously come to assume they're all like that, despite the fact that when you look around at any given time, the vast majority are acting just like anyone else.
I think what you read here on HN is not a representative sample of Americans.
It has a lot to do with fact that if you won't be nice, you will be punished.
No, that's not really true. Many Japanese do not treat white Americans and Philippine people the same, for instance.
What are you talking about? The Japanese are preternaturally polite, but they aren't necessarily any "nice"er than anyone else. And they aren't there to serve "the white man". If anything, they believe that they are the most evolved race of humans (or some think 'not even the same species as normal humans') on the planet. Look - their society is rough and tough. But it has nothing to do with race. It's just a tough gig being Japanese.