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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Both countries have low birthrates, but Japan is far enough along the labor shortage curve that unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan. From the friendly article:

According to Statistics Korea, the national statistics office, the unemployment rate last year for people aged between 15 and 29 was 9.5 percent, compared with 3.8 percent overall and 3.6 percent for Japanese 15 to 24.

Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular. There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

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> unemployment has been essentially eradicated in Japan

Much of that is the surprising amount of minor busywork the country uses instead of welfare support e.g. multiple people doing circulation around a minor bit of roadwork when other countries would use traffic signs or temporary traffic lights. This is mostly unreliable contract and part-time work.

Japan has fairly high rates of relative and working poverty, with north of 15% living under the poverty line.

For comparison, in 2010 the U.S. had 15.1% of its population living under the poverty line. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold

To draw some analogies, Japan has some very conservative people in power, but that's more to do with the election systems that give more power to monolithic parties that attract rural voters. When you look at the proportional vote (Japan has FPTP + a non-reproportioning proportional segment), Japanese people are on average much less conservative than their elected government would make it seem.

> Also, Japan has a vocal far-right fringe, but the average Japanese person has no qualm with Koreans and Korean TV, music, food etc is widely popular.

And Israelis love Palestinian/Arab hummus. That feeling is not transitive to the Palestinian people.

> There are over 500,000 Koreans living in Japan, many 2nd or 3rd generation, and plenty more naturalized Japanese of Korean descent. If anything, I'd suspect there's a lot more antipathy in Korea towards Japan than the other way around...

Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens and have limited rights in Japan, and can face widespread discrimination if they do not hide their identities/ancestry.

They can naturalize anytime they want but choose not to...

> Zainichi Koreans of any generation are not citizens

That's a bit of a tautology: if they nationalize, which they can if they wish to, they become citizens and stop being counted as Zainichi. They're also granted a number of privileges (welfare, state pensions etc) as "Special Permanent Residents" not afforded to any other non-citizen residents, although they're still not to vote.

I think comparison with Israel/Palestine is wrong because Koreans do not explode bombs in Japan.

Also, I don't understand why anyone could dislike Korean people. They didn't invade Japan, and probably they never invaded any country.

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