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Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

Well the women defacto being "forced" to not work part is more, women sacrificing their freedom to make life easier for the men.

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CORRECT! And this is what perplexes me so much. I lived in Japan and saw this with my own eyes, it was such an ultra conservative society, especially in respect how women are treated.

And then you meet Western people who adore, even feteshize Japan SO heavily without reflecting anything what is going on.

People have to understand that most of the things they love in Japan (cleaness, extreme degree of quality in customer service, orderliness) is due to those ultra conservative values and norms.

Hence, I am very critical towards Japan and I find people naive who one the one hand adore Japan so much (also the super conservative government) and at the same time hate the Chinese values, system and even people.

It might be that this is so fetishized in western culture precisely because there are many people who are conservative but cannot find a socially appropriate outlet for it. Try saying "The man should work to feed the family, the woman should raise the kids." on American TV ;) But I'm sure there are Americans (of both genders) who feel like that is how they would want their marriage to be.

Similarly, Japanese women are usually portrayed as very submissive in Anime and Japanese movies. Probably, some people find that sexually attractive, or else they wouldn't do it.

Looking at what westerners desire of Japanese culture might be a good way to find suppressed urges in the western culture. Whether or not we as society decide to act on that knowledge is a different question.

I studied Japanese and met maybe a hundred people that love Japanese culture.

I never met any who would approve of the sexism, xenophobia or crazy work culture. Most people love the aesthetics, literature, history, architecture, food, music...

I think you are describing a certain far-right weaboo subculture, but that's just a pocket of 4chan inanity.

When Trump became POTUS, I couldn't find anyone in my social circle who liked him. But apparently, roughly half the country did.

Similarly, I've yet to meet someone who thought Brexit would be a good idea.

What that shows me is that the bubble is very real and that people with those views are hidden from me.

"Do you think it is, or is not, morally wrong for a couple to have a baby if they are not married?" 47% of Americans say "morally wrong". That is very conservative in my opinion.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4315/family-values-differ-sharp...

The American misconception of democracy is that the majority decides the way. This is why I dont like the system. The Europeans are making it much better, because they force parties to have coalition. The European democracies are not doing what the majority wants, but assures that the minorities are not left behind.

Just because many many people voted for Trump or the Brexit it doesn't make this good or right.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of how democracy works in Europe. There are many different countries in the continent and only some of them have parliamentary systems; others operate more like the USA (and there's even a dictatorship or two). In a parliamentary system a party that wins an outright majority can form a government on their own and do what they want; parties are only forced to form coalitions when they lack a majority.

I think he was being too short to address your criticism.

America only ends up with a majority because the system creates and only has room for 2 political parties.

If America had a more hand wavey European like system, then America would likely have 2+ parties.

> American misconception of democracy is that the majority decides the way

I don't understand, a large part of the last 20-30 years of American elections have been an entire outrage over how a such a small amount of people can have such outsized results in elections because of how the system is structured. Its literally the opposite of your take.

Majorities don't decide the way in US. Even a president can be elected without being the most voted by the majority of citizens, due to the crazy delegate system.

> roughly half the country did

That says a lot about about US. But I never said I was talking about US.

It’s because most people are only tourists and never live there?

I think there are a lot of people who just don't notice the problematic things because they're looking at Japanese culture through a telescope that only shows the bit they like.

If you just like Studio Ghibli films, or giant robots fighting each other, you might not notice that the police in Japan have a suspiciously high confession rate because it doesn't explicitly appear in the small portion of Japanese culture they're looking at.

> But I'm sure there are Americans (of both genders) who feel like that is how they would want their marriage to be

They're entitled to live like that if they want, so long as it doesn't turn into socially and structurally coercing everyone else to live like that.

I'm sure it's very convenient for a lot of people if women were to be forced back out of the workplace and economic independence to be guilt-tripped into caring roles for the rest of their lives, but a lot of people put a lot of work into digging their way out of that and are not keen to see it undone.

>They're entitled to live like that if they want, so long as it doesn't turn into socially and structurally coercing everyone else to live like that

Yet people routinely advocate for subsiding what we want and penalizing what we don't in damn near every other public policy context, transportation, energy, housing, etc, etc, etc.

So how do you reconcile this? Surely those people who want a conservative lifestyle have just as much right to try and get society to do what they want on the issues they care about as any (to pick an example) the people who want us to reduce outsourcing of manufacturing to countries with less environmental protections do?

> So how do you reconcile this?

Because one is about limiting women’s rights, and the other is about issues that affect all of society.

That much straw in one place poses a fire hazard.

It's perfectly possible to craft policy that makes life easier for households with one working parent and one stay at home parent without doing anything to specifically restrict women. Crafting policy in such a manner would be all but necessary since we live in an age where same sex marriage is widely accepted. Heck, it could be as simple as a well crafted tax credit.

What is far harder than crafting the actual policy is having a discussion about the policy without things devolving in exactly the direction you're bringing it.

Edit: Now that I think about it policy that promotes married couples with a single stay at home parent would likely go a long way toward un-screwing the people who've been screwed out of stable households for several generations due to welfare and state assistance rules that highly dis-incentivize marriage.

The social conservative positions I have seen in the US for the past few decades have been only about limiting women’s rights. I have not seen anything come out about helping families with one stay at home parent and one working parent.

Nothing about healthcare reform, minimum wage laws, or parental leave policies. You have to have two working parents to afford the volatility of income, which in the US was also tied to healthcare, and still is in some sense (until Democrats helped changed that with ACA, not the people that call themselves conservatives).

Reducing this volatility for families is not the “conservative” position in the US.

Indeed a lot of westerners trying to understand the "Japanese mindset" but missed it completely. Classic example of misunderstanding between cultures.

You must be a westerner. This is a very common westerner comment its very textbook, so textbook that Asian mindsets are tired responding to it. Please try to understand the mindset in Asia first. For example, do women in Japan really want career more vs becoming a house wife? You will be surprised at the answer.

Are women a monolith?

As someone raised by non westerners, every single woman cousin of mine chose to become financially independent. And why would they not? Who wants to live under the thumb of someone else?

Ignore my anecdote. The proof is the simple fact that wherever women are allowed to financial independence, they choose to take if.

I have had this conversation come up many times before and the people always say that their daughter in law is their daughter and everything that is theirs is hers. So then I tell them, well, they should have no problem signing over their assets to her, and they clam up pretty quickly.

" For example, do women in Japan really want career more vs becoming a house wife? You will be surprised at the answer."

Ask this question in the West and you may be surprised too.

But why can there only be one answer? Could it not be some women would like to be a house wife and some would like a career? If so, its not good that society makes one of these options very hard.

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