Hacker News Reader

Comment by jossclimb | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what will transpire for Korea and Japan. Xenophobia and Racism is commonplace and so they don't make it easy for migrants to assimilate.

View on HN

I find the concept of using immigration to solve the problem bizarre.. like Japan will survive but without Japanese people./

In many other countries, immigrants eventually become just as much a part of the country as non-immigrants.

There are millions of children of immigrants in Germany who speak German just as natively as anyone else in the country, just to give you one example.

There's no way out of a depopulation spiral other than reversing it or dying out. If they die out some other nation will take over their land, so it's merely a question of whether the ethnically non-Japanese people who will inhabit the land in the future will call themselves Japanese or not. What happens when a nation has its ethnicity completely replaced? Does it lose its national identity or not?

What is a Japanese person, how do you define that? For most people someone born, raised, with citizenship, fluent in the language and culture, regardless of their parents' provenance or skin colour is a a fully fledged person of that nationality and ethnicity.

Well, that the official declaration. But we all know that it is a lie. Even for very similar ethnicities like say Italian, French, German and Swiss you can easily tell the difference. National identity and culture is heavily influenced by genes.

I know two people of very close Italian descent (parents/grandparents were born in Italy) in France, and they're as French as anyone who can trace their lineage to 15th century Versailles. The only Italian parts remaining are their surnames.

> National identity and culture is heavily influenced by genes.

Citation very much needed.

>Citation very much needed.

I'm sure that there are studies but let's be honest. This is just common sense. I'm sure that if you replace Japanese people with Berbers from North Africa, Japan will look very different.

So you're saying that if you took 50 million Berber babies (for the sake of argument let's suppose that this is possible) and gave them to Japanese families, the next generation in Japan would be significantly more Berberish? Or are you saying that if you took 50 million adult Berbers and deposited them in Japan that Japan would be very different?

If you're saying the latter: what role is genetics playing in that scenario?

If you're saying the former: no, culture is not a genetic trait. Obviously.

In case anyone is curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory mentions the canonical example of cultural and genetic coëvolution: lactose (in)tolerance.

In particular, in the given hypothetical, one might predict a change in the dairy culture in Japan if suddenly the population was significantly more tolerant of lactose.

(I assume the usual example of lactose intolerant is chosen because it appears some people are otherwise religiously opposed to considering the relationship between culture and genetics.)

>one might predict a change in the dairy culture in Japan if suddenly the population was significantly more tolerant of lactose.

It might change or it might not. Just because a dietary option is open to you doesn't mean you're going to take it. Nothing prevents me from eating sushi, and I still don't, and the reason is obvious: I didn't grow up eating it, so it isn't part of my normal diet.

It's one thing to say that culture and genetics are not completely independent. It's another to say that culture is heavily influenced by genetics, to the extent that it's a hereditary trait.

I definitely don’t think culture is all that influenced by genetics in any great sense (I mean if everyone is lactose intolerant there won’t be a great milk-based food tradition but that’s sort of incidental). But if you were to drop 50 million foreign babies of visibly different ethnicities into families in any country, they’d of course end up with very different upbringings as visible minorities.

This stereotype about 170 million people is pretty overplayed.

Perhaps but by any objective ranking it's much harder to get a permanent Visa to work in Japan that your average developed nation. I assume south Korea's similar. I don't see either nation has any choice but to accept more migrants as their native populations age.

It’s incredibly easy to get a permanent residence visa in non-authoritarian East Asian countries, especially compared to anywhere in the west.

Asia just isn’t as popular of a destination because of 1) huge language barriers, 2) wages are lower than the west, and 3) visas are contingent upon stable employment, and gaps in employment plus zero tolerance policies towards visa overstays/illegal immigration make that risky to a large proportion of people.

But if you stay at a company or only job hop with offers in-hand, East Asia as a whole is insanely easy to move to, get permanent residence, or even citizenship. Anyone who’s gone through the process, doubly so those who’ve dealt with processes in the west, can readily verify this. The conditions for Japan are literally just: college degree or 10 years experience, job offer, no criminal record. Then stay a few years, don’t have a major criminal record, and you can get citizenship in as little as 5 years with a 95% acceptance rate. Permanent residence is a similar process.

I felt zero obstacles the entire way. It felt like renewing an ID card and nothing more.

Sure, I was including the language barriers and the challenges of getting job offers and maintaining stable employment. I wouldn't consider Australia a country it's particularly easy to get a PR Visa for but if you have any experience at all in high-demand industries (esp. Health care) I gather it's pretty straightforward. My partner moved from Japan exactly on that basis (she didn't have a college degree that was recognized here, and had to do one while she was here, including learning English to a sufficiently proficient level) and seems to think it was far easier than for someone trying to go the other way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com