Have you ever been to Tokyo? One of the largest cities in the world yet has way way lower robberies/homicides than US cities.
Not how that works.
If I was being more careful I could have written the country "indirectly elects" the Supreme Court judges. My basic point still stands, San Francisco policy is in many ways set by the entire country.
So far the city is processing 72 applications, and they expect to get nearly 100 to 200 more over the next year. Which is very different from the four we processed in the past 10 or so years
Source: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/san-francisco-begins-is...
Certainly 100 permits a year are not going to change things much and definitely four issued in the last 10 years didn't, and if anything sounds like "strict gun control", then four people allowed to carry in 10 years is it.
Singapore is a better example, but requires a form of authoritarianism to pull off that would be unacceptable to both the right and the left.
Japan takes few immigrants, but those that do immigrate there are expected to be guests and live within the established norms of Japanese culture and society.
That’s the opposite mindset of the US - especially the liberal leaning areas, where the society is expected to accept and respect diversity and differences.
You can immigrate to Japan as a Westerner (or even as a outwardly similar looking East Asian from Korea or China, etc), live there for decades and become fully assimilated into Japanese society, even gain citizenship, but still be treated as an outsider - not necessarily disrespectfully.
You could probably say the same for other East Asian countries such as Korea, China, Taiwan, etc.
At least, that’s my belief as an American who has spent several years living in Japan.
Perchance those things are related?
What really are the genetic basis to say Japan is a country that's markedly different from other asian populations?
The people living in Japan have not lived there for long enough for their genetic to become too different from those of other asian countries. Culture on the other hand changes much more rapidly. Culture is the "genetics" of society, it is passed down from generation to generation and it mutates and these mutations are also hereditary... it's just much faster than biological processes.
But ultimately, it seems very unlikely (and as far as I know, there's very little evidence that suggests this is the case) that race and genetics will have a huge effect on culture. Specially given that countries with similar genetic populations will have vastly different cultures.
Keep in mind the culture of the various regions could easily cause fast natural (?) selection. I’m no expert on Japan’s history, and even less so on China/Korea/etc. I know enough that Japan had periods of pretty constant war, and that the young and the brash would essentially volunteer to be mercenaries. It seems to me that could pretty quickly weed out the most aggressive genes in a population. It would be different, of course, if soldiers were conscripted instead.
That’s just one example and as I said, I’m not a historian. Another example would be America. People always come up with silly reasons why we became the dominant world power. In my opinion the reason is simple: the people that immigrated here were risk takers, hard workers, and dreamers. Their kids would inherit those genes.
So, I’d say culture begets genetics which begets culture…
Yet that didn't happen to other regionally isolated countries like Mexico or Brazil - hell, or even Canada.
And yes, youth always volunteer for wars. Like I said, I'm not a historian and my example was just an example of how things could guide selection. That said I don't think many countries had something similar to what ronin, or even samurai, were. It was a fairly unique system.
China's Great Leap Forward would be another example of something that could guide who lived to procreate and who didn't.
because publicly acknowledging this obvious reality comes at a cost: you WILL be attacked. most people do not want to be attacked and would rather take the easier route of pretending to not notice this or anything that's going to cause them a problem.
they have even done studies with 1 day old babies where the scientist holds the baby's nose shut and guess what, babies of different races react in different ways. same as when they take baby boys and girls and put them in a room the boys go for the toy trucks and the girls go for the dolls. i'm sorry but that study doesn't need to happen if you don't live in an ivory tower and have to act like a politician because you have so much money to lose for having the wrong opinion.
The Ainu’s skin tone is more like Caucasians than East Asians and the majority population, (Yamato?) are noticeably shorter than the Koreans to whom they are most closely related. There’s clearly been enough isolation, for long enough, for some differentiation. That’s not to say the distribution of traits doesn’t overlap. We’re not talking Sardinians and Swedes here, never mind Bantu and Basque.
Seoul, like Tokyo, could also be described as a HNer’s dream city. Ultra safe, ultra clean, amazing transit. And like Tokyo, a city like Seoul could never exist in the US for similar reasons.
(Then again, cars and public transit coexist somewhat harmoniously in Seoul, with cars being an aspirational item for many Koreans, so maybe it’s not a dream city for the banallcars HNer crowd)
It’s why even in America you see racial/ethnic blocs and enclaves form. Hence the mentions of an “Asian voting bloc” or “Hispanic voting bloc”, during elections. Would we be hearing about such things if the US was monoracial? Even among many divisions, it would be one less divisive factor.
(yes, I’m aware in the past things were carved up even among whites - such as Italians vs. Irish etc)
Also worth pointing out that homogeneity isn’t only along an axis of race. Example: There are plenty of Mexican Americans who are extremely racist towards newer Mexican immigrants to their neighborhoods. LATimes has done several pieces about this dynamic. People will always find reasons to put other people in categories.
Also worth pointing out that the society in Japan is more overtly racist towards outsiders of any race. My source is a life-long friend (white American living in Japan for 15+ years) who overheard lots of conversations when the locals think he doesn’t understand their words.
America has been a “melting pot” for a while, so we have moved our racial/homogeneity issues at least one layer below polite discussion. Most Americans will put up a façade about not being racist, but don’t actually put any effort to align their behaviors.
Sadly, I think identity politics has tossed the melting pot ideals aside. It encourages zero sum thinking where different groups are enemies and relative sucess is what matters. This means pulling others down is just important than lifting people up. Unfortionatly, it is easier to pull people down than lift them up.
Crab bucket mentality in practice.
My theory is racism and identity politics have a positive feedback relationship. That is to say identity politics is counterproductive for bringing about a less biased and hostile society. It divides and pits people against each other as enemies.
Yes, Japan is a very high-conforming and ethnically homogeneous society. It is also a low-crime society. However, to derive just from that that absence of racial homogeneity alone leads to high crime makes no more sense than claiming that not using logographic scripts leads to violence - since Asian society are generally less violent than, for example, the US. You need to do much more work than just picking one difference and attribute everything to it.
Ironically, America in the 90s and early 2000s seemed to be approaching a sweet spot where cultural expectations and “mild” authoritarian policing were successful at crushing urban crime rates. This whole thread is full of longtime West Coasters bemoaning how much better city life was in “the good old days” of 10-15 years ago. Odd how there’s zero political will to simply go back to what worked.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972
[2] https://qz.com/2029525/the-20-countries-that-dont-collect-ra...
A glance at Japan's history and geography will tell you that Japan is an incredibly homogenous country as far as ethnicity goes.
Furthermore, up until 1869 Hokkaido was a separate kingdom peopled by the Ainu - Japan has a long history of exchanging people with Korea. It's not some fabled walled-off kingdom, it's a regular country full of regular people
It’s not the homogeneity.
Please read the first line in the main body of your article and you’ll find the answer. It’s so predictable it’s more accurate than science.
Cronulla was a one-off event almost 20 years ago, was extremely shocking and out of the ordinary, and as far as I can remember no-one died. As such, it’s not a great example of anything much, other than the fact that ethnic tensions existed between white and Arab communities in Australia in the mid-2000s (which is not all that surprising given the context of 9/11, the Iraq War, etc)
I do agree with your first point, however, that Sydney is a good example of one of the most multicultural cities in the world being quite safe, without requiring authoritarian policing (lockouts and drug dogs in train stations aside)
But I’ll stop you right there from swaying the blame onto someone else and reaching entirely false conclusions. What crime is NOT due to:
- Crime is not due to poverty. Plenty of poor cities who aren’t violent.
- Crime is not due to previous crime. Put white felons on an island and you get Australia, as the joke says.
- Crime is not due to high-density area. Tokyo.
- Crime is not due to immigration or displacing population. Ukraine migrant kids who spoke French astonishingly fluently in 6 months, a better score than all kids from “other” French backgrounds.
- Crime is not due to mixing population. Singapore.
Each of them is easily proven by finding great counter-examples of constructive people being moved/concentrated to place X or Z and not having high criminality.
It must be something else, something which can be found in all evoked areas and not found in peaceful areas, but I’m not going to say it.
Is it water?
Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.
My own belief is that its some combination of:
- Extreme wealth inequality
- High cost of living
- High incidence of poverty (relative to the aforementioned cost of living)
- Poor social safety net
- Poor community cohesion and trust
- Individualistic cultural attitudes (as opposed to collectivist cultural attitudes)
- Poor public protection
- Easy access to drugs (including alcohol)
I think the drugs just become a symptom of the problem; people get addicted because they are suffering (see rat park). They develop antisocial behaviours, which reduces community cohesion and trust. The city then becomes less happy overall, and it becomes a cycle
When kicked out of the front door, try to come back through the backdoor?
You can create convoluted science that a combination of those factors leads to violence. Since it’s a combination, it’s even less provable, a correlation doesn’t cause causation, and I’ll keep finding counter examples, to which you will find even more convoluted reasons.
But there is a much, much simpler hypothesis, and for my part it explains the world with accuracy and predictability. What defines a science is its ability to predict the future based on some inputs.
So, my stance is to never make a decision based on prejudice, which is satisfying in terms of humanism, but don’t forget that people will reliably get killed, mugged and raped, and in quantity, if you don’t watch out for the thing-I’ll-not-say which was ever predictable. And it’s both our responsibility to put our family out of harm’s way, and an incredible feat of the XXIth century that we’re feeding our own relatives into a crime machine that reliably gets them killed or raped.
Speaking from experience. But everyone who has a grave opinion on this topic has, someday, seen a relative crossing the path of those people.
You’ll hear stats about the high percentage of Japanese people in Japan, but those statistics invariably refer to Japanese citizens, not ethnic Japanese.