> Immigrants eventually become Japanese citizens though when they themselves settle in Japan
That's great if you want to preserve Japanese paperwork and populate Japan's geography, but doesn't help the Japanese people themselves.
That's great if you want to preserve Japanese paperwork and populate Japan's geography, but doesn't help the Japanese people themselves.
For the sake of discussion, say if the government "imported" Scandinavian[1] families with their traditions, etc, to Japan, probably they'll keep this culture, and you'd have "parallel societies". Maybe only if the migrant families have kids who are young enough to grow up with the Japanese culture, and for some people maybe even that's not Japanese enough, because of their migrant parents' influence on them, and maybe only the kids of these kids, who'd have assimilated even more Japanese culture while growing up, would be sufficiently Japanese.
Edit to add: the alternative, a bunch of Scandinavians living in Scandinavian neighborhoods and sending their kids to Scandinavian schools (with their own cultures/languages) would bring about a totally different community within a few generations, which one could say "not very Japanese", or "a very different Japan".
[1] I had a different origin country before I changed it to "Scandinavian", I have a feeling changing the country has an effect on how people would perceive such a migration, but hey maybe I'm projecting my own bias.
And the Japanese themselves consider Japanese-ness genetic, so who are you to tell them otherwise?
Of course people can believe that there’s a genetic component to Japanese-ness, and they are free to become extinct as a result.
If this were to happen worldwide, and geography thankfully makes that likely impossible, I'm not sure that an entire planet blanketed with a single mass media driven culture, with the inevitable extinction of hundreds of long cultural tails ( like endangered or near endangered languages today) answers the problems that proponents of unrestricted multiculturalism seem to be profess concern about. For there to be cultural variation at all, "original" or "native" sources of variation to provide inputs for the "multi" have to be preserved somehow.
And it can't just be the cultural equivalent of farmers markets, reservations set up part time on half a city block, on land that 50 years prior was not city, but hundreds of acres of actual farmland and farmers tending it.
That's why this is not going to become a real issue. It's always a fake issue that nationalist can draw on to get people agitated. Even in the most multi-cultural places in the world, people will self-segregate to be with those that look and think like them. We simply shouldn't ostracize or shame the small minority that branch out of their genetic in-group.
I live in Japan, btw, and the people here in general don't consider immigrants to be Japanese, no matter how well said immigrants speak Japanese or contribute to society.
If you asked a Japanese person, and that person gave you a "honne" answer, he or she would most likely say "genetic." I guess the Japanese should be "careful," lest they draw your ire.