> let in more immigrants while still maintaining their culture.
Impossible.
Impossible.
I definitely don't have any feeling of loss of culture, I guess that's my point.
"sophisticated set of shared rules and norms" - I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I definitely get a bad feeling from a sentence like that though.
Why?!
2) If anything, "a [..] set of shared rules and norms" sounds like an environment which tries to enforce a strict template for how to behave and act and do. If that's really the case then it to me would be a terrible place to be. Like that backwater isolated village with some snooping crones keeping an eye on everything.
If you meant something totally different, please explain. Particularly the "sophisticated" point.
The rules and norms are complex and encompass a wider and deeper range of behaviors.
> 2) If anything, "a [..] set of shared rules and norms" sounds like an environment which tries to enforce a strict template for how to behave and act and do. If that's really the case then it to me would be a terrible place to be.
Anti-social people don’t like it, to be sure. But it facilitates high trust societies that have lower social transaction costs. Paradoxically, it enables societies that have less formal policing and rule enforcement, because of the high level of informal policing and rule enforcement.
I would like to see a more specific example of what you mean by sophisticated rules and norms. What would a real-life example be? I still don't get it, so I would be happy to learn what you mean by this.
The unsubtle explanation from someone who is not a huge Singapore fan (or from someone who is?) might be that this is simply the power of well-engineered, highly authoritarian government. But it's certainly not about choosing homogeneity or eschewing immigration.
This didn't jibe so I looked up the figures and I still don't understand why you'd write this. To be honest I don't understand why you've written most of what you've written on this thread, but, did you mean to write "ignoring religious diversity...?" The US is 63% Christian. The largest religious group in Singapore is the Buddhists, at... 31%? And unlike in the United States, two minority groups in Singapore (Christians, Muslims) have strong representation in the population, whereas in the US, not so much.
Which I guess would leave things like language, of which they have four official ones and quite a few others, with a bilingual education mandate that demands everyone learn English but recognizes that they've probably got their own as well, IIRC.
There's racial makeup, if that matters to you (I get the feeling it does). In terms of cultural dominance I would reject the idea that there's something massively different about a 69% white majority vs a 74% Chinese majority. The second on their list is Malay at 13.5% and the second on our list is Black at 12.4% and my God why are we even having this conversation
I'm pretty sure the explanation for the undeniable order there is the completely obvious explanation that does not involve "homogeneity" or immigration. It's the authoritarian system of government.
And yes the homogeneity helps Singapore’s orderliness. The overwhelming majority of the population is Asian, who in general are more collectivist and orderly than say Italians.
How many individuals from those ethnic backgrounds might actually want to emigrate to Japan, I don't know.
South Korea and Japan do have difficult relations, and they have been getting worse. But I remember visiting South Korea some years ago and talking to some of my South Korean colleagues about how they felt about Japan, and what I noticed was wide differences in opinion – some were still very angry at Japan for things it had done long before they were born, others were critical of their fellow Koreans' anti-Japanese sentiments. I suspect some of this is political – historically, many Koreans collaborated with Japan, among others Park Chung Hee, who served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, and then became South Korea's military dictator in the 1960s and 1970s. Some right-wing South Koreans still have some sympathy for the 1960s/1970s military dictatorship, and hence tend to view collaborators with Japan more sympathetically; more left-leaning South Koreans are highly critical of both.
In any event, there are a lot of things which Japan could say to try to assuage South Korean feelings on these topics. Japan's problem is that saying those things would upset Japan's own nationalist bloc. But if Japan really wants to attract Korean immigrants, maybe upsetting their own nationalists is the price of that.
Also, there a lot of ethnic Chinese people in Australia who are actually from Malaysia or Singapore; Malaysian Chinese want to escape the discrimination of Malaysia's Bumiputera policy; many Singaporeans want an escape from Singapore's cramped living conditions (small apartments). So ethnic Chinese immigrants can be sources from places other than China proper.