Immigration is not the solution. It's a workaround.
I fail to see how replacing Japan population with immigrants from Africa or South-East Asia would save Japan.
It is a bandaid sure but it's a bandaid worth literally decades of time. There's a reason doctors put bandaids on wounds.
It's kind of too late anyway.
Why not? Poor people go wherever they can/where they are allowed if the host country is rich.
Colonization making English and/or French an official language of about 50 African nations means there are about a dozen options that present basically no language barrier and much smoother cultural assimilation than East Asia in general.
I'm not saying no African at all would go to the region. But they'd be near the bottom of the list even with comparable policies.
90 out of 54 is quite a high percentage.
Acceptance, Opportunity, Racism, Xenophobia.
East Asia is much more backwards than the West in this regard and the west isn't exactly heaven. In South Korea and Japan, all foreigners get the short end of the stick but black/brown people and Africans get the shorter end.
All the open policies in the world won't reverse public sentiment so easily.
Immigrant are human. And knowing you won't have to watch people scuttle away when you enter a bus means everything when you have options.
You can believe Japan would be full all you want but I assure you it won't be because of Africans.
Genetics? The US is literally a nation born out of immigration and any "racial distinctiveness" in Europe has more to do with the limited means of transport leading to geographical inbreeding than some metaphysical legacy of pure bloodlines. Not to mention that most of Europe experienced various migration waves all the way back to the first migrations that resulted in Europe being settled by humans at all. Japan has been trying to keep up its strategy of just being extremely racist post-WW2 and it doesn't look like that got them anywhere.
Culture? You literally can't look at most nations' cultures without also considering the cultures of their neighbors that influenced them. As much as ethnonationalists like to pretend otherwise, for any continental culture the grouping of what aspects are specific to that "nation" have more to do with its history of government than any shared identity. Germany for example was barely a coherent concept before the 19th century. Japan being forced to spend most of its history navelgazing and sitting on its thumbs because it consisted of a bunch of islands doesn't make its culture any more special or worth preserving than any other and most of what you imagine when you think of Japan today is the result of being repeatedly carpet bombed and literally nuked after trying to do an imperialism to the point of voluntarily acting as a vassal to its victor: Westernization had less to do with immigration and more with global trade and trying to cargo cult the nation that wiped the proverbial floor with it.
Heck, the only example I can think of literal replacement is far-right Israeli settlers moving into houses of Palestinian families after their expulsion without even giving them enough time to clear out the fridge. That's literally replacement: residents of one culture and ethnicity are forcibly removed from their own homes and replaced with residents of another. But again, that's not what's happening with immigration and it's not what you're complaining about.
If you're truly concerned with a loss of culture and every distinctiveness being washed over until all that remains is a homogeneous grey soup Disney can fill in a tin and sell to you, the problem isn't immigration but commodification and tourism. Instead of dishonestly grandstanding about native Americans you should be looking at Hawai'i where Americans bluntly annexed the kingdom, cut up the land to sell it off to American hoteliers and the very rich, and then sold off cheap immitations of the native culture so middle-class tourists could have an "exotic" experience as a piece of escapism.
Forget about "national identities". Places used to have identities. Every city, every town used to have a distinguishing character that was the result of its geography and history, like the rings of a tree telling the story of past seasons. Then big box chains stomped out the local businesses and undercut the competition by making it up in volume before ramping up prices again once noone else was left. And with nobody left to perpetuate the culture now that the only means of production was commerce and commerce was owned by the same big companies, all that is left is the same, market researched, focus group tested, mass produced, grey soup that is served everywhere. At best you can hope your local history is interesting enough that Disney picks it up as a novelty so it can use it as the backdrop for its umpteenth retelling of a story some dead guy wrote before copyright became a thing.
You don't seem to genuinely worry about losing culture. It sounds more like you just don't like "foreigners" to live around you. If you are truly concerned about loss of culture, look at preservationist projects. There are for example linguists who go out to communities in Europe who speak endangered languages so they can be recorded and studied. There are people who form activist groups to get local sites on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites so it becomes easier to find funding to maintain them. There are groups who learn and teach endangered arts or crafts so the knowledge isn't lost when a profession is no longer deemed economically useful. There are people who use spare rooms to run donation-funded private museums to preserve local history.
But here's the thing: culture changes and evolves over time, especially at the intersection. Life isn't static and neither is history. If you demand that immigrants "assimilate" you are literally asking them to give up their culture to preserve some kind of shrinkwrapped carbon copy of what you think yours is. But even if left to its own devices, your culture would change over time. What happens with immigration is not replacement of culture but a merger. Culture is a river, not a pond. No matter how much commodification tries to tell you otherwise by trying to sell it to you in a bucket.
Geographically, it's obviously not replacement. "People lived here, now people live here" is just continuity.
Genetically, who cares.
Culturally, that's up to the people.
In the moment, aside from historical preconditions, the largest factor to how narrow this in-group is and how strong the dislike towards those not in it is, is mostly a matter of perceived scarcity and danger. As every good business owner knows, the best way to distract an employee from how small their share of the profits is, is to dangle a more desperate group in front of them as a scapegoat. Give someone your scraps, then make them deathly afraid others want to take it away from them, and they won't dare to ask for more (or solidarize with others against you - racism was one of the biggest cudgels against unions in the early 20th century US before simply framing unions as communist became an option).
Not at all, not unless you use some Orwellian tactics to completely redefine what an ethnic group is.
>Geographically, it's obviously not replacement. "People lived here, now people live here" is just continuity.
A geographic area is not a "people" nor an ethnic group. Shoving more people into the landmass we know as Japan may be good for the economy of the landmass, but it won't be good for the ethnic group we call the Japanese.
>Genetically, who cares.
Common ancestry is one of the core attributes of ethnic groups. The Japanese people and ethnologists care
>Culturally, that's up to the people.
"If we replace the Japanese with Appalachian Whites, it's up to the people to decide if they're being replaced or not."
Yes, you made my point for me: if you replace the Japanese with foreigners, they are being replaced.
QED.
Basically true. An awful lot of Americans, for example, don't see it as "replacement" when people from Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, Spain, or wherever come join them. Their cultural identity isn't defined very tightly at all by who their parents were. This is not universally true in the country, of course, and some of the larger political fights are over this notion.
If Japan feels much more strongly that ancestry matters profoundly, well, that's going to be a rub for them moving forward.
But beliefs are malleable and it will ultimately be up to them.
Not at all, not unless you use some Orwellian tactics to completely redefine what ethnic replacement is.
>An awful lot of Americans, for example, don't see it as "replacement" when people from Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, Spain, or wherever come join them.
Just because there's a large group that's delusional or willfully ignorant to what's happening doesn't make it true. An awful lot of Americans think men can get pregnant, or climate change isn't anthropogenic or happening at all. They're being replaced whether they bury their head in the sand or not.
>Their cultural identity isn't defined very tightly at all by who their parents were.
Of course it is, just like it is in Japan. Your common ancestry and common ancestral grounds are core attributes of what we call ethnic groups.
>This is not universally true in the country, of course, and some of the larger political fights are over this notion.
As covered above, it's true whether one side believes it or not. No doubt it's become a large political fight from what I've seen. I agree with you there.
>If Japan feels much more strongly that ancestry matters profoundly, well, that's going to be a rub for them moving forward.
We do. Many countries in Asia and around the world do, which is why many of them (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) are ethnically homogeneous.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
But I'm not really interested in tugging on this thread because it's extremely tedious to argue definitions of words in a language where the dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.
> They're being replaced
You can't replace a culture via immigration that has, as a cornerstone, "Come join us." That's like saying the population of a school has been "replaced" because it graduated an entire generation of students and a new generation is there now. The relevant continuity is unchanged.
One way out for Japan would be to shift their cornerstones. If that's not on the table, if a younger generation unserved by the status quo can't find a way to put it on the table... Good luck.
Yes, because it's apt.
>I don't think it means what you think it means.
We both know exactly what it means and it's clear that its aptness bugs you.
>But I'm not really interested in tugging on this thread because it's extremely tedious to argue definitions of words in a language where the dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive.
I'm not interested in it either, but it's clear: the definition and proscriptive usage doesn't suit your narrative.
>You can't replace a culture via immigration that has, as a cornerstone, "Come join us."
Yes you absolutely can. If you replace the "come join us" leftist people with ISIS, surprise surprise, you've been replaced. QED.
>That's like saying the population of a school has been "replaced" because it graduated an entire generation of students and a new generation is there now.
This is a hilariously not well thought out example because it actually proves my point. Yes, if you replace the population of a school with a different ethnic group, you're replacing the original ethnic group. This is like saying if the trout population in a stream goes down, and you replace the dwindling population with salmon, "the relevant continuity [of fish] is unchanged." You've kept the fish population the same, but you replaced the trout with salmon (who are not native there). Thanks for proving my point. QED.
>One way out for Japan would be to shift their cornerstones.
Or maybe Japan doesn't need "a way out".
>If that's not on the table, if a younger generation unserved by the status quo can't find a way to put it on the table... Good luck.
Homogenous nations will do fine, even if they upset your IMMIGRATION and unlimited capitalism pyramid scheme Gods.
Not to unlimited growth capitalist, no. Culturally and as a people they're doing fine.
>Meanwhile those nations that embrace newcomers of all kinds are doing significantly better.
No they are not. Japan is perfectly fine without trucks of peace, grenade attacks, and gang assaults on women.
Yes, replacing. You're replacing native Ainu with foreigners. That is by definition replacing.
The logic is 100% consistent.
I know you probably like to use all of these things as fanciful metaphors to support your argument that "natives" (white people or the Japanese) are now being "replaced" by (incidentally Black and brown) immigrants but these weren't metaphors, these were the real deal. By alluding to these things as metaphors you're masking the real scale and character of these historical atrocities.