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Comment by lgkk | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Tucker Carlson from what he said on all in podcast about Japan.

Yes the population decline is alarming but does slowing growth really matter when you have a strong culture?

I don’t believe the solution to their problem is importing random people who share nothing in common with their culture.

The Japanese should be able to maintain their culture and I am sure they will bounce back. They owe it to nobody to radically change their culture to appease some number crunchers.

And I say this as an immigrant to US. I’ve been to Japan and it’s just quite amazing.

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Being anti-emigration seems to be winning in the minds of pretty much every rich nation right now. But it is just bad policy:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83

People said the same thing about the Irish and the Italians in the US. It was wrong & racist then and it is wrong & racist now.

A population that consists of more retired elders than workers is a problem. There are no automated retirement homes and more medical workers are needed as well.

> Yes the population decline is alarming but does slowing growth really matter when you have a strong culture?

Wtf is "strong culture"? I guarantee your answer would be different than Tucker Carlson's because he never intended it to be defined. It's just a fake term he made up because, in the heads of his mindless listeners, it invokes the idea that some cultures are superior, but deliberately with no criteria to define it.

First, Japan's entire history is a story of radically changing their culture. Adaptation and cultural syncretism is the norm, not the exception.

Also, the vast majority of immigrants to Japan will always be from other Asian countries. It seems like a stretch to assume none of their neighbors (from whom Japan adapted much of their own culture) share anything in common with them.

But of course, this isn't about Japan. It never is. This argument is always an orientalist proxy for Western xenophobia and racial prejudice. A polite way to say "I don't like the brown people in my country who speak a different language and worship strange gods, wouldn't it be nice if we could be more like the noble Japanese, who are willing to fall on their katanas and go extinct rather than suffer the impurity of foreign blood?"

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