Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

I've spent an awful lot of time in both Croatia and Japan, and the problem looks more or less the same in both places.

Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany.

Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from smaller cities and towns to Tokyo.

The end result is that small towns are, quite literally, dying. Small cities are emptying out. Rural regions are beginning to resemble retirement estates, complete with hobby farms.

The "solution" is immigration -- if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese, or a Lebanese man will become accepted as Croatian. I don't think that's going to happen in either place. In Croatia, I know a bunch of Chicagoans of Croatian descent who moved "back to the homeland." Nobody in Croatia accepts them as "real Croatians." They're going to be part of some expat community for life. It's going to be even worse with culturally distinct foreigners. And it's going to lead to trouble. If there's an elegant way to manage this, I'm not aware of it.

> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese

This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc. Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you don’t look ethnically Japanese you’ll never be accepted as Japanese. And that’s even if you are white and even if your partly ethnically Japanese. If you have dark skin you at in for an even tougher time, and any hint of it going back several generations will label you as “the outsider”.

It might not seem like it from the outside because the racism isn’t as outspoken in media as in the US, but imagine spending your entire childhood living with everyone you ever come across acting like you don’t belong to the only country and nationality you have ever known simply because your fathers father was Scottish, it’s rough and a hell on its own.

There are, quite literally, third and fourth-generation Korean-Japanese people who are still not considered fully Japanese.

The most famous example is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama

This guy is a fourth-generation Korean-Japanese athlete, but was still never considered Japanese by the Japanese fanbase, he was frequently booed and heckled, and he went on to compete under the S.Korean flag. And this guy's father and grandfather were born in Japan, and he looks ethnically indistinguishable from the Japanese.

It's pure fantasy that second-generation Indonesians or Filipinos are going to integrate into Japanese society. It's going to be extremely painful, if it's attempted.

For people who are looking for a book to read and also interested in learning about the immigrant life in Japan, I can highly recommend the historical fiction novel “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee. It follows the story of multiple generations of a Korean family that moves to Japan sometime after the Japanese annexation of Korea. It describes in detail the struggles mentioned in the above comment across multiple generations of Japanese who don’t have a home in either Korea or Japan. (Another example of such are immigrants from Pyongyang, and returning after the Korean War would mean going back to North Korea.)

They won't have a choice at some stage. The population is declining so rapidly, and they're struggling so hard economically they are, whether they like it or not,importing more and more immigrants and the truth is, they can be as racist as they like but it only worked when they had the clout to get away with it. It's less and less viable for them to continue on this trajectory. People might never be "accepted" but the face of Japan itself will likely be different in the future simply because they've failed to embrace change properly.

Visit Japan now and there are more and more Americans, Australian, Indian and Chinese working, buying property and setting up businesses there.

I'm not really celebrating any of this, I just don't see how an old and tired population can continue to put so much energy into xenophobia when literally one of the only things between them and China are the US military having a base on Okinawa.

China will very soon have exactly the same "old and tired" problems. What are they going to do, beat each other with clutches while being accompanied by their drip lines? And why?

I guess you're a Peter Zeihan fan?

I still think China will have a much larger army and navy than Japan. They have 10x the population and probably a similar decline in their populating expected.

Why would they want to beat up Japan? What's in it for China?

Immigration is not the solution. Identifying what policies make your nation an ecological sink where humans go to die childless is the solution. Immigration is a temporary solution that has negative consequences vs just having a birthrate above replacement and it only works as long as some place has a very high birthrate. Which is increasingly untrue as more countries catch the low birth rate disease pioneered in the first world.

>> The "solution" is immigration -- if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese, or a Lebanese man will become accepted as Croatian.

Obviously people are not fungible otherwise every country would look the same. If Croatians or Japanese want to preserve their culture, they will have to make their own babies, there is no way around it.

While I can understand that they would find this upsetting, how long ago did their ancestors leave ? Are you sure that this doesn't stem from them having been used to self-identify as (American-)Croatian, but which hardly corresponds to the evolution of Croatians since then ? Their assimilation might be even harder than for some other immigrants without Croatian ancestry, if they feel like they might be "owed" something ? (And that's not even starting with other potential issues, like being of a different class...)

Typically, first generation immigrants rarely fully assimilate (unless immigrating very young of course), it's their kids that will.

There are always groups. Even when your country is one race. The difference is just it will be eating their own people instead of having an 'other'.

Have to bare your own babies if you want your people, culture, or way of life to continue.

Transportation revolution. Cars that fly themselves at high speed. Superconducting maglev trains shooting between downtowns and between suburbs. Cutting the distance is the only way to expand and combine low cost of living with economic density.

Totallly fine for a Ukrainian woman to become Miss Japan: https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/ukrainian-born-miss-japan-...

With both Japan and Ukraine leading in depopulation, no amount of population swapping between them will save either one.

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