Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past (2023)
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I've read travelogues from the 17th-19th centuries, and in a lot of them, all of the countries are described like Japan. "Look at these weirdos, they insist on ______!" A tourist going from France to Italy would be constantly amazed, offended and puzzled. No longer.
It's a weird thought for me to have. I'm not a conservative; I view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives. But it feels like most of the world that doesn't have those things is increasingly homogeneous, in a way that's also uncomfortable to see.
I'm much younger than these Gen Xers and Millenials, but it feels like Japanese style cultural impact is much larger now than "western style".
Heck, KWave, KDramas, and Manhwa are heavily based on Japanese JPop, JDramas (the GOTO back in the 2000s before Sony made licensing expensive), and Manga.
> view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives
Japan has also changed a LOT demographically over the past 20-30 years - before foreigners were mostly Zainichi or Taiwanese plus a smattering of Chinese illegals, but now you have 2-3% of the population from ASEAN, China across all economic stratas, Koreans from Korea, etc but they all look "Japanese"
Particularly for young people - Japanese cultural impact at the time was intense. Arcade gaming basically emerged from Japan - 8 of the top 10 biggest arcade games ever were Japanese. Then home video gaming - first with Nintendo and later others. The Sony walkman was a cultural phenomenon - as ubiquitous and valued as mobile phones are now for 1980s teenagers. Manga comics started appearing in western comic book shops and Kurosawa movies in arthouse cinemas. Japanese branded VCRs represented a revolution - the earliest on-demand system for consuming movie/TV media - and was embraced by the youth of the time.
And that's just then influence on the kids, in the adult world, Japanese car brands destroyed the US and Euro competition, home consumer electronics were almost exclusively Japanese. Japanese massive positive trade balance of payments meant they were forced to invest outside of Japan which resulted in a massive buying spree.
It's the same everywhere. We are now stuck in the world where the formula is of A or B.
Android vs Apple
Intel vs AMD
Sony vs Nintendo
Microsoft vs Linux
Firefox vs Chrome
For any technology that has a third party has a very little mindshare.
Not only does this make innovation hard. How? When only the same two contenders continue to dominate the market and have newr-infinite resources.
"let us buy you out, or we'll make our own"
tho how much is corporate shenanigans and how much is power law of company size, idk
https://blog.archive.org/2019/01/28/the-world-as-they-saw-it...
Homogenization doesn't seem to happen until either some sweeping administrative body insists on it, or (unique to modernity) a specific culture's media successfully and pervasively inserts itself between people and local/inherited traditions.
Most people didn't leave their local area, the need for a unified language was extremely limited compared to modern society. Dialects developed because interaction was so low, so you could easily hear which part everyone came from, today all of that is evening out over time. Go a few hundred miles and people use different words even if it is the same language and people would have a hard time understanding each other.
So, when there's more cultural exchange and less isolation?
When thinking about this cynically, I feel like this has some depressing ramifications. Cultural differences (and isolation) are often born from financial disparities as well. Does this mean that the path to global cultural homogeneity is basically just gentrification on a massive scale where economic -> cultural minorities get more and more ostracized?
What level of "isolation" forms that threshold though? We're nowhere near a single worldwide religion, for example, which is odd because it's the most existential of cultural beliefs.
We have neoliberalism, at least
I think what makes it different this time is that we are using science to find the best culture. "How should we behave towards each other for the best possible outcome?" If a certain culture is clearly and demonstrably better, then that will lead to everyone adopting it.
Democracy might also be part of it, as in authoritarian states the person in power wield such a an outsized influence that their personal whims and fancies can turn into culture.
For example, most people in the world, nowadays, send their kids to school and use smartphones. And even though Putin, Xi and Western leaders may not be friends, they wear basically the same professional attire.
200 years ago, there would be much fewer common cultural traits.
Toshi would tear down his local shrine and import the third world because it's better than having some Judeo-Christian reporters call them names?
The cultural and ethnic shifts happening are happening because banks, governments, and CEOs see it as being in their own interest. More working hands, more mouths to feed, more votes for their party. None of it has ever been natural and none of it is to our benefit
He would have if those foreigners were similar in numbers to the Japanese, rather than being a minute minority.
The result depends on the ratio. I don't see why we can't have trade and relations with other countries without also assimilating eachother
throwing foreign people into a country without them adaption the culture is not reviving that country but changing it which on a longer time scale is the same as that country (read culture) dying. nobody would claim old empire are still alive because on there rubble a country stands today.
Having a sovereign language has allowed it to avoid so much brainrot in our culture today.
それは、翻訳行為が高価である限りにおいてのみ機能します。
(That 'free' is also 'mediocre quality' does not help when the problem is 'brain rot': viral memes still be viral)
Not that your point isn't actually a good one - we do now often see the worst of US-made culture war toxoplasma (in all stages of its lifecycle) being imported wholesale into European cultures where it is barely relevant to local circumstances, which I would squarely blame on sufficient English skills and superior production value of anglophone politics.
I kinda assumed so — I kept changing the English until the English-Japanese-English round trip translation wasn't wildly wrong, but the fact I had to says how far Google Translate has to go before it's actually good.
California & San Francisco: All of their problems are foreshadowing what is going to happen in other parts of the US; all of their strengths are also coming to other places.
Even within San Francisco, is Valencia St the future or past of tony Chestnut St?
When you think about bad shit happening, and then how we only seem capable of reactive, rather than proactive politics, seems obvious. Problems have to become catastrophic before anyone deals with them, and all the problems left are the ones are small, but growing.
The biggest difference was the US was able to leverage white collar immigration to develop a substantial lead in the computing industry by the mid-90s.
SK is probably going to hit a similar bust like Japan's soon (they're basically following the same cycle as Japan except with a 25-30 years lag)
Every country can chart its own way. South Korea is both more healthy innovation wise and less healthy demographically, right?
In Neal Stephenson book Seveneves the technology of a future is in a few small ways described as weirdly un-advanced compared to the present. I wouldn't describe it as the focus of the book but it still seemed particularly implausible to me but ... I hadn't really thought about Japan. I've never been but I've read that in a few ways technology (fax machines were (are?) still popular just a few years ago) is weirdly retrograde.
That said for potential readers of Seveneves - as with all Stephenson's book it needed an editor to keep him in line. The second half was no where near as good as the first. There were plausibility problems with the technology used throughout the book. Also it was really a lot of fun and I have to admit that I enjoyed reading it.
And yep, I like to think of Seveneves as 3 books in a big trench coat where the first 2 are fantastic and I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone that likes some solid sci-fi.
"Older" is a relative measurement of time, but doesn't say anything about the marginal benefit or cost.
An example of your question I see from Japan relates to payment systems. People often critique Japan for its cash-oriented systems and have also observed the difficulty that digital payment systems have had in gaining traction in Japan... an example for why digital payment systems have had poor adoption is the existence of earlier, well-adopted solutions that provide many of the same benefits in the majority of practical scenarios (i.e. stored value IC cards: Suica/Pasmo/etc.). In cases like this, the "newer" and supposedly better technology doesn't provide as large of a marginal benefit. They already solved much of the problem.
I don't think the fax machine or floppy disk anecdotes are by themselves evidence of any larger trend – most countries I'm familiar with have both systems firmly stuck in the past as well as those that have kept up with time.
A good part of the "stuck in the past" technologies are probably nothing much other than "first-mover disadvantage" (where organizations just stick with the first iteration/solution to a given problem and grow so used to that specific implementation that it's never quite worth it to adopt what would now be state of the art).
The demographic "leveling off" is inevitable. Until that point is reached, however, favorable demographics can partially offset pyramidization. The US population is still growing (largely through immigration) so it has not reached the endgame stage like Japan and parts of Europe have.
The pyramidization game works by artificially restricting urban housing supply more and more over time. If everyone reacted by buying instead of renting, the game would always end in a 2008-style crash, when the pyramid's bottom-most layer finds itself under water with no further buyers to push it up.
Instead, with renters in the picture, housing prices rise until rents equal the maximum amount of income that can be extracted from renters. This keeps the bottom-most pyramid layer just afloat.
At the equilibrium point, economic growth is stunted. The "working segment" of the population is trapped by rents and mortgages, and cannot take chances. The "housing baron segment" tends to underfund productive investments like the stock market, with real estate looming large on their books. The government has to allocate a lot of resources to the budget effects and stabilization requirements caused by the real estate system, including indirectly via the banking system.
Anyway, everyone will have their own experience, and I haven't been in Vietnam since before the pandemic, but last time I was there (4 cities and a few out of town trips), while I had OK connectivity, I wasn't blown away by it vs Japan or other places. I'd take Japanese traffic safety and street sanitation over Vietnam every day of the year though.
The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed
And when in Vietnam was it via Vintel [EDIT: Viettel - doh I need my noon coffee]?
Vintel, yes. I also noticed free wifi at restaurant and cafes were much faster in Vietnam as well.
D1 and D3?
And yea Vintel [EDIT: Viettel - doh I need my noon coffee] makes sense - they're the military monopoly on telecom in Vietnam.
Vintel was always slow for me, but they were also trying to MITM and my setup was always evading that.
Who was your mobile operator in Japan?
Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34475915
# The Rise and Fall of Japan's Economy - Can it Recover?
Economic stagnation is preferable (and has better solutions anyway), the only ones to gain from immigration are foreigners that hate you, your way of life, and some fat cats that hate you ten times more
The kind of guy who enjoyed Japan in the 80s or 90s probably isn't the kind of guy listening to modern J-Wave, watching Anime, or digging into METI and the ADB's Flock of Geese strategy.
Instead of mimicking and pastiching western culture like back in the 80s and 90s, Japanese subcultures now merge the west and Japan in a more imo mature and self assured manner.
Also, Japan has absolutely become more diverse compared to 20 years ago - before the foreign population was fraction of a percent, but now it's reached 2-3% - most of whom are from all across Eastern and Southeast Asia.
Japan has been developed now for a generation, so there isn't much of a pull to leave Japan and evangelize within America - especially when Japanese firms have a much stronger market position in ASEAN and India. Same thing will happen to Korea in 10-15 years.
A friend was telling me the first time they moved to the U.S. to work in Silicon Valley, they were expecting some sort of high tech glassy utopia. “It’s just suburbs” they said with a frown, “and San Francisco was a grimy disappointment as well.”
Most of the U.S. doesn’t even look as nice as the Bay Area. It’s mostly the same suburbs minus the wealth, nature, and sunshine. The buildings and infrastructure and in many cities are decades old by now. What exactly does it mean to have the highest GDP if it doesn’t reflect in your daily life and surroundings?
I read that people in Japan tend to travel some of the least in the world outside their own country despite their amazing passports, and most will say it’s because they’ve got everything they need right there. Perhaps relentless economic growth shouldn’t be the goal—rather, building something nice for the society you live in and keeping that way should be.
Next, the relentless capitalism has squeezed every last penny from every inch of life (for the good and bad). Parking 20 Dollars an hour, concert tickets 400 bucks, hospital visit 100k. You need a lot of GDP to keep up.
the US economy is one of the (if not the, depending on who you ask) strongest economy in the world - and we're not talking military economy.
To pretend otherwise is simply naive. Mississippi, the poorest US state, has both higher GDP Per Capita and GDP PPP Per Capita than most of Europe, much less the world.
But in practice what happens is that Americans would simply stop buying so many cars from you, and then Carlandia's economy would start to tank. But there's a simple solution. Carlandia intentionally starts to devalue its own currency, precisely to maintain stable trade levels. So they do precisely this, as do other nations around the world. But as prices around the world start to normalize the inflation disappears, but the money we printed doesn't. So this gives us the freedom to print money and have it disproportionately end up being "real" as opposed to just inflationary, as it would be for most other nations. So you basically get a 'print GDP' button.
But this is also a liminal state of affairs. Not only is the world going multipolar but other economies are growing much faster than ours meaning are gradually losing dominance in terms of being a key market target. If we're not able to export inflation and demand/dominance of the dollar starts to slide, then things are going to get rocky, fast.
>If we're not able to export inflation and demand/dominance of the dollar starts to slide, then things are going to get rocky, fast.
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To answer this question, I think it's important to answer another question. Why can't a country just print their way to economic growth? Why can't Columbia, for instance, just print trillions of dollars worth of Columbian pesos, spend it, and become an economic superpower next year? The reason is that the prices of things is little more than a balance between supply and demand. If you increase demand a bunch (by giving people lots of money that they now want to spend on all sorts of things) but supply stays the same then all you do is send prices skyrocketing and create general economic chaos.
So normally to see "real" economic growth you need to increase your supply of things while also simultaneously increasing consumption, so you don't just result in over-production and plummeting prices. And this is really hard to do. But for the US we don't really have this problem. We were able to print money, and have that inherently result in an increase is supply as other countries weaken their currency to keep pace with the now weakened dollar.
This is a superpower. This is why as other countries now bicker over what will replace the dollar, nobody wants any single country in control of the global currency. It's simply far too powerful - both as a weapon and as a tool for "unfair" economic growth. Incidentally this also happened in the past. We had a global system setup in place to prevent the US from dominating global economics called Bretton Woods. [1] The USD was exchangeable, at a fixed rate, to gold by other governments. So if the US ever started printing an excessive amount of money, other countries could collect the weakened currency and exchange it for a bunch of gold, making a bunch of profit and also effectively punishing the US in the process.
So in 1971 exactly this happened with the French trying to trade in dollars, which had been quite recklessly printed since the 60s, for gold. But Nixon chose to default on our obligations and completely withdraw from the Bretton Woods Agreement. This led to a great quote from the time that "The dollar is our currency, but your problem." from Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. This was almost immediately followed by setting up the Petrodollar in 1973, where oil would only be traded in USD - simultaneously allowing the US to start printing an arbitrary amount of dollars, but also ensuring it would remain the global reserve currency, by making it impossible to access oil without it.
So basically our modern economic system began in 1971, and you can see it as a huge inflection point for all sorts of issues related to the economy. [2] It resulted in tremendous growth, but also lots of problems. And once the dominance of the dollar ends, so will this era of economics.
Without challenging that the high GDP of the US may be an outcome of its hands-off attitude towards capital return and wealth concentration, it's not really the world leader for making sure its people are healthy and well in proportion to it.
"How to destroy innovation and ensure monopolies take over your economy."