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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.

This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.

The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.

Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.

Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.

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The Japanese government, like France, doesn't keep track of ethnicity. That number means citizens and everyone just reports it as if it's ethnicity. You wouldn't be able to tell if some of them are half Korean or Chinese.

Tokyo in particular has a lot of immigrants these days, and I think you'd only notice if you read their nametags at the convenience store.

You don't get a Japanese passport easily in Japan so in fact yes it's easy to track the ethnic groups in Japan

Last year, less than 9,000 foreigners naturalized into a population of 123 million.

In order to naturalize, you must present a compelling case to do so: you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education, must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially, must have no criminal record in Japan or elsewhere, and nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen.

Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.

I said "half" for a reason, I wasn't talking about naturalized citizens but rather their descendants or people with part foreign ancestry. Zainichi Koreans are the main example I think.

It's not a lot more, but it's more than 2%.

If it doesn't drop below 88% then it's still higher than Finland and doesn't change my point at all.

I’m confused. If you are born and raised in Japan to at least one Japanese parent, you are Japanese.

Not to the kind of person who thinks Japanese people are genetically well-behaved.

> you must present a compelling case to do so

Nope. You must give a reason statement but it doesn't need to be compelling.

> you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education

Technically true but misleading - yes it's permitted to leave school at 14 in Japan, but very few children do.

> must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially

Up to a point. It's more "must have a household income equivalent to a minimum-wage full-time job, or equivalent lump sum assets, and not be behind on your taxes".

> nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen

What? No.

> Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.

Right, which is exactly what makes "less than 9,000 foreigners" a very misleading figure. Naturalisation gains you little compared to living as a foreign permanent resident, and requires renouncing citizenship, so most people don't.

For the overwhelming majority of people just becoming a permanent resident is more than enough - there's not a strong need to become a Japanese citizen vs. permanent residency outside of the right to vote, and for overwhelming majority, the trade-off isn't worth it.

But Japan is not a particularly difficult country to naturalize in if you so desire. The N1 can be studied for and passed without being fluent. Supporting yourself financially basically means having roughly full-time employment. No idea where you got the idea you need to be married to a Japanese citizen, not true at all.

> This is rarely talked about but is so important

> 98% ethically Japanese

In the million of these discussions I've seen, this is usually the first/only explanation people jump to. (moreso for people only superficially familiar with Japan).

I'm speaking more generally about all comparisons between countries. The US is constantly compared to the Nordic countries and people constantly wonder why they're so much better on axes like healthcare and education. Very little attention is given to the obvious explanation that it's easier to treat and to educate a relatively homogeneous population.

Strongly disagree. People jump to that when they see a healthy society that's relatively homogeneous, and ignore counterexamples like relatively homogeneous countries, or states within countries, that have poor education/healthcare/etc. It's a post-facto explanation with no predictive power, and people jump to it only because it's superficially obvious.

… In the 1980s, Ireland was _extremely_ homogenous. This was not a place that people came to, it was a place that people left. Today, 20% of the population was born outside the state, and Ireland has one of the highest immigration rates in the world.

Spoiler: The education and health systems in 1980 were _far_ worse than today. Like, really, there’s no comparison. They’re not exactly world leading now (in particular the health service has a constant staffing crisis) but they were really quite bad by European standards back then. When I started primary school in 1989 or so, there were more than 40 kids in my class; today there’s a cap of 30 and the average is 22 or so. Health, education, and social services were bad because we didn’t spend enough money on them.

Organisation and resourcing seem like more obvious causes of problems with US healthcare and education than _demographics_, tbh.

The numerous crime statistics in all other western countries very much back that up.

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