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Comment by flamethrower123 | Hacker News Reader

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Okay so which specific cultural religious and ethnic backgrounds are causing trouble and what empirical evidence do you have of this happening on a large scale? It can take many generations for immigrant family to assimilate into the host country's culture, how do you know they are there to conquer and not just taking time to assimilate? Why do you think only Japanese people can take care of Japan, do you hold this belief for other countries?

If you broadly link the flavors of Christianity practiced in Russia and the evangelical side of the US I guess you could make a claim about white Christians causing a lot of trouble worldwide with military attacks on other countries...

Go back to countries in the same religious/ethnic tree meddling in the Middle East in the early and mid-20th-century and you can link back a whole host more problems to white Christians!

But the southern evangelical side of my family gets pretty upset whenever I point that out...

A nice history lesson and each religion has its extremists. Not for nothing that we had the crusades. We live here and now, though. We can learn from history, but need to judge how people behave today, and who is causing the issues where we live.

If I were to guess, I'd guess it's Islam. I come from a region where we have a sizeable Muslim minority, and hardly a day goes by without some outrage or the other which hurts their sensibilities (ban calls for prayers? ban praying in the middle of the street during rush hour? serve bacon/ham in school lunches? etc. etc.); regardless of the fact that people have lived this way for millennia, and Muslims just showed up in the last few decades, but insist on bending the rest of the society to their norms.

I live in a region that has a lot of Christians and they constantly try to bend the local laws to follow their religious views, even where it could violate provincial and federal law. They have caused human rights issues in our local government. Is it fair that they do this just because they immigrated here a long time ago instead of fairly recently?

> Okay so which specific cultural religious and ethnic backgrounds are causing trouble and what empirical evidence do you have of this happening on a large scale?

Feigning to not know, is knowing.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not going to go guessing what the OP meant, if you want to have a good faith discussion about something then you need to be specific. Anyone can make vague claims about people causing trouble, its meaningless.

You're not going to get a serious reply. It's a fresh account, and their other comment is just "The immigrants create a lot or trouble.".

The truth unfortunately just doesn't matter much these days.

Folks read stuff online by people and just take it as fact without bothering to ask the simple questions that you have.

Since only 3% of Japan is foreigners, it can hardly be large scale.

The ones in the news lately are the Kurds which the police can’t touch because of some asylum law running various scrapyards, and the Vietnamese car theft gangs.

> even if that means I will never be able to be accepted there

You need Japanese blood (visibly), culture (language, manner, custom), and nationality to be "fully" accepted. This isn't new and has more to do with Japanese people themselves than with any legal restriction.

I am fully aware of that.

Alternatively, we need 30% of the population to be foreign.

This sounds like social media driven hysteria. No evidence. No statistics. Just vibes pushed by those with a political axe to grind.

The same people are predicting sharia law in NYC any day now.

Can you name which backgrounds you/Japanese people are talking about?

What confuses me is that Japan is not a very immigrant-heavy country. There's no chance of someone who doesn't represent the interests of native Japanese people being elected any time soon, or ever. So why can't they pass laws codifying the behaviors they want to encourage and ones they will treat as non-assimilation? Why aren't they doing something to address misbehavior directly, making newcomers to the country prove their long-term commitment to their new social and cultural environment, or punishing infractions more harshly so bad actors can't stay in the country? Why are the only two options available to them 'do nothing' or 'blanket punish all foreigners because all foreigners are trouble'?

It is part of Japan being Japan. Japanese being Japanese.

Japan is a shame based culture. A lot of social norms are encoded as part of being Japanese and not strictly enforced. Japan has less lawyers per capita compared to US for example.

Take a look at a lot of the influencers that are causing trouble in Japan. In the US we probably bludgeon (or shoot) those people on the spot and lawyers talk later, but Japan doesn’t do that, not even their police. Majority of Japanese just sit there silently but deep inside filled with disgust.

Besides, once these laws are implemented, soon it will be obvious which groups are “targeted” and it doesn’t look good in the eyes of the international world.

I know that Japan is a lot more implicit in enforcing its culture. But it is not a country that runs on honor alone. It has police, it has prisons, it has courts. The lawyer comparison doesn't tell me much because the US is a very litigious country in ways that go far beyond individual criminal law.

Besides, the implication you made is that a lot of the actions people don't like are already illegal, just not tightly enforced. Especially if you say Americans would shoot the perpetrators on the spot.

Even if they wanted to protect their status quo, they could only apply stricter requirements on residents who haven't received their citizenship yet. Law-abiding immigrants in many countries are used to having to clear higher bars than locals. But at least in this case this would be equitable, only punishing the people who actually do something wrong instead of everyone.

Lawyers per capita results from a structural legal system difference not a "shame" difference. It has adversarial influences but is much less a lawyer-theatrics-dominated adversarial civil-jury-trials-for-all-sorts-of-things free for all.

The US could avoid a lot of inefficiences if they adopted the same.

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