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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

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'?

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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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