Probably not a good political move but he sure as hell is not wrong. Instead of allowing some immigration to help with their decreasing population, they chose robots.
I mean, is that a bad bet at this time in history?
Look at what’s going non there right now. It ain’t working for them, and they’ve been trying for decades. Recently the yen hit records low. Great for me to vacation there but not for them.
At the current rate, Japanese robots will be all that populate the country in like 150 years. Japanese racial purity will ensure the rest of the world won’t have to worry about their racism eventually 👍
Was playing the Yakuza games recently and was curious to the actual history of the organization. Learned some stuff about Japan in general along the way. Yikes. I wouldn’t say he is wrong on this one either.
He’s definitely not. They’re something like 97 percent plus “pure” there. Also discriminating against foreigners is perfectly legal and common anywhere not in a tourist area.
I seen some crazy videos on tiktok. Seems like certain younger Japanese play a harassment game trying to taunt foreigners to lay hands on them.
Yea cause the guvment is more likely to trust locals. That said, I spent a couple weeks there last year and it was great. I’m definitely going back in the near future.
They actually touch on this in Like A Dragon. One of your party members is a Korean Mafia member, who specifically fell in with the Korean Mafia because Koreans were (and generally still are) completely unable to attain citizenship - even if their family was transported to Japan against their will during WWII.
I mean, that’s arguably a bad move in terms of international relations and maybe he shouldn’t have said that, but…he’s also not really wrong. Japan’s demographic situation is serious, and the Japanese government has been trying to get the public to accept more immigration for a while and been running into friction.
To some extent, they can help mitigate an aging society with relatively-many retired people relying on relatively-few working people by trying to increase labor force participation, and I know that they’ve done that too – trying to get more women working and pushing back the retirement age:
https://hrmasia.com/japan-approves-law-raising-retirement-age-to-70/
Japan approves law raising retirement age to 70
But that can only go so far; having the total fertility rate as low as it is in Japan creates pretty substantial issues.
And it might be better to lead by example here. In the last few years our own total fertility rate has fallen as well. We do better there than pretty much all developed countries, but in general, if you’re going to run a lower total fertility rate, you’re gonna have to make up for it somehow.
We’ve had a history of running very high immigration levels compared to most countries, but we’re currently at a comparatively low level relative to our own history:
In the decade ending in 2020, we saw a lower population growth than any other decade in the history of the country, at 7.4%. Until 1870, there wasn’t a decade where we didn’t grow less than 30% in a decade:
https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html
IIRC some countries, like Canada and Australia are running higher per-capita rates.
googles
Yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population
15.4% of the US population is immigrant.
21.3% of the Canadian population.
30% of the Australian population.
For 2023:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_net_migration_rate
United States: 3.0 people per 1000 population in 2023
Canada: 5.4 people per 1000 population in 2023
Australia: 6.4 people per 1000 population in 2023
Some EU member states are also up there, like Belgium, but that’s due in significant part to internal EU population movement; it doesn’t deal with EU demographic issues in aggregate, if one is to deal with them in aggregate, as there’s also outflow of people from member states with low fertility, like Bulgaria. I kind of wish that Eurostat would start aggregating statistics for the EU as a whole on things like immigration and import/export numbers. They could publish those alongside the individual member state numbers, could do both at once.
If the US wants to increase the birth rate they should make this country one that’s worth bringing children into.
You’ll create slaves and you’ll like it.
The 1% are really asking for a French Revolution response here.
After many years of studying Japanese history, I’ve come to agree with the opinion that Japan has a culture of masochists ruled by sadists. Well, that’s pretty much the entire human species, but the Japanese especially so.
I’ve been learning a little bit about the Boshin War. At one point there was a group of teenage soldiers who thought they had lost a battle (they hadn’t) and so they killed themselves
Like, humans are largely masochistic, but Japan (especially before 1945) really cranked that shit up to 11
