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No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn't way higher
This. I think there's so much to love about Japan, especially the cultural leaning towards doing everything with respect, dignity, and skill.
But the megacorpos definitely won in exploiting that, and the general social pressure revolving around workplace culture there is genuinely terrifying to me.
As a US person, our corporate-brainwash culture is awful too, but I'm glad we're seeing bigger working class pushes to tell our employers "Go kick rocks. My family is more important."
It's got nothing to do with megacorps, that's just run of the mill Japanese culture/society.
America has a individualist culture. Thats why we have unions and stuff (for now, anyway..) and don't have to blow our bosses ego until 11pm every night.
Japan has a very..conformity driven culture. You conform to expectations around you, or you get ostracized heavily and treated like an outsider.
Which is a big driver for this kind of "I ahve to work till 5, then drink with my boss/coworkers until midnight, because if I dont I'll lose my job and be ostracized" stuff.
There's a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.
I think I like the premise a bit more than the show. Zom 100 is about a kid who starts a soul crushing office job only to become the happiest guy alive after the zombie apocalypse starts and he realizes he doesn’t need to go to work anymore.
Give them some days off.
You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
I don't think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate
Which is why, in the U.S., the rich are turning back abortion rights and access to birth control, and gutting our public education. They could, instead, work to build a country where people felt safe, and supported--healthcare, jobs with decent wages, education, etc.--but the filthy rich are psychopaths who care only about themselves, and will do nothing that costs them money, power, and control. Instead, they'll GLADLY watch the people (people they depend, incidentally, for what good is power and control, if there's no one to wield it over?) suffer at great levels in attempts to achieve their goals.
It takes a lot of poor people to make one filthy rich person.
Babies are expensive and time consuming to develop into useful serfs. The US is not yet hitting most of the consequences from low birth rates because it’s balanced out by immigration. As long as they keep encouraging and welcoming immigration ….
Well-said. They don't see people as people, they see them as farm stock plotted on spreadsheets that they can manipulate by pulling levers.
And happiness just isn't a variable they would ever think of pulling a lever to increase. In fact I suspect they see a lack of it as an effective motivator, as long as it's managed properly through division and distraction, and those desperately upset little data points don't start assembling guillotines.
I mean, any system collapses if you don't have the people to actively participate in it.
I'm not saying that as a defense of capitalism, more so as pointing out how dumb your comment is.
Lets see how China handles it down the road before we mark this one a problem of one specific system, rather than just humans seemingly sucking in sustainable long term planning on large scales in general.
China is also capitalist though, and they're also starting to suffer from the same issue.
No, China is Communist, it says so right in their name.
/sarcasm
No lie, you a funny guy
Its not capitalism that causes the over leveraged ponzi scheme, its the lender of last resort they call the Bank of Japan.
In a capitalist lending system you wouldn't get bailed out for making risky loans, so there wouldn't be the moral hazard, or the heightened cantillon effect to profit off debt accumulation.
The national pyramid scheme
Well, if you prioritize shareholder growth, before Support of children and make sure people have to work super hard to be able to sustain themselves and can't afford to have a family.... Then you should not be supervised that you don't have any babies in the country
I believe Japan has less inequality than the US. Not sure on that, but I think it's true. I think in this case we see work culture playing a role. The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan. No one has time to even think about having kids when you are a company man there. It's similar in the US.
This is why we need to do something now. Japan has been unable to offer enough of the right incentives to turn their birthrate around so how do we do any better? Act now. They waited until they had a problem before trying to turn it around and it hasn’t worked. Social and economic inertia is very difficult to turn but maybe if we start now, we can have different results. Japan never had much immigration to fall back on but we can use that to buy more time. We have a chance as long as we keep encouraging and welcoming immigration…… shit
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan.
China too.
Even as economist talk about the Lost Decade (really, two decades) in Japan, the unemployment rate has always been relatively subdued compared to the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUN25TTJPA156N
From about 1.7% in 1990, and then two spikes that just about reach 5.0% in 2002 and 2009. Not only that, but that's the range for people 25-54 years old, which isn't equivalent to the headline number typical in the US. There is an equivalent in published US data, and you can see it's much higher and spikier than Japan:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000060
This doesn't mean everything is OK for the working class in Japan. Housing prices are astronomical, requiring 100 year multi-generational loans. Working culture is also far more stressful. However, I think it's fair to ask who the "Lost (two) Decades" is really affecting.
requiring 100 year multi-generational loans
This is the first I've heard of this and the fact that it's real is insane to me.
I live and work in Japan, and it definitely is not a very condusive environment for younger Japanese people to have children. My wife and I are both foreigners, and we are in out late 30's and just had our first. The country has some really great benefits and support services for having children, but we definitely would not be able to do this if we worked for Japanese companies, and with the Japanese work mentality.
While it IS getting better, work being the central pillar of life and the expectations from the older generations are still very much a thing. The long hours of paper pushing, the culture of promotion based on age and time served rather than innovation and hard work takes a toll on people. If you are not living in the office in your 20s to show your dedication, you are looked down upon, at least accoridng to my Japanese friends.
Immigration could help fix some of this. Japan is a desireable, largely affordable country, that is safe when it comes to raising children. Living here as a foreigner though has specific challenges, and your job prospects are pretty poor unless you are lucky, and access to housing and just general living can be challenging, even if you can speak Japanese.
I just got a new job in Kyoto, and I currently live in Tokyo. I would say around 40% of the houses we applied to look at would not even let us see the properties because we are foreigners. That's 100% legal and totally ok to say here, and I take that in stride. In Australia (where I am from), they would either just tell you to piss off, or show you the property knowing you don't have a chance, so at least they are upfront about it here I guess. Getting a credit card is a massive ordeal, which you kinda need here because debit cards are increasingly hard to find, and they don't even work for all bills and systems, and getting a bank account ... it all just snowballs.
Also anything outside of the major cities is kinda dead. I love it, but living and thriving there in places that have more space that would probably promote having big families, is nearly impossible, or at least impossibly boring. This is not unique to Japan, Australia is largely the same outside of the main cities.
Not sure what the fix is. But annecdotally I see these articles all the time, and yet there are kids and younger families always around, so not sure if it is as serious as they are saying, or more media hype?
I've always had this silly dream of running a large, wealthy tech company, and attempting a startup in Japan, not reliant on business with other Japanese companies, that promotes a healthier work culture, and then stuffs the high productivity results in the faces of other companies. As a stretch goal, it could even locate out in the burbs, with an investment in better infrastructure access.
Japan has so many great things about it, but the major points around banking, sexism, and seniority really twist the image.