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Answerman - Why Is Japan's Population Declining?

Once again, I remain very skeptic about this being a reality. If U.S. and Chinese money is that important why haven't we seen much anime aimed American and Chinese sensibilities. Dimension W is the only example I can think of.

The decline in the size of the school-aged population sure isn't mirrored in most anime set in high school. There every classroom seems to have 25 or more students. Perhaps that's true in the urban areas where most anime takes place, but certainly not in rural Japan. Here's a story from The Guardian about declining school enrollments which mentions an elementary school in Aone whose enrollment has fallen from 254 at the end of World War II to just six students today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate

Around a third of countries have a sub replacement fertility rate some such as the USA and UK make up for this with high immigration rates.

Fertility rates are dropping world wide outside of Sub-Saharan Africa which is also the part of the world struggling to increase standards of living the most.

I'm sure from American TV most people from outside the US would think it all looks like New York or LA. When really a lot of the US is vast and empty.

Also, the immigration thing is a double-edged sword. Look at Singapore. To fix the declining birth rate problem, the government has been bringing in foreign workers (nay, foreign "talent") to help bolster the economy via their open-door foreign policy. Many people now feel alienated in their own country and are complaining because they are facing greater and greater competition from foreigners. Come to Singapore and you'll notice just how many workers here are non-Singaporean. The sense of ownership and social cohesion is slowly eroding away with an ever diluting culture.

Unfortunately it was also the reason that as the "Salaryman" had to work longer and harder, sometime being away from their wives, only seeing them once a week up to once a year, thereby only to have one child, what then grew up with a single parent with no contact with other children except in school and no one to explain social and cultural expectations to these lone children resulted in a growing population of shy, socially inhibited teens and young adults?

It's been mentioned on this site before, that kind of practice is some of the most backwards dogcrap I've heard in my life. You don't hear that from any other country.

For example:

-Tax cuts and other incentives for companies to relocate their headquarters out of the main urban areas of Japan.

-Providing people who are considering moving to the countryside the necessary living/job information to do so.

-The central government providing funds to localities who have produced concrete and sound plans for their own revivals.

Edmonton is a hotspot for immigration; People come here because of the usually (not specifically now but in general) strong economy and the affordable living costs and the openness of the community. Immigrants are encouraged to keep their identity but, also, are expected to assimilate socially and economically; This has happened right alongside the local cultural celebration being kept strong, not as a backlash against "dem foreigners" but as a natural desire to keep loving the things that have built us and what is considered local has evolved and embraced new things over the years.

Mixing not only happens but is expected of society; You are a weirdo if you stay locked up in your house of identity (race, religion, etc.), regardless of how you define yourself. It is normal to see people of all colours in all places and levels of society: University presidents, cab drivers, surgeons, convenience store owners, million-dollar business owners, clerks who ring up groceries.

Even when you leave the city, though the diversity numbers go down, it is still not considered an odd thing to see or know people of a different background.

The Japanese valued their cultures, foods and all that meant something to them by a long mile and having something that seemed alien to them will just caused panic and issues.

Yes there are racism, and that is just deplorable, but there are other side of the story. Many emigrants, especially Muslin communities just isolate themselves. They don't even try to integrate in European society and culture. The problem is even bigger with the second generation. They feel that they are alien to European society and hate their countries.

The same thing goes for immigration: you get the numbers up, but is what's there still Japan? When people immigrate, they bring their culture with them; what degree they assimilate depends on the compatibility of the two cultures and the effort put into making it work. Of course, the people usually demanding multiculturalism really mean they want mass importation of third worlders whose cultures they don't actually understand.

I wonder what's causing this. Whatever force it was that was leading people to have lots of children, what changed it?

Something I see complained pretty often is that the United States falls into three stereotypical locales: The Big Apple (Hollywood falls under this), the Wild West, and the Trailer Park. No doubt that's because these are the three most common settings for the United States in media.

The Japanese valued their cultures, foods and all that meant something to them by a long mile and having something that seemed alien to them will just caused panic and issues.

I bet you wouldn't say the same if Japan tried to push their ways and culture to others because, ya know, they so self-destructive and all that.

When said people are the ones killing and raping them, I don't see the issue. Not every culture welcomes in people who want to hurt them with open arms.

I'm not sure how someone can look back on 2016 and say that. All the racial tension, crime, poverty and violence we have is a result of being so diverse.

People of different groups have a hard time getting along.

If your argument is "diversity would be fine if people would stop being so resistant to change and more accepting" then it's a very weak argument because that is never going to happen. It's against human nature.

All the stuff America has been through this year would never happen in a country like Japan.

Mohawk52 wrote:

Unfortunately it was also the reason that as the "Salaryman" had to work longer and harder, sometime being away from their wives, only seeing them once a week up to once a year, thereby only to have one child, what then grew up with a single parent with no contact with other children except in school and no one to explain social and cultural expectations to these lone children resulted in a growing population of shy, socially inhibited teens and young adults?

That's strange. Around here, you have most parents working most of the day, oftentimes BOTH parents, with kids having little contact with other kids except in school with no one to explain cultural norms to, except lots of these kids grow to become rowdy, egocentric, drug-abusing, and oftentimes dangerous teens and young adults.

Paiprince wrote:

Another victim of the "multicultural" cool-aid...

There are pros and cons to immigration. For some countries it works well, in others not so much. It is not the answer for every country. There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. But acting as if immigration is INHERENTLY a negative thing in all cases is just as narrow-minded as claiming it is always a positive. Open your mind.

When they discuss immigration policy, especially when it applies to the influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslims to the West, pundits don’t necessarily exhibit a liberal bias, or for that matter, a left-leaning view of the world. How would John Locke, Adam Smith or Karl Marx respond to the current debate? My guess is as good as yours.

In fact, when they welcome immigrants, legal and illegal, from the Middle East and elsewhere, and blast the immigration restrictionists as bigots and racists, most Western policy intellectuals display what would commonly be described as the Whig interpretation of history.

According to Whig history, our societies have been moving in an almost linear fashion towards more advanced forms of enlightenment and liberty. Values like secularism, religious freedom, individual rights, women’s rights and free markets, representing the progressive future, were bound to overcome the reactionary forces of the past, represented by religious oppression, absolute monarchism, coercive government and backward-looking tradition, with liberal democracy being the culmination of this forward-looking process.

This view of the world derived in part from the ideas of the Reformation, which was seen as a central progressive force challenging the reactionary Catholic Church. So it was perhaps not surprising that while some of the leaders of the much-derided anti-immigration movement in nineteenth-century America known as the “Know-Nothings” were actually opposed to slavery, and supported extending more rights to women, they were also opposed to the immigration of Catholics into the country, believing that the followers of the pope and his illiberal traditions could end up halting the march towards progress.

The notion of a progressive or a liberal calling for restricting immigration would today sound mind-bending, if not a contradiction in terms. After all, notwithstanding the warnings from the Know-Nothings, the history of Catholic and, for that matter, Jewish immigration into the United States followed the Whig interpretation.

In fact, as political scientist Samuel Huntington put it, members of both religious groups as well as those of other non-Protestant branches followed the route of “Anglicizing” their religious practices and traditions and integrating themselves into the more secular and liberal environment of the country. They embraced what Huntington called the “American Creed,” which he regarded as the unique creation of a dissenting Protestant culture, with its commitment to individualism, equality and the rights to freedom of religion and opinion.

So from that perspective, the assimilation of these immigrants into American society could be integrated into a narrative of progress. They may have not been “like us” in terms of their view of the world when they had arrived into this country, which was why the Know-Nothings campaigned against them.

But then history proved that those who were opposed to the immigration of Catholics and Jews were wrong, playing the role of reactionaries in our forward-looking narrative. Today’s leading liberal pundits assign the role of villains to opponents of Muslim immigration, who are depicted as the modern-day Know-Nothings.

This Whig interpretation of history would recall how the children and grandchildren of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy or Poland, and those of eastern European Jews, abandoned their parents’ and grandparents’ archaic religious traditions and sense of religious particularism and ethnic tribalism. They have, indeed, become very much “like us,” and in some cases, more committed to the progressive American creed than members of old Protestant families from New England.

So why should we assume that Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia wouldn’t play the same role in the sequel to that movie? Presumably the same economic, social and cultural pressures that eventually helped Anglicize the Catholics and the Jews in this country would do magic for today’s Muslim immigrants. And those who don’t share that expectations are part of the reactionary past: angry old white men who cannot come to terms with the changing demographics of the country.

But these upbeat expectations assume that many things that may be wrong, including scientific and economic progress, and other forces of modernization like industrialization and urbanization, are so powerful that they force one to leave the traditions of the past behind to embrace liberal and secular forms of identity.

We are told to remember that the granddaughters of the families who emigrated from highly stratified, patriarchal and religiously oppressive Italy’s south now wear a bikini when they go to the beach. As do the granddaughters of the ultra-Orthodox Jews who immigrated to America from the shtetl in eastern Europe. Why shouldn’t that happen to the granddaughters of the Muslim immigrants from Egypt?

But wait a minute. Why do things seem to be happening in reverse in the case of many young Muslim immigrants in Europe and the United States? Their grandmothers, growing up in the 1950s in, say, Alexandria, actually looked “like us,” wearing the latest European fashion and a spiffy swimsuit on the beach. It’s their granddaughters who are now wearing veils, the hijab and the burkini to make sure that they don’t look “like us.”

That many Muslim immigrants resist playing the role assigned to them in the forward-looking narrative may be explained, in part, by the backward turn taken by many Muslim societies where, as in the case of Turkey, the Whiggish interpretation has been turned on its head. As forces of modernization like industrialization and urbanization have accelerated, these societies have actually started shredding what remained of the secular and liberal values that were embraced by many during much of the twentieth century.

Hence the contrast between the dramatic transformation of Western societies during the age of globalization and postmodernism, where the debate has moved to a point where same-sex marriage is now the law of the land in several countries, and the trend towards more oppressive religious standards, intolerance and tribalism in the Muslim world.

So while the liberal West has been opening its doors to Muslim immigration, shrinking Christian communities in the Middle East are being decimated and its members, facing a radical Islamic assault, are forced to leave countries where their ancestors had resided before the Arab invasion.

Liberals who adhere to the Whig interpretation of history face a dilemma. They cannot accept the idea that many Muslims living in the West, not unlike members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel and the United States, don’t want to be “like us,” and if anything detest the liberal and secular values that prevail in the United States and Europe.

Yet hanging to their liberal fantasy, policymakers and pundits accuse “Islamophobes” of wrecking progress and resist considering the inevitable: as these Muslim communities grow and expand, expect not only an end to same-sex marriage. Muslim citizens would then challenge other core principles of the Enlightenment, accusing bikini-wearing women of violating the changing standards of the community.

And as multiculturalism becomes a form of secular religion in the West, many liberals also try to deal with their cognitive dissonance by insisting on the preservation, if not the celebration, of regressive Muslim traditions, like the hijab. Liberal intellectuals, who spend much of their time denigrating evangelical Christians and warning of their plans to challenge the rights of women and gays, become apoplectic if someone dares to criticize Muslim traditions. Islamophobia!

Demonstrating the challenges liberals have in trying to keep their progressive narrative intact, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a self-styled feminist and a leading global promoter of multiculturalism, appeared recently at a gender-segregated event in a mosque, singing the praise of Islam on the main floor where only men were permitted, while women were watching Trudeau from the balcony.

“Right now we have these political leaders — ironically, politically liberal leaders — who are just putting blinders on their eyes about their values,” Asra Nomani, a liberal Muslim, told Canada’s National Post. “That’s the big differential for liberals, they fancy themselves as honouring the women’s body and yet the segregation by its very definition hyper-sexualizes women’s bodies. That’s the great irony.”

Perhaps not such an irony. As liberals like Trudeau discover that Muslim immigrants are not ready to become “like us,” they conclude that they are left with only one choice: to become more like them.

Leon Hadar, senior analyst at Wikistrat, a geostrategic consulting group, is the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.

Except no culture is inherently violent or intolerant.

.....No it's not you'd still have crime, poverty, & violence even without diversity. If you think a homogeneous society would be free from those ills you're being awfully naive.

If most of the U.S. shared this sentiment we'd still have blacks getting lynched for little reason other than being black, being separated from whites in various establishments, or crosses burned on their front lawns. Change happens good (and bad) and to throw your hands in the air over it based off of something so abstract and subjective as human nature is not really putting your best foot forward.

Everyone's comments has grimly reminded me of how moronic the human race has been over the years.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

Except no culture is inherently violent or intolerant.

All I'm suggesting is maybe before we try to force Japan to be multicultural we actually make it work for our country first. It would make for a stronger argument. So let's wait until people aren't being shot in clubs or rioting in the streets before we declare it a victory.

-Stuart Smith

Once again, I remain very skeptic about this being a reality. If U.S. and Chinese money is that important why haven't we seen much anime aimed American and Chinese sensibilities. Dimension W is the only example I can think of.

But we do have analytics which tell us the percentages and likelihood certain groups will do certain things.

So if someone wants to be more cautious then it's understandable. It's not even limited to Japanese. Asian Americans are less likely to commit crime than even white Americans.

Even in America you can find microcosms where the places with high diversity have higher crime rates than more homogeneous areas.

Lynching and segregation may be illegal but the hatred hasn't gone anywhere.

All I'm suggesting is maybe before we try to force Japan to be multicultural we actually make it work for our country first.

It would make for a stronger argument. So let's wait until people aren't being shot in clubs or rioting in the streets before we declare it a victory.

Stuart Smith wrote:

But we do have analytics which tell us the percentages and likelihood certain groups will do certain things.

Which can be skewed if not outright wrong?

.....You seem to be under the impression that Muslims in this country are going around shooting people in gay clubs at record numbers instead of treating it as unfortunate but rare thing.

Which can be skewed if not outright wrong? Out of curiosity, what constitutes "skewed"?

... I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Muslims are committing terrorism at record high - and increasing - rates.

And, to cut you off at the pass, it doesn't matter a damn whether they're anointed as "real" Muslims by the Progressive Society of Muslim Certification: they're still acting in the name of Allah. Refusing the acknowledge that this is jihad rather than random terrorism does nothing to stop it.

Muslims in this country aren't shooting up... or calling in bomb threats...