
Poverty in Japan - robk
http://japaneseruleof7.com/poverty-in-japan/
======
g09980
I've lived in Japan, and I love Japan for all its charms. Westerners
definitely romanticize it, but day-to-day life for local people isn't all
roses. Something brings one to reality when you see raggedy old men vomiting
outside Pachinko parlours, the scantily clad "massage" women shivering in zero
degree weather, or the mentally ill muttering to himself while bumping into
the walls at the conbini. Aging population, high rate of alcoholism, difficult
work culture, and untreated mental illness are some things you don't see on a
postcard, but they are real.

~~~
kurthr
It is a pleasantly polite (but unarmed) society, and one of the most foreign
for an American to visit even though parts of it (cars, shops, buildings) may
look the same. The dichotomy between the surface familiarity and utter
cultural (and language) difference is what makes it so wonderfully bizarre!
Since I know people who work in the hospitality industry I don't romanticize
it, but it's not a horror either. There are crazy places like tourist Roppongi
and other red-light districts, but it is still really safe even in the least
well of parts of town (so much better than sketchy parts of LA/NY).

It's also changing. I only really started regularly seeing random (not
artistic) graffiti around 2010... and that's after visiting for almost 20
years. Certainly, I've known about poverty in Japan (mostly seen in Tokyo)
since the late 90s and 2000s bust. The late 80s boom/bust priced a lot of
people out of housing and they've been slowly cut out of the workforce as
well.

The kids really started changing in the 90s and by the 2000s a lot of the
creatives were wearing t-shirts and tennies to work, which was a huge change
(although some traditional places still wear uniforms today). They've (as a
cohort) changed some of the norms of work and life (not getting married or
having kids!), but have also hidden themselves in weird little sub-cultures
(anime, videogames, shopping, karoshi).

I should know what's going on in Japanese social media, but I really don't.
Anyone have comments on that? It can't be as weird and twisted as Korea.

~~~
aikinai
I'm not familiar with Korea, but I don't think there's anything particularly
weird about Japanese social media. The obsession with privacy is eroding over
time, but still relatively strong. Mixi basically died and was replaced with a
combination of LINE, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Facebook is popular in some circles, but not nearly as active as in the US.
It's almost closer to LinkedIn, like your professional face (even if not
strictly about business like LinkedIn).

People often have multiple Twitter accounts for different purposes and it's
incredibly popular. Maybe the only country where Twitter's still growing?

Instagram use is basically the same as the US I'd say. It's helped erode the
privacy obsession, with more people posting selfies and such.

And LINE is the juggernaut being the primary social graph of Japan. It's the
default for one-to-one and group chats, and some people use the other features
like the wall-like feature, shared albums, etc.

~~~
selimthegrim
I really like LINE and wanted to use it but the only person I knew who used it
was my Mongolian coworker (I lived in Portland at the time) - everyone else
looked at me like I was nuts when I tried to talk it up.

~~~
kurthr
Yes... LINE is the communication protocol in Japan and some of Taiwan. I found
the use of much more involved emoticons/stickers interesting.

Outside of that WeChat is absolutely critical in China and everyone who needs
to work with China. However, not having a bank account in China makes using
many of the Wechat capabilities impossible.

------
rayiner
> Of course, if you saw it in your own country, you’d recognize it for what it
> was—people working their asses off, even well into old age, not out of some
> perverse industriousness, but simply because they’ve gotta eat.

Until we invent replicators, everyone’s gotta work to eat. Even folks on HN
are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that. What
people in the US admire about Japanese culture is their attitude to the work
they’ve got to do to survive. It’s not like folks in the US don’t have to work
to eat. But if you’ve ever been in an airport security line in both places you
can tell the difference.

~~~
RealityVoid
Not true for everyone though, is it? There are people that get the privilege
of existing without working anything. Besides, I say that the term you
mentioned for solving this issue, "until we invent replicators" makes it sound
like we are bound this way and could not solve this problem were that we
wanted to. No, I think that is not true, we simply don't want to and some of
us are rather concerned of the side effects of doing so. But I don't think
that this issue would be insurmountable, if we would want to fix it.

~~~
throwaway2048
The beliefs about replicators and transforming planets like mars are just a
futurist fantasy about how our problems will all be magically solved in the
wonderful future, its great escapism to avoid caring about real issues we
really can solve right now, and a very convenient dismissal if issues we can
address _right now_ with "The future will fix it"!.

Note, many of the people that don't need to work are extraordinarily wealthy,
hundreds of thousands of times over what would be required to lead a
reasonable life, their wealth bases usually built, directly or indirectly,
from the efforts of the same people that have to work until they are 70.

But yeah, in the future, somehow this arrangement will change into a magical
utopia, not a situation where those same wealthy horde an even more absurd
amount of power, while everyone else struggles to scrape by, or is just
discarded entirely in the face of cheaper and better automation that is owned
by the wealthier rentier class.

You see this callous disregard on HN every time an article about Uber or
Amazon treating their employees like shit, remarks to the effect of "they
shouldn't be complaining, cant wait till they are replaced by robots", and I
think its disgusting, but its a telling remark about how employees are going
to be viewed increasingly in the future.

If we don't even want to bother broaching the serious wide-cutting issues we
have _right now_ with poverty and inequality in our society, I fail to see how
the hell technology that effectively massively magnifies the economic power of
whoever can afford them the most will do anything but make the situation far,
far more dire.

~~~
woolvalley
I don't think the OP post was being serious about replicators. It was a geek
version of 'until money grows on trees'.

And then the next reply was saying we don't necessarily need replicators to
solve this problem.

~~~
throwaway2048
not all replies are a refutation or dispute with what was being said.

------
aikinai
Weird that this guy has lived in Japan for ten years, but he groups a bunch of
culture aspects in with his evidence of poverty. Preparing a lunch box,
recycling bath water for laundry, using kerosene heaters? These are just how
things are done in Japan, no matter how much money you have.

Maybe that's one of the cultural differences this author is missing. Most
people in Japan, even when they are far more wealthy than their neighbors,
still live exactly the same lifestyle.

~~~
norswap
Perhaps. Yet the other things he points out can't be explained away so easily,
so the point stands.

------
monkeypizza
Spike Japan is another well-written blog covering poverty & decay in Japan,
specifically Tokyo. It also has nice photos of things rusting.
[https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/](https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/)

~~~
monkeypizza
Sorry, it actually covers Hokkaido.

~~~
emodendroket
Poking around it seems like the older posts are about the Tokyo area and the
newer ones about Hokkaido.

------
nitwit005
> When I first moved from the U.S., it all seemed fantastically romantic. Old
> wooden houses without insulation? That’s “traditional culture.” A family of
> four in an apartment the size of an American kitchen? Efficient use of
> space.

I kind of have trouble parsing this post, as I'm not sure if it's the author's
own romanticizing of things, or someone Japanese is telling them this.

~~~
emodendroket
What he is saying is that when he first came to Japan he mistook the outward
signs of poverty for charming cultural quirks.

------
emodendroket
This really hits home for me. I spent a year in northern Japan when I was a
college student and of course I was just as oblivious as this guy was, just
thinking how nice it was that the service was so great everywhere. When I go
back now, with more understanding of what it takes to produce that, well, I
feel a lot more conflicted, let's say.

------
havill
Um, you all do realize that the guy who writes this blog is known within the
English Japan crowd as a fabulist (a storyteller), right?

The characters in this story are all figments of the blog author's
imagination.

You all have fallen for yet another Japan hoax. Like the bagel heads or LED
braces.

------
ci5er
I think that I have seen (tripped over) more dead aging alcoholics in Japan
(Shinjuku and Shibuya in particular) than any other country I have ever lived
in.

I've tried to administer CPR a couple of times, but the Japanese going from
point A to point B, (as polite as they are normally), just shrug and move
on...

~~~
agibsonccc
I'm just going to say (my own experience only: disclaimer), SF is
significantly worse.

I've lived in tokyo a year now and SF 2.5 years and I don't regret my move at
all.

The guys lying in the street like that (even if not homeless) is actually
culturally accepted. You see people sleeping in all sorts of places in Tokyo.

I won't comment on whether that's "good" or "bad" but it's definitely
different than the US. I still heavily prefer Tokyo despite that (I don't see
it that often in practice)

The worst areas are by far Roppongi and Shibuya. Admittedly, I don't go to
Shinjuku as much.

~~~
Zakiazigazi
> The guys lying in the street like that (even if not homeless) is actually
> culturally accepted.

It isn’t. It, however, is precisely what the blog talks about: newcomers
explaining things away as “cute cultural quirks”.

~~~
agibsonccc
I'll give you that it's not considered "polite" but I guess I should say it's
"expected"?

Let me correct myself a bit. I guess what I should have said was public
places? For example cafes or mcdonalds you can find tons of people sleeping in
there, another example is train stations.

Obviously yes these are very different things, hence my correction.

------
kingofpandora
I've been to Japan a few times and I'm the fucking idiot who explained it
away.

Thank you.

------
GreaterFool
I see poverty in Japan and I have no illusion that for many people here life
is hard. But where is better? I often travel to US and it is like going to a
third-world country. And I only visit nice places there!

~~~
Veratyr
Have you been to western/northern europe or Australia? I've visited Paris,
Berlin and Zürich and haven't seen US levels of poverty in any of them. I've
also visited a kinda out of the way part of Russia and while average wealth
seemed lower than in the US, the floor was higher.

~~~
toomanybeersies
You obviously haven't been to Northern Territory in Australia. The way that
the Aboriginal people have been treated, and the conditions they live in are
Australia's national shame. People getting hit by cars because they drank too
much and fell asleep on the road are a legitimate issue. They even have PSAs
to try and stop people from sleeping on the road [1].

[1] [https://youtu.be/XA241Lg70fg](https://youtu.be/XA241Lg70fg)

~~~
Veratyr
No, I grew up around rural Victoria and my family is from NSW.

Why are things so bad for them in NT? I was under the impression they had much
better access to welfare and education than the rest of us. Am I wrong? Are
they not partaking of it? Are they discriminated against and unable to find
housing/schooling?

------
CryptoPunk
This is fantastically written, but I hesitate to upvote it out of fear it will
increase public support for forcible income redistribution and other forms of
centralization.

On the subject of Japan: people overestimate its wealth. It industrialized
much more recently than the West, and even pre-industrialization, was behind
economically and technologically. What the society has accomplished in such a
short period of time is impressive, but looking at its buildings it's clear
that it still trails the West in capital concentration.

In any case, there's more to a society than wealth. The orderliness and safety
of Japanese society makes for a standard of living that is much higher than it
otherwise would be. There are a lot of intangible and hard to quantify
benefits to feeling safe in person and property when outside your home at any
time of day or night.

~~~
emodendroket
"I liked this post about poverty, but I hesitate to upvote it because I fear
it will increase public support for alleviating poverty."

~~~
CryptoPunk
I believe such policies retard economic development, which is the only way to
alleviate poverty.

~~~
Feniks
Funny, my socialist country ended up with a small surplus in the budget last
year. Meanwhile the US has a trillion deficit.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't agree with that guy but I don't know what surplus/deficit has to do
with it.

~~~
emodendroket
I also wonder which country we're talking about because, really, what extant
government could be described as "socialist"? All of this guy's post history
seems to be making critical posts about the US, some of which strike me as
pretty wide of the mark.

------
SolaceQuantum
The mention in the article of the false perception by people vacationing in
japan of describing the japanese as just naturally, culturally happy to serve
whites/foreigners well into old age reminds me of how black people were
depicted in America (and their depictions are still around here and there...)
(fairly similar notions of “just culturally/inherently happy to serve”).

I think this may be a part of othering or being able to live on cognitive
dissonance?

Edited for clarity; I think people thought I was saying Japanese people are
white serving, not that there is a false perception of such.

~~~
g09980
As someone who only spent a fraction of his life in America, I'm always at
wonder at how Americans try to find racism/oppression in every situation. As
another poster below alludes, life isn't always pleasant. We can't all be
equal, but inequality != servitude.

~~~
scarmig
We can't all be equal, but we can build a society where old people don't have
to work long hours until the day they die, and young people don't have to
struggle to pay for electricity or healthcare.

I'm just noting that so we don't fall into the trap of letting our Randian
overlords pre-emptively limit the bounds of our imagination.

~~~
rayiner
It’s not clear that Japan can do that given its population demographics. And I
disagree with the premise that old people who can work shouldn’t have to.
Society should take care of those who can’t take care of themselves. But it
squanders societal resources to exempt able-bodies people from work simply
because they’re old.

~~~
scarmig
> it squanders societal resources to exempt able-bodies people from work
> simply because they’re old.

That sounds like the kind of a decision a paperclip maximizer would make to
me.

"Societal resources" not being squandered is a perverse thing to optimize for.

Consider two worlds: 1) A world that automatically makes N widgets, and people
could add an additional N widgets but choose not to 2) A world that
automatically makes 0 widgets, and people add an additional N widgets because
they choose to

If you're going for "not squandering societal resources" as the main metric of
a society's value, world 2) is strictly superior, because people waste less
time on frivolities like leisure and pleasure.

I'm open to arguments, though, that we should spread more leisure and pleasure
around the age distribution instead of backloading it. I expect I'd be
convinced, even.

~~~
rayiner
The situation we’re dealing with is scenario 3: a world that makes N widgets,
and everyone is used to the quality of life that comes from the society making
N widgets, but the population is decreasing and making N widgets is becoming
harder and harder. In that situation, why should able-bodied old people get a
pass on working?

Japan is not a post-scarcity society. Even if income we distributed completely
evenly, it would be about $43,000 per year. That’s comfortable, but not so
much that Japan could afford to produce a lot less and still enjoy the kind of
lifestyle people associate with a developed country.

