> I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system.
A good example is housing. Japan had a gigantic housing bubble a decade in advance than the USA and Europe. It is also interesting to see that meanwhile declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city, it has made many town houses almost free. I would expect this to be replicated elsewhere.
Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Japan is not the world, but it seems reasonable that can give a heads up for many problems that other places will experience in the future.
I think housing is a bad example to use wrt Japan.
Japan is one of the few markets in the world where, for the most part, only land has value. Buildings LOSE value over time. This is for multiple reasons but mostly due to ever-changing earthquake-related construction regulations such that it's almost always cheaper to rebuild from scratch than keep an edifice and retrofit to regulations.
This is also why Japan has more architects than any other country- if buildings are not kept and are almost always destroyed after a 30 year mortgage, the owner can build whatever they want and not have to be concerned about resale value- so lots of unique residential architecture.
Alastair Townsend first covered this in ArchDaily years ago and it went on to be covered extensively by NPR and other outlets.
I think this is becoming increasingly less common. I am seeing lots of 30+ year old homes for sale in my local market that have been renovated by the seller before putting it up for sale. Housing quality has improved significantly since the post-WW2 era, so there’s no need to tear down a 30-year old home anymore. Some new appliances, wallpaper, and flooring is enough to attract a buyer.
Here’s an example of a listing of a 39 year old home where renovation is still in progress. They include product links to the new appliances they are installing now, and will update the listing once remodeling is completed. This is super common to see in used homes listings these days.
I agree. I just bought a 20 year old place and it’s still in fine condition (and freshly renovated). Im planning to live in it for a while but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if so long as I renovate it before selling I can get basically the same as what I paid now in another 10 or 15 years.
I am not the person you responded to. I bought a house in Nagano last year. After living in Tokyo a long time The paperwork was not too difficult. Takes about 3 hours to walk through it all, in the presence of the seller, realtor and scrivener. Hand over the cash and take ownership.
The neighbours have been unexpectedly wonderful. Very kind. I live there most of the time and wish to contribute.
I actually think it's advantageous to be a (European) foreigner. They realise all the little nit-picks that Japanese do to each other in the service of community would be mostly lost on me. YMMV.
Having lived in Tokyo for a long time probably helped, as you are familiar with the language, local customs, and dealing with beaurocracy. I'm not sure if the parent has prior experience living in Japan, but if not I would think the whole process could be quite bewildering.
Ok then I would agree buying a house is easy. A real-estate agent should take care of everything and you are only really responsible for stamping your seal (about 100 times) and transfering the money.
Getting a loan is also fairly easy provided you are employed and have permanent residency (or a spouse who is a permanent resident or citizen). Shinsei Bank (recently acquired by SBI) seems to specialize in loaning to foreigners.
Neighbor situation is highly variable. I have some neighbors who I am quite friendly with, and others I literally have never seen. Typically neigbors will at least be polite, but you do hear horror stories of neighbors quarreling about taking out the trash, snow falling from the roof onto the neighbor's property, etc. My next-door neighbors live with their aging parents, and the grandfather (who has dementia) once shouted at someone who was doing work on my house. And people do tend to gossip, but it's mostly harmless.
A Jitsu-in, which is the most official type of seal and is registered with the city office, needs to match your legal name. So mine is just my family name in latin characters. It looks funny but does the job.
For less formal seals you can pretty much pick whatever you want. For those I use my family name transliterated into katakana.
From what I've seen, buying a house is easy (you can hire brokers/realtors to do the paperwork) but the biggest hurdle is your visa status. Owning property does not entitle you to stay in-country longer than 90 days. You'll need a local job or spouse in order to reside there.
Loans can also be difficult for foreigners to acquire, so prearrange financing or cash.
Most important regulation for earthquake proof was made in 1981, that is about 40 years ago. It's often mentioned first on buying house checklist. So I expect that more houses will be supplied to market.
>I think this is becoming increasingly less common.
That should be the case. As regulations get stiffer and stiffer the amount of area under the "long tail" get smaller. Of course there's always people who want to screech about how more is needed but at some point the tail is so narrow that society just ignores them because the amortized cost per improvement is just so high it's a no-starter.
Buildings lose value in almost every market. It’s just that in western cities the land increases by so much more than the building decreases we don’t notice it.
Yes, but there remain factors that cause the value of western building to rise in value even decades later (my 120 year old house is worth $90,000 and going up in value). For example as construction costs increase, replacement costs increase, which causes the value of an existing building to rise.
This is apparently not the case, and for some odd reason (probably government and tax policy) a house absolutely goes to $0 in 25 years and stays there.
You're claiming that _relative to newer buildings_, yours has lost value.
The parent poster is claiming that _relative to the same building in the past_, prices go down in japan and up elsewhere.
Would the apartment you live in now have cost more or less 5 or 10 years ago? That's really the thing the parent poster is talking about, and other newer constructions are unrelated to that point.
This is not unique to Japan. Buildings depreciate.
You only notice it in Japan because general inflation has been close to 0% and sometimes negative.
Also - people in Japan tend to spend much less money updating their home compared to the rest of "The West". If you're sinking 1% of the value of your home into updates annually - the home isn't going to depreciate as much as if you didn't.
Buildings lose value over time in most places. And in many places where they don't, including renovation investments in the picture results shows declining value.
The only places where buildings go up in value is where the building has been grandfathered in and is no longer able to be built in accordance with modern zoning rules.
Which is rather common in my experience. The town adjacent to the one I just moved to has a bunch of duplexes, but if you look at the current zoning it's all single-family-only. You couldn't build much of the town as it is today, which is a shame as it's very nice.
As you might expect given this, the town has steadily lost population.
Here in the Netherlands this is absolutely not true for houses. My house, despite no renovations done, has more than doubled in value over the past ten years. Housing shortages make sure that existing houses are definitely not losing value.
But is that the value of the building, or the land that is increasing for yours? My home (building + land) value has gone up a ton due to the housing shortages in tech centers, but on the assessment, the building value has gone down, while the land value has shot up a lot.
It is very weird how houses depreciate very quickly in Japan.
There is surely intentional government policy behind this, and this would have significant impacts on the broader housing environment.
I recall reading at one point for example that the property transfer tax is lower for empty lots than it is for occupied lots. Another subtle housing policy that incentivizes people to tear down old houses.
Much has been written about Japan's zoning impacting its housing prices and rents, but imo it's as likely that the various tax and housing policy that creates this incentive to tear down homes is as important of a factor in creating a housing market that looks very different from other rich nations.
Not really. Japan isn't unique in how property is valued. Real estate values in market-based economies are set by the market. Cap rates in Japan are comparable to the US and other major markets. Assigning value to land or improvements is just accounting. Buildings in Japan (and elsewhere) "lose value" over time due to depreciation, not because only land has value. There are huge tax advantages to owning real estate vs other asset classes. For example, Japanese real estate owners take advantage of accelerated depreciation for wooden structures as a tax shield.
In Japan, houses were treated as capital expenses. Other countries treat housing as capital assets. Things may have changed in Japan in the past two decades, but that's how things worked up into the late 90s/early 00s when I stopped studying all things Japanese. This financial treatment was why so many smaller/rural communities were turning into ghost towns.
> Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
I think they may have escaped to evergreen technology for consumer electronics, but one might argue America is equally as trapped by historical infrastructure. Japan's infrastructure is interesting as it's clear much of it was built in the 80s and 90s, but it's still serviceable and their big bets on trains turned out to be rather future proof. When walking the streets, especially somewhere like Osaka, you can see much of the signage, bridges, pedestrian crossing buttons are very old indeed. You do often feel like you are in a future-past of some kind.
None of these statements apply universally across both countries mind you, there is good rail in the US and modern infra in Japan as well.
"Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change."
I believe that their mindset and stance towards technology is simply different.
Japan had a history of "gadget technology", which was revolutional in the 90's before the Internet became ubiquious.
I am guessing that they (myself included) were dissapointed in the direction technological advances went. Their vision maybe didn't happen, but that doesn't make it wrong, or that the current technological trends are right.
Situation in Germany: House prices are going down the last few months, but much more slowly than they consistently rose during the preceding 15 years. At the same time interest has sharply risen.
Compared to prices there's a much bigger decrease in new construction, which I'd interpret as people increasingly not pursuing houses and instead piling onto the rent market. Urban/suburban/"sprawl" houses were basically a DI(preferably-NK-and-wealthy-parents-chipping-in) and beyond thing before, I'd suspect houses will continue to shrink while drifting even further up the income distribution and everyone else must rent for life - at an average rent/income ratio of around one third which has only ever been going up, and is of course much higher for non-DI households.
Home ownership rate has always been falling and continues to do so (fell below 50 % in 2022). It'll get a lot lower when boomers start leaving their houses (feet first most likely), because baby boomers have far high home ownership rate than following generations. And with recent changes to the way houses are legally valuated and inheritance taxation I'd suspect many kids of baby boomers can't actually afford to inherit their parents houses and will have to sell.
I dunno where this is supposed to converge to. Everyone renting at >50 % of net income (which is already not at all uncommon, especially for singles in cities) from huge housing companies?
I think for you - Germany might be an anomaly since in Germany you guys have strong rental protections. and rentals can have long leases i.e 3+ years. whereas in the UK / US a lease usually last a year. in london with average leases being 6 months to a year.
in the UK new builds are inflated due to gvt shenanigans
That's true, though the only protection for new tenants is rent control (the type where rents can't exceed a reference rent by ~10%), which is active in most cities - but is also generally ignored (~80 % of new leases violate these laws). New construction, modernized (also "modernized") and first-time-leased flats are excluded as well, and if the previous tenant overpaid, rent control is suspended as well.
> Everyone renting [...] from huge housing companies?
In cities like Munich, where the real estate is extremly valuable, definitely. The increase in inheritance tax you mentioned makes it very unattractive to not just sell the house to the highest bidder immediately, which in most cases will be one of the large housing companies.
For small tenements, it's very challenging to generate enough rental income to offset the inheritance tax in a single lifetime, especially if the new owners want to keep rents low.
> Situation in Germany: House prices are going down the last few months, but much more slowly than they consistently rose during the preceding 15 years. At the same time interest has sharply risen.
That's the case in NL as well; the causes are multi-fold, housing prices have consistently gone up in the past decade, while mortgage interest rates have gone down, meaning it's more attractive and interesting to get a house and mortgage now and fix the interest rate.
But the other issue there is a housing shortage, because population increase is not slowing down.
But the other issue is that houses aren't being built fast enough, for diverse reasons - NIMBY, having to give up farmland or nature for houses, counties that want pretty housing estates instead of functional apartment buildings (because 'ugly' houses attract undesireables), and new nitrogen laws making getting licenses more difficult.
And now there's sudden inflation due to a sudden change in situation (to put it mildly), which triggered the EU to rapidly increase interest rates (I'm no economist, I'm not sure how the two are related), which triggered mortgage rates to increase.
Given people were already borrowing the max amount they could, if the interest rates suddenly go up, a gap appears which caused the reduction in interest in buying a house, lowering demand. The other one is that people stopped looking for houses because their energy bill suddenly tripled or worse.
The Netherlands ultimately decided on socialism which means that even in Amsterdam a lot of the houses are on government rent control.
Also mixed neighborhoods with low income and middle income households so that you never get into a "banlieue" situation.
The government decided what to build, where to build and for how much.
> Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change
The fax machine in Japan is always treated like it's proof they're stuck in a timewarp, an earlier age, and just haven't moved on.
But I think it makes sense. Japan was introduced to fax technology early on. Japanese is traditionally written vertically. It is written with Chinese characters. In handwritten Japanese, people actually invent/modify characters on the spot. (Much as how Engl. text might be littered with randomly-invented abbr'vns.) They're not going to be able to enter those into a computer easily.
Some Japanese newspapers were using traditional typesetting techniques right into the 21st century because vertical text support was, and largely still is, an afterthought in most publishing software. Software has only recently gotten to the point where it can replace a fax machine and handwriting, for reproducing Japanese texts in the manner the Japanese expect. Besides scanning/taking a photo of a page and emailing it, which isn't enough of an improvement to motivate the change. (Particularly as business faxes just end up digitized and emailed anyway.)
> Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
You already see it in some countries that just skipped cable TV, desktop PCs and wired internet, and that went straight to smartphones with mobile internet (or wifi). These are countries where you can do everything with your phone, whereas here some (e.g. government, banking organizations) are still trying to catch up and adjust.
But is this MORE technological? Using smartphones imparts way less tech capabilities on the user than does using PCs, and definitely doesn't push users to learning new things (how many people are discovering IDEs on their phone and learning development as a hobby?).
Housing in Japan is so peculiar that it seems difficult to draw global lessons from it. Are there any other countries in the world where a perfectly servicable house that is over 30 years old is literally worth less than nothing (because it "must" be demolished before the land can be reused)?
Posted a similar comment up above, but this isn’t really true anymore. Search in any non-rural area and you’ll see lots of 30+ year old houses that have recently been remodeled, or are in the process of being remodeled.
Here’s one that I found in Takasaki with very little effort.
Most of the houses being torn down are not what I would consider “perfectly serviceable”. There are usually serious issues such that the home isn’t worth saving.
It's true for more places than not. Yes, you're seeing more homes that have been remodeled and put up for sale than in the past, but these are the minority -- mostly newer mansions in cities. For many/most homes, it's often financially better for the owner to just tear them down, or leave them to rot (the latter is a big problem across Japan).
Small towns really do have programs to give away homes if you commit to remodeling them or tear them down. Even in bigger cities it isn't difficult to find abandoned properties.
(I'll also add: people see things like Cheap Houses Japan, and make incorrect assumptions about the state of the resale market. For a large portion of those "cheap" properties, you'd have to put in 2-3x the sales price just to make them livable. In other words, the owners are trying to solve their financial problem by dumping it on someone else who is more willing to deal with it. This could be appealing for someone who wants a vacation home and loves the area, but it's not a healthy housing market.)
I think we are talking about different things here. The parent was referring to the practice of demolishing “perfectly serviceable” homes in order to construct a new home on the same land, implying a sort of deliberate wastefulness in the Japanese housing market.
But you’re talking more about markets where there is very little demand (due to declining population) for both new and used housing. Or homes that are in such a state of disrepair that it makes more sense to demolish them and rebuild from scratch.
Depends on location. Some houses are indeed worth next to nothing, because nobody wants to live there.
In many cases a big farming company buys land with a house on it and then lets the house to rot, because they only need the farmland that's around it. And they don't bother to demolish the house, because it costs money.
Building codes changing and earthquake resistant construction: plumbing is more flexible and less durable, shake resistance technology evolves enough to make old building deprecated (or the house is straight build with light wood with a set life expectancy)
This is the reason often stated, but I don't think it's always the true reason. I think people just don't want to live in a house that another family lived in if they have the choice (rental apartments seem to be different).
Also if it was true then people wouldn't be living in any house older than 30 years since they'd fear death by earthquake. But that's not true - I know loads of Japanese people who have lived in their house for more than 30 years. It's only when the land changes hands that it suddenly becomes vitally important to implement this rule.
Earthquakes’ influence isn’t just about when they happen. I might be hard to visualize but the actual structure and materials need to change to adapt.
For instance in europe lead pipes were widely used for the internal plumbing and nowadays it’s replaced by rigid and pretty durable polymers. The plumbing goes into the walls, floors, etc. to each place where water goes.
Except that doesn’t work if your walls and floor can shake. You don’t want pipes break into your walls and leak internally. So pipes can’t be rigid, and you’ll have to compromise on durability for flexibility.
When buying an appartment, our plumbing was rated for 30 years. After that, even if everything else is in a perfect state, we’d all have to tear down the building walls and change the plumbing. It can be done, but cost wise it’s not so far from rebuilding from scratch.
Public buildings get away with way longer life by either paying for way more expensive techniques, and/or having the plumbing and any other things that could need inspection or maintenance put outside the walls. It works great, but is ugly as fuck and can have other practical issues (all pipes being exposed has weird safety issues, some europeans house do that and it’s really not great)
And that’s just plumbing.
PS: the second hand housing market is actually super healthy. In particular you get to see how the buildings and neighbors are doing after a few years, and the risk of a bad surprise is that much lower.
PS2: you can live longer than 30y in a house/appartment. Its value just plummets, except if you prove you made all the recommended updates to extend its useful life. It’s basically the same as keeping a car for 40 years. It can be done, but it’s not the generic nor recommended use case.
It costs a bunch. Renting a reasonably priced standard room in Tokyo won't land such perks.
Going up to family size appartments in recently built middle-class complexes will usually come with pretty good insulation and you won't hear a baby crying at top volume.
The sad thing is that I live in Aomori, and the construction quality here is abysmal. I would understand the lack of proper insulation in warmer areas, but in Tohoku and Hokkaido?
And don't get me started on the lack of proper central heating and the use of the stupid portable kerosene heaters. Today I heard from a guy who is working for the village office that the most common emergency call now in winter are from elder people who suffered thermal shock inside their own houses when walking from a warm room to an almost frozen room.
>Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
I've lived in Japan for eight years and the only time I've ever been asked to fax something was by an American company. I told them no.
I recently (months ago)left a company where everything was faxed. All records were typed on computers, printed, and faxed to companies. Orders as well.
Perplexed that they weren't faxed directly from computers. Are the records not considered 'real' until they exist in paper form, for which there are well-established storage/ retrieval/ relocation standards?
A few months ago when applying for internet service from NTT they required me to fax a copy of my residence card. I ended up going with KDDI (for that and other reasons).
I've only had to sent two faxes in my whole life, and both have been in the last four years while living in Japan. One was for Amazon, and the other for the Sapporo police.
>Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Would beg to differ. Japan is one those nation with extremely advanced space, robotic and nuclear tech. They can be a nuclear power over night if they are allowed to legally. Far as space, they landed probe on asteroid for space mining (https://www.space.com/41898-hayabusa2-deploys-hopping-robots... ).
Yeah, this is a very narrow HN definition of “technology”—I.e. web technology. And even then it overlooks the hardware side, since Japan has among the fastest broadband speeds, Japanese companies are leaders in cellular and fiber communications technology, etc.
In terms of “core industrial competencies”—ability to design and build a nuke, ability to make advanced materials, ability to design and build a competitive microprocessor, ability to put things in space, etc.—Japan is still the second most technologically advanced country in the world.
I heard that the pachinko industry got its head start from the post-war surplus production of ball bearings. Perhaps the quality you mention is now feasible as a result of the scale economics from pachinko ball production.
> declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city
Despite overall declining population, Japan's major urban centres are actually increasing their population. Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and more are all growing cities.
Declining population isn't entirely relevant. Japan's major cities still continue to grow, and western countries will probably continue to grow as a whole due to immigration. I still suspect that we will see housing bubbles pop in some major western cities, but many will fight it to the death. I predict that whole industries moving to areas with more reasonable housing policy will be the cause. We already see it in cases with investment in Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine until a year ago), and southern U.S states. Part of me hopes that these cities with horribly selfish housing policy end up like the declining western cities that lost out when manufacturing went overseas.
Europe - sure
US has mostly solved our population aging problem with having fairly open immigration and high immigration numbers relative to the rest of the developed/rich world..
Now if politics change that, it's another story.
> US has mostly solved our population aging problem with having fairly open immigration and high immigration numbers relative to the rest of the developed/rich world
I'm not sure about that. For starters, it's easier to immigrate to Germany or the UK than to the US, and by percentage of the population, Germany does host a higher number of immigrants.
The US does accept more foreigners yearly, but it makes it a long way, if any, to stay in the country permanently.
Skills. The US hoovers up the world’s skilled immigrants. Germany - like much of the non-english speaking world is left with the scraps.
Don’t take it from me, look at what the German government is doing with allowing foreigners to immigrate there. When a country throws open its doors the way Germany has, you must ask the question - why?
I suspect EU country vs US comparisons get thrown off as well by EU freedom of movement vs US interstate mobility. We should probably be looking at aggregate EU immigration from non-EU nations when comparing to other developed countries.
Someone born in France but lives in Germany vs someone born in New York but lives in California are both similarly easy from a legal standpoint. However counting the Frenchman in Germany as an immigrant seems kind of dubious given that's kind of the point of the EU.
Maybe legally but we literally have millions of people that come here to work every year and are not documented. Nearly 3 million last year and although there are many refugees that are here for help, it's mainly people that want to work in everything from kitchens, the landscaping, to construction, to farming, to whatever else can make use of people that want to work hard every day at a manual job and show up.
That's only true if you are educated and from the west. Otherwise, it's much harder to legally (or illegally) immigrate to germany. The USA is a lot more open to immigrants, and in my experience, there is more xenophobia/racism towards non-western immigrants in germany.
I'm not comparing Germany to the US from a societal standpoint, but their legal immigration frameworks.
For instance, the US has immigration quotas for pretty much everything, thus the backlogs that resulted in Chinese and Indian born people to wait for a decade or more to achieve their permanent residency status. The process is also extremely complex and, as a result of that, it is quite expensive, in the order of thousands of dollars.
Considering that Iceland has a population of less than 400k, more than doubling the population over a 12-month period in the cold would be a death sentence not just the the country, but for all the new immigrants that are moving there.
Iceland with 80% of immigrants would not be Iceland any more. Its language and culture would be completely marginalised and replaced with something else.
That's a bogus reason though. No culture is static, Japan or US or Germany 100 years ago were very different to the current day. Culture is how citizens live their lives, and it's pointless to try to immortalize something that is naturally in constant flux.
On the other hand, what rights do people have or not have to preserve their culture or their way of life?
An exaggerated example, but a good litmus test here is something simple like are you ok with lots of Americans moving to country X (let's use China and Norway) and making it culturally more like America? You can't say that this is a problem but then Iceland (since that's the example we're using) being weary of accepting large numbers of immigrants out of fear of culture change isn't a valid concern also.
None of this actually requires immigration. Cultural imports are enough to utterly destroy aspects of local culture without a single person immigrating.
I don't know about Norway or Iceland specifically, but I have been told that English is so trendy in Sweden that not a lot of cultural works are actually written in Swedish anymore. As for China, we've actually gotten cultural backwash from Hollywood doing so much business there. Specifically, a lot of western media companies have had to self-censor in order to retain Chinese market access.
If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls. We would need to emulate pre-Meiji Japan in every country in the world: i.e. no migration whatsoever, and heavy restriction and censorship of cultural imports. So no Internet, no imported cinema or TV shows, no international phone calls... hell, no international postal system.
Less dramatically you have countries like Canada or France that have local content quotas, but those have their own issues. But those are less "stop cultural change" and more "keep Hollywood from completely smothering our local creative industry".
Yes none of this required immigration but that's besides the point when we're talking about a country absorbing immigrants.
> If we really wanted to coat every culture in amber then we would need a lot more than just immigration controls.
Following this extreme reasoning we should equally just dissolve all borders. Let's start with Japan or Switzerland perhaps? I've always thought it would be cool to live in Switzerland myself. I'm disappointed I can't retire to the Scottish countryside or to Brittany. Who are they to tell me I can't live there?
Obviously this is a non-starter, but being dismissive of others wanting to hold on to their contemporary culture is ridiculous too.
Iceland's combined first- and second generation immigration is around 18% of the total population[1], [2] seems to suggest it's around 25% for the US.
The country has also signed up to accept practically unlimited immigration. It's a part of the EEA (the economic area of the EU), meaning that a population of around 500 million can move there tomorrow with very few legal hurdles. "Unlimited" in the sense that the difference between 500 million and the world population of 8 billion hardly matters for a country with a population of far less than 1/2 million.
Sure, but the practical limit is basically the attractiveness of an environment, economy & availability of jobs.
All things being equal, how many people want to flock to Iceland to work in tourism and fishing? Maybe with the right immigrants one could replicate their last financial bubble & crisis.
The Santa Cruz I grew up in, with vibrant cultures from hippies to punkers is gone. All the people that lived there have been forced to move due to lack of affordability, and the people and local culture has been replaced with immigrants. While there is a town, culturally, it is not the town I grew up. If you asked us in the 80/early 90s if we wanted that, we would have said no, we would like to be able to live the life we created, have the neighbors we have known our whole lives, etc instead of being California refugees spread across Oregon/Washington/Idaho/Nevada/Hawaii. It's not really bogus to those peoples whose entire way of life is being displaced, and shouldn't they have a say and some sort of agency over their local culture?
No one is saying Iceland should take 80% immigrants.
A rational conversation is that US takes a higher % of immigrants than most of the developed world. No one sane is comparing notional numbers comparing a 330M country & small 5M countries.
Talking % terms means it doesn't matter the base size.
As an Icelander, our traditional culture has already been completely marginalized and destroyed by the outlawing of piracy, as well as of raping and pillaging.
If the rest of the world would agree to look the other way on those topics, I'm sure we could be persuaded to once again accept double-digit percentages of the population as sla..., ahem, immigrants every year.
Why is that a problem? Languages and culture change all the time. Iceland is hardly "Iceland" anymore compared to any sufficiently past "Iceland" (e.g. pre-Internet, pre-aviation, pre-motor vehicles, etc) but I don't see any reason why that is a bad thing in principle.
This seems an odd concern to be raised in a language that can charitably be described as the bastard child of Norse and French mostly spoken by people who never sat foot in Great Britain. You also seem to assume all of those immigrants are culturally and language-wise homogeneous, which is unlikely to be the case unless, say, something catastrophic happens to Canada causing its population to flee to neighboring countries (and even then that's a bad example because Canada is heterogeneous itself).
Considering older people tend to use computers and be more tech savvy while younger generations only interact with tech on their phones it will be interesting how this turns out.
People like Peter Zeihan argue that the USA seems like it will have a large replacement population just because they had a large population to begin with (boomers -> Millenials -> Gen Alpha). There are things that can blunt this (Millenials can't afford to have kids) but so far it seems like it is holding fairly steady. Given this it would be difficult to argue for them getting stuck in some specific technological era.
Japan has too many socio-political peculiarities for lessons to be translatable to other democracies. Especially when it comes to politics, its nearly a one party state with LDP having governed more than 50% of the time since the founding of the democracy.
"The LDP has been in power almost continuously since its foundation in 1955—a period called the 1955 System—except between 1993 and 1994, and again from 2009 to 2012. In the 2012 election, it regained control of the government." – Wikipedia
While historically true, the current Japanese government isn't very Buddhist, and hasn't been AFAICT since the Tokugawa shogunate crumbled (in fact, they persecuted Buddhism after that).
What does it matter when all parties vote approximately in the same direction together on several thousand page long bills that are dropped on them by armies of ghostwriters funded and influenced by who knows?
Wow so many assumptions to disentangle here. Seems like someone reads too much reddit and the like. If said corp. and military interests really controlled America, things would look completely different.
I agree they exert a some influence on narrow areas, but control is too strong a word. World is too chaotic for any one entity to exert any degree of control on anything.
Hard to understand why the parent comment was downvoted. This is precisely the interpretation of the US system in political science: A one party oligarchy with two factions that slightly differ in issues that are non-critical to the oligarchy's interests. They clash wildly on identity issues, but when it comes to feeding the military-industry complex, the stock market and keeping their own taxes low, they are always 'bipartisan'. A recent Princeton study confirmed this:
Actually, the above study is just a confirmation of what was known a long time ago as outlined in one of the most famous and biggest study of the US system and social dynamics:
This famous UCSC study found out that ~30,000 people (including women, children) constitute the American elite class and they are extremely class conscious and exclusive. They hold balls to introduce their children into their own society for coming of age, they intermarry within themselves, they monopolize all positions of power among themselves. The study found out that they monopolize everywhere from governors' seats to senate to corporate boards among themselves.
Yes the two Parties can agree on a few things, that does not imply "one Party oligarchy". In fact much of the dysfunction in government can be traced to the wildly different positions of the two parties.
However if we want to talk Oligarchy we can view the US as being dominated culturally by Liberal (classical sense) values. Open Society, all that stuff. This manifests in politics.
> Yes the two Parties can agree on a few things, that does not imply "one Party oligarchy"
Those 'few things' define the oligarchy. As the Princeton study found out.
> Open Society, all that stuff.
That's a false perception. There's nothing open about the existing American oligarchy. The famous UCSC study referenced in the grandparent comment found out that ~30,000 people (including women, children) constitute the American elite class and they are extremely class conscious and exclusive. They hold balls to introduce their children into their own society for coming of age, they intermarry within themselves, they monopolize all positions of power among themselves. The study found out that they monopolize everywhere from governors' seats to senate to corporate boards.
Even the people who are more or less familiar with this think that because there are some 'exceptions' to this in the tech sector due to the existence of startups and also a few upwardly mobile upper middle class personas occasionally marry into that oligarchy, there isn't an oligarchy and the society is 'open' and upwardly mobile. But exceptions don't make a rule. Even the anomaly that is the tech sector is a rule-taker in American economy and politics, not a rule maker. The rules are still made by mostly East Coast 'old money' families and the elite networks that their social groups constitute. Here are the critical findings of the study again:
Those two parties agree on most things that actually matter.
They are both right wing capitalist parties.
Sure - one of them might talk about LGBT rights or whatever. But when a LGBT person gets in an accident - they will still receive a crippling medical bill. Unlike in "homophobic" countries like Poland, South Korea or Japan.
On my second corporate trip to Japan I mentioned to one of my Japanese counterparts that I enjoy visiting Tokyo because it is like visiting the future.
I wasn't referring to some futuristic veneer like Akihabara, but overall the way a society can function with the density that is Tokyo.
It's important to note (for those who didn't read the article) is that this article is not about why and how Japan is a Harbinger state but rather why scholars study Japan.
Yes and: I'm more interested in comparisons than trends, which often just feels like punditry.
Like how misc constitutions effect democratic participation. Like how misc court arrangements and criminal law impact policing. Like how land use impacts public health. Etc, etc.
Once you start reading about history you will laugh at the challenges of today.
Like it literally couldn't get worse for the Netherlands than 1672 and we got through that (in fact look at the mighty France and England today who's laughing now).
It is extremely funny that many people believe that Japanese “trapped” in 90s technology and they don’t have access to the shiny new things we have in US. In fact they have better access than us. Some people just choose not to, because not all new technologies are created to improve lives of normal people.
"Harbinger" is an unusual word, and it's interesting the way the paper distinguishes between "leader," "bellwether," and "harbinger."
In Japanese politics during the nineties there were a couple of parties whose names were commonly translated as "Harbinger Party" (Sakigake) and "New Harbinger Party" (Shintō Sakigake). (Or maybe these names referred to the same party?)
At least Japan has the capacity to launch satellites whereas the Brits failed to launch a small batch from an out of production Virgin Boeing 747 shortly after SpaceX had launched over 50 then 100 satellites in one go.
Although Jaxa's last attempt was a fail consistent with the Brits.
What I couldn't understand was why Sony couldn't keep up with Apple's stellar hockey stick growth when it had the talent in hardware. Don't know about the software because Microsoft.
This isn’t an article saying “Japan sucks, Britain is the best!”. It is saying that Japan appears to have encountered some social and economic problems a few years ahead of the rest of the developed world.
Apple started it's recent strong of successes with the iPod. That was a device built around a cutting edge hard drive. Apple did well at choosing features, but iPod software was all contracted out. The hard drive was it's most important feature and Apple locked that on by buying all of the units Toshiba could produce before most had even heard about it.
All of the tech in (say) the iPhone was already in use elsewhere. Apple's great success was (1) bringing it all together and (2) selling consumers on one great leap forwards. That's where Apple beats the likes of Sony: Not in incremental improvements but in creating new product categories and marketing them so that 100m+ consumers want one on launch day.
Indeed. I remember having a slimline Sony Walkman in the late 1980s and people in London asking to buy it from me. Not friends, complete strangers like store proprietors who had a 'wow' reaction and made an offer on the spot.
Britain gave up it's independent launch system program partly because it was part of the ESA and partly because it bought Polaris/Trident from the US. Virgin Space is actually a US company not a British one, but their launch system is cheap and definitely worth persevering with.
A good example is housing. Japan had a gigantic housing bubble a decade in advance than the USA and Europe. It is also interesting to see that meanwhile declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city, it has made many town houses almost free. I would expect this to be replicated elsewhere.
Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Japan is not the world, but it seems reasonable that can give a heads up for many problems that other places will experience in the future.