[temp-dude-87844]

Japan has never been one to shy away from high-tech industries, and as the article notes, aesthetic sensibilities towards kawaii robots make this a natural progression for a high-tech, ethnically homogeneous, aging nation.

Although Japan was once an imperial power, its reconciliation with its past has not included a transition to a multicultural post-colonial state promoted by intellectuals and practiced by widespread (and largely economic) migration from former colonies to the home country at the seat of power, as it has occurred in the case of most other imperial powers. The difference being, the places where this transition did take place had been colonial empires for longer, and had for centuries notions of nationhood derived from shared values more so than shared ethnicity.

[matt4077]

Germany comes to mind as a counterexample: a homogenous nation until the late 1950s, with no colonies to speak of, and jus sanguinis. Yet it transition to a functioning, diverse society today.

And Japan is arguably paying a steep price for keeping their blood oh-so-pure: it's a society frozen in tradition and fear, with an economy in what is essentially a 20-year recession.

Making robots care for the elderly will just be another step in the dehumanisation of that society, indeed. It's the coup the grace for a generation that replaced social life with "being in the office" and love life with blow-up dolls and pornography.

[mc32]

I think you're projecting western values on Japan.

While we may see "dehumanization" they don't. Where you see a pornography fetish, they see it as an extension of their sexuality. For them it's progress. They have valued tradition and will continue to do so. It's not an ephemeral value they hold.

Germany found a different path. It does not necessarily mean it's the one true path.

And, long term, all societies will face the same issues. Some sooner, some much later --but face it they will.

[matt4077]

I'm pretty sure the need for social interactions with other people is somewhat central to being human, and not a trait of culture. That's why humans are often called "social animals".

The suicide rate in japan being 3x European levels also seems to point at something being amiss, although that may indeed be an artefact of culture.

[flukus]

> And Japan is arguably paying a steep price for keeping their blood oh-so-pure: it's a society frozen in tradition and fear, with an economy in what is essentially a 20-year recession.

Most of the west has seen the same stagnation, they've just papered over it with immigration. Why would anyone care about economic growth when they are not receiving the benefits of it?

[matt4077]

> they've just papered over it with immigration

That's just easily disproven by looking up GDP per capita.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

[temp-dude-87844]

(West) Germany's ascent to a multicultural nation began accidentally, as the post-WWII economic miracle and the closure of borders with the GDR led to a shortage of workers which was to be remedied with an import of guest-workers from the Republic of Turkey.

German employers' lobbying and the worsening of global economic outlook in the 1970s led to these temporary measures being made increasingly permanent, with a path to permanent residency, but not citizenship.

In the 1990s (and in a process that continues today), Germany relaxed its jus sanguinis citizenship laws, and German society, influenced by the political approaches of its western neighbors, debated profoundly about how to reconcile its historical notion of Germanness with its desire to participate and show leadership in an increasingly multicultural European Union, all the while showing proper human compassion to its decidedly different residents of foreign descent. In Germany's case, this was particularly interesting, because the German people have long been a nation split between several sovereign states, yet a shared sense of German belonging has transcended centuries of political upheaval; nonetheless the State of Germany -- in its various guises and predecessors going back before the Unification of 1871 -- has been the one polity that was always intrinsically German.

Today, this questioning of what it means to be [nation] in a classic nation-state is ongoing Sweden and beginning in Denmark; it's also causing angst in Austria and Hungary, where the recent rise in immigration (or transiting migrants) is causing conflicts with a national identity that was built -- both by domestic and foreign forces -- in the aftermath of the First World War to emphasize maximum contrast with conflicting nations who would go on to gain their own nation-states.

Japan's outlook on immigration is not entire unlike those practiced by small European states defined solely around the self-determination of a single nation bound together largely, but not exclusively, by ethnicity, shared language, and implied lineage to predecessor states somehow connected to the nation in question. It's under demographic pressure, but its past experiments with immigration have shown that widespread assimilation foreigners is out of question, and it can only import people if it's willing to re-examine what it means to be Japanese. Given their high-tech economic base, they may opt to pursue that solution instead, while less economically fortunate Eastern Europe can't pursue as much automation, and will have to opt for immigration.

[matt4077]

Germany had, just 10 to 15 years prior, shown pretty thoroughly that they were competing with the best of them in terms of "self-determination of a single nation bound together largely, but not exclusively, by ethnicity, shared language, and implied lineage to predecessor states".

Japan today and Germany 196x share the labour shortage. But Japan's demographic problem adds a second incentive to encourage immigration, whereas Germany back then was experiencing the baby boom. So, if anything, Japan has an even better case for immigration today than Germany 60 years ago.

[Tsagadai]

Migration is a significant part of many countries growth. If Australia and New Zealand, for example, did not have such massive migration they would be effectively in serious depression. In both countries migration has added more than 1% to GDP growth for the last 30 years. Merely in recession is kind of surprising as for many other countries with such stagnant or declining population growth (low birthrates and barely any immigration) they would be in a much worse situation.

[alphaalpha101]

As someone from NZ: we have an election in about 4 weeks, and this is a serious issue here. We know that this immigration-driven growth is not real growth.

[Tsagadai]

But it really is. You get a resource (human in this case) that usually comes with education and healthcare paid for in the X years before they came. Usually immigrant X has a higher level of education than the general population due to restrictions. Not to mention that said person has money (usually also a requirement), which adds to the economy in the same way that tourism does. How is that not adding growth to an economy?

Conversely, a mass exodus of educated citizens emigrating from a country negatively impacts growth.

[matt4077]

> We know that this immigration-driven growth is not real growth.

Do you? Here's a list of US companies founded by immigrants:

Google, Apple (2nd gen), Intel, Tesla, ebay, Yahoo

[alphaalpha101]

Lol. I'm not anti-immigration, don't be so defensive, and I'm also not talking about the US. Stop bringing up the US. This is a thread about Japan and I'm talking about New Zealand.

The New Zealand government really wants people to believe that we're experiencing 'economic growth'. But while they might be technically right, they're effectively wrong. Economic growth that is so much entirely from immigration that we're effectively in per-capita-GDP recession is not real, useful, good growth.

[matt4077]

Lol yourself, and don't be so wrong.

Here's per-capita GDP growth in New Zealand, showing that there is real growth after normalising for changes in population: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

[rdtsc]

> Yet it transition to a functioning, diverse society today.

Do you think it is functioning because it is diverse or diverse because it is already functioning well? Or maybe the two are just correlated and there is something else causing those two things?

[matt4077]

I was mostly arguing against the idea that Japan would be unable to embrace some diversity. But yes, in the long term, immigration is probably important to sustain a dynamic economy with new ideas.

I posted the list of US companies founded by immigrants elsewhere. It includes Google, Apple, Tesla, Intel and others.