Comment by GreatGaijin
4 days ago
- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need
- Functioning government
- Competency, skilled engineers
4 days ago
- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need
- Functioning government
- Competency, skilled engineers
With:
- A declining population
- Rural collapse
- Stagnating economy
- Shut in problem for old people
Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.
Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.
Not sure what you are driving at. This thread was about Japan and I responded about Japan. If we were talking about Italy or South Korea then my response would be different.
You are correct that Japan isn't the only nation with large problems, particularly around declining populations. The thrust of my initial comment is that no nation is perfect and thoughts of "why aren't we just like that nation" are a little silly.
It's very easy to come up with a few bullet points of the big problems of a nation. Just like it's easy to generate such bullet points about the positives of a nation.
- Western media wants to focus on negatives of Japan because the idea of an alternative functioning system is narrative breaking. - now that UK is out of EU, negative EU messaging about Greece, Spain, and Italy is unlikely to reach US. - the media doesn’t want to promote a “declining white birth rate” narrative - there are a lot of nerds on the internet interested in Japanese culture. - neighboring Asian countries do not tend to love Japan
It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.
There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.
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Anime and 90s propaganda from people appealing to Japanese businessmen.
Because we aren't bombarded with "Why don't we do things like they do in Italy" messages on every online forum like we are with Japan.