Comment by cedws
1 day ago
My home country, the UK, has already been through this cultural erosion which is why I respect Japan's right to defend its own. London in particular has become a place for everybody and at the same time for nobody. It's a city of people of different values and wavelengths with very little shared strata compared with Tokyo.
London isn’t an example of cultural erosion—the pie has simply grown. The same applies to New York. Diverse cultures enrich London; they add to it rather than diminish it.
Absolutely absurd. Why is it people feel the need to make out that western cities are somehow magically immune from the exact same detrimental effects that they happily accept about everywhere else?
"Enrichment" is a buzzword for the insulated elite happy that they have new things on their lunch menu, somehow ignoring all the negatives that come with it.
I can't help observing that Britain established a global empire (so vast in scope that they could truthfully say the sun never set upon it, until quite recently) and made it clear to the countries they colonized that Britain, and particularly England, was the center of civilization. We're surrounded by the artefacts of this empire, from Imperial measurements in the USA to Greenwich Mean time being the default timezone to which all others are calibrated.
If you establish a vast trading empire, and tell the often surprised new inhabitants of it that the empire requires their spices/ silks/ slaves, can you really be surprised that the more enterprising and adventurous colonised people gravitate toward the point of origin? Is it some sort of mystery that there should be more people from Algeria and Congo in France, or why there are so many Indonesian people in the Netherlands?
I feel a similar perplexity about many people in the USA making loud complaints about cultural adulteration despite a good quarter of the land having previously been part of Mexico and this being reflected in most of the place names (to take but one example). Some commentators object with an absolute straight face to hearing so many people speaking Spanish in cities with names like Los Angeles.
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Always amusing that lowering the percentage of natives in a culture is an improvement, "enrichment", "vibrancy", and so on, but only in one particular kind of direction...
And interestingly, the people who utter this ideology are usually from the natives - because fundamentally it's a type of narcissism - a kind of "I'll show you" or "I like you being hurt" that feels pleasurable or gives a sense of superiority.
Can't imagine this ever being tolerated within China and Russia though, perhaps that's why they're the current bogeymen.
Funny to see this sentiment here but in the USA if a conservative-leaning politician talks about "preserving our culture" or saying that immigrants should "assimilate" they are accused of being a code-word (or even an overt) racist.
US conservatives get no benefit of the doubt thanks to years of racism and racist policy. It is clear that they are reactionaries looking to codify white supremacy.
However, American culture has moved on (a lot) from that though. For several generations, it has been described as a "melting pot" or understood through the lens of The New Colossus mounted on the Statue of Liberty.
The question is, do you think it's fine for the same line of "Japanese supremacy" thought to apply in Japan, and if so, why do you think it's different?
Completely different. American culture is immigrant centric. I am an American, and I refuse the biblical indoctrination that some wish would represent "our" culture. Why should conservatives get to dictate what America's culture is? As far as I am concerned, we are a nation of immigrants, and no one should assimilate to certain ideas. In particular, because these ideas can be weaponized. The Church can mangle with the state, because America is mostly evangelical. Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l), because America's most affluent are Jews. Services can be refused on the basis of one's romantic inclinations. Some people end up as more free than others. So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart. They are merely choosing the rhetoric that resonates most with lower classes (as history has taught us is a strategy that worked with peasants in the days of yore), because a critique of upper classes or billionaires or those that profit from our toil is them biting the hand that feeds them.
> Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l)... So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart.
Do not pretend like liberals were on a different page than conservatives on that issue before the election. Support for Israel was happening under Biden and would have continued under Harris; Trump's the one who did a bait-and-switch with pretending he'd be more neutral until he got in. And conservatives have been called antisemitic by liberals far more than the reverse.
> American culture is immigrant centric.
What does this mean? Because to me, it means we don't have a culture and never will have one. What does immigrant-centric mean to people who are born not immigrants, besides getting out of the way for the next generation on its way in?
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as an actual londoner, no, this guy is just being codedly racist too
Yup, this happens to any melting pot city (Paris, New York, LA, San Francisco, etc). The downside of multiculturalism is these places become low-trust societies.
Do you dare leave your bike outside unlocked in these cities?
Bicycle theft is endemic in Japan as well.
Of course, being Japan, they also have a compulsory bike registration scheme and police can and do (not-so-)randomly stop people on the street to check that they're not riding stolen bikes.
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I am from a country in South East Asia, and its sad here as well. We have absolutely 0 connection to our ancestors from just 100 years ago. We (and me) have truly forgotten and don't have any identity beyond the surface level. We suffered from Arabification of every part of our culture.
I honestly think the original culture is pretty much extinct. Very, very few of the incoming generation even desire to uphold and rekindle that culture. In fact, it is despised.
Malaysia?
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This is such a weird notion. Waves of immigrants have created some of the biggest most economically productive cities the world has ever seen. If Tokyo goes this route, only greatness lays in its future.
The rest is just nostalgia, and that's fine. But realistically, a big piece of Japanese culture will be well preserved in the new culture that will emerge. As it is, we've stopped lamenting the arrival of Buddhist influence on the island, so too will other immigration influences.
many “economically productive” cities are giant shitholes
some things are more important than just making line go up
Do you actually live in such a place? Or are just looking at videos on Twitter?
Hopefully Tokyo actually rejects this western culture and mentality as fundamentally self-effacing instead, and rejects your kind's weird notions and narcissistic pronouncements of cultural superiority (so weird they'd want to be them - all Asian and Japanese like - omg gross, enrich them right away!) instead.
Eventually they may even come to view the westerner, evidenced by their minds in such a shocking condition, as a fundamentally grotesque thing, and go full closed-country again - especially after their power wanes. Certainly one case would be more beautiful than the other!