News reports of how badly Japan was doing never quite squared with my experience as a visitor to that country. A recent New York Times editorial attempts to explain the apparent discrepancy.
[The article is interesting to read, but I’m not sure that I buy the entire argument. The Japanese government has indulged in some massively wasteful projects. Still, they probably can’t compare in profligacy to the U.S. federal and state governments (for example, retirement age for public employees, including police officers, in Japan is 60, compared to as young as 41 or 42 here in the U.S.).]
We associate bad times and a bad economy with a breakdown in civil order at ground level. If Tokyo doesn’t look like all those apocalyptic ’70s movies about New York, you figure they must be doing well.
But that’s a non sequitur. It’s a very different culture, with a much greater imperative to keep up appearances.
Japan, like Finland, is a great counter-argument against people who claim the only way to have a competitive high-tech economy is to throw open the floodgates of 3rd world immigration (also against people who claim that it’s impossible for high-wage countries to maintain a manufacturing base). In the long term a smaller population will probably be good for Japan once they get over the demographic hump, resulting in more affordable real estate, less crowding, and higher wages. I give them credit for wanting to preserve their culture and ignoring the many commentators who have called for them to combat their declining population by importing a servant class from southeast Asia into an already overcrowded island.
Another important statistic the article didn’t mention: Japanese cities are light-years safer and cleaner than American ones. The comparison of the Japanese reaction to Fukushima and the American reaction to Hurricane Katrina remains instructive.
… and Japanese coin laundry machines had electronic controls before American-made ones…
-dlj.
Dai-hyo torishimaruyaku-shacho
Nippon Coin Laundry System, K.K.
Matt Yglesias doesn’t buy the whole argument, either.
To me, all those charts in Yglesias’s article make no sense and are out of context. It’s already known the population’s getting older, so the top chart makes sense in that context. Apparently working less and still kicking ass in the world stage is a bad thing according to the second chart. Does the third chart take into account more people going to upper level schools and therefore not working? I’m probably biased though since I’ve used a lot of those arguments the NYTimes article used in real life.
I’d take being nearly immortal, genius, lowest-crime-rate-in-the-world, whacky-tv-watching and all their other awesome traits-type of person then listening to what other countries, who can’t tie their own shoes in the morning, are telling them to do.
Good article and I agree, sounds like the NY Times is pushing the “Govt planning is good for us” theme.
Japan has had failures in govt planning, PhDs are a good example:
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2007/071025/full/nj7165-1084a.html
Japan seems to work well overall, and even better when it is allowed to craft its own free market solutions as in the case of the “Paper PhD” system their companies had implemented prior to the govt financed PhD system.
The Japanese are just better people than us, we can’t just copy their example because it wouldn’t work in a multicultural nation.
Here is a debunking written by a limey who lives in Japan and speaks (and reads!) the language:
http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/spiked-eamonn-fingleton/
The most humorous part of the reply is the conclusion:
“Fingleton was a fool when I first encountered him on the Dead Fukuzawa Society message board in the late 1990s and remains an undiluted fool to this day. I can come up with three explanations, plausible and not so plausible, for his behavior: that he is genuinely, unfortunately stupid; that his mentality is such that once cornered, he can cede no nuance of grey in a debate; or that, to cast a Fingletonian conspiracy theory to work on the man himself, he is in the pay of sinister Fulfordian forces, perhaps the “fascist cabal known as the Bilderbergers”. Readers, what do you think?”