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The labor shortage in Japan is at its highest in more than four decades, according to new government data. Low birth rates and an aging population have resulted in a shrinking workforce.
There are currently 1.48 jobs for every applicant, the highest figure since 1974 when fast growth drove the ratio to 1.53. The data outpaces the labor shortage peak in the early 1990s, during the country's period of economic stagnation.
[...] The analyst said the number of women and older people who have been joining the labor force has increased, as "the labor shortage is forcing companies to hire people who previously weren't looking for work."
Source: RT
[T]he number of families living on an income lower than the public welfare assistance level more than doubled in the 20 years after the asset price bubble popped in 1992, according to a study by Kensaku Tomuro of Yamagata University.
Now 16 percent of Japanese children live below the poverty line, according to Health Ministry statistics, but among single-parent families, the rate hits 55 percent. Poverty rates in Osaka are among the worst.
[...] Children of single or poor parents often are ostracized in their communities, Tokumaru said, noting that other parents do not want their children playing with children from a "bad house."
Source: The Washington Post
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 31 2017, @01:02PM (1 child)
I'd agree with that assessment.
"If we replace our people with Chinese, and replace our government with a provincial Chinese government, then we will be super successful"
Who is this "we" exactly?
And whats so wrong with the Japanese people themselves, that they need to self genocide themselves in order to "win"? We nuked them twice before we found out about tentacle pr0n, so they can expect a couple more mushroom clouds for that, but even tentacle pr0n doesn't deserve intentional cultural genocide.
A lot of racial supremacist beliefs are embedded in the support of immigration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @04:18PM
I think this is one rare time I agree with your analysis.
Just have one nitpick. It's not racial supremacist beliefs. It's the belief that people raised in any and all cultures are interchangeable cogs. I don't know that it fits with racism, but it strikes me as just as bad a racism, maybe even worse. It's replacing human diversity with some kind of commodity COTS (comes off the shelf) mentality.
Humans are not mass produced meat robots with part numbers! It's almost some kind of misapprehension of human nature you'd think would only be possible for somebody coming from a star system hundreds of light years away and only making a half-assed study of this planet....
If it makes me racist to observe that for whatever reason, Europeans (by extension USA) and Japanese have cultures that promote modern technological societies, then I'm a fucking racist. Maybe reality has a racist bias as a small exception to its normally liberal bias. Europe resurrected the cultures of ancient Greece where democracy and science were born. Japan was mostly feudal until the Meiji era when they began the century and a half process of embracing those ancient Greek ideas in double time to catch up to Europeans.
Of course I'm massively simplifying. But I mean for fuck's sake. I run through the Vision Gran Turismo mode in GT6, and I see, you know, here are some Germans talking about engineering and artistry that went into this concept car, here are some French talking about engineering and artistry that went into that concept car, here are some Japanese talking about engineering and artistry that went into this other concept car. You know?
Maybe some day for the rest of the world, but culture matters. Culture is a big part of who a person is. Some cultures are perhaps too idealistic and impractical, some cultures are pragmatic, some are oriented towards this, that, or the other thing, and there are some cultures that are abjectly in every objective measure just fucking bad (looking at Thar cultures). I'm not saying that there is One Culture to Rule them All (The Culture?) or a "best" culture.