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I always enjoy coming back to the forums and reading this thread. I actually work for one of the Japanese newspapers and it's pretty interesting being on the inside of all of this weirdness going on (as much as one can be).
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Mar 31, 2017 21:27
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Ron Darling posted:I always enjoy coming back to the forums and reading this thread. 
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Mar 31, 2017 21:53
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I'll try to post a bit more - it's been a long while I will say that Abe and Trump have struck up an unlikely companionship (for lack of a better word). The whole "flying over here in a panic after the election" thing was kind of odd, but the Mar-a-Lago summit and golfing has seemed to put the Japanese government mostly at ease right now. Trump and Mattis have kind of backed off the host nation demand, which is massively helpful for Abe's political cause. They'll probably kick a little bit more in for show but not enough to really throw anything off the rails I will say, in terms of the economy, it's mostly (in my opinion) because there's such reluctance to go outside the box. I find Japan to be one of the most innovative countries in the world, but it seems like dissent isn't tolerated within the corporate world. This isn't a perfect example, but we had one guy here, absolutely great reporter, hella gregarious with booming laughter, who will never advance to the top because he's deemed "too loud" for the higher ups. The whole "paint within the lines" mentality is completely bizarre to me.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:09
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Ron Darling posted:I will say that Abe and Trump have struck up an unlikely companionship (for lack of a better word). The whole "flying over here in a panic after the election" thing was kind of odd, but the Mar-a-Lago summit and golfing has seemed to put the Japanese government mostly at ease right now.
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Mar 31, 2017 22:46
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mystes posted:Lol, all they had to do was play golf and not tell anybody what they talked about (probably nothing), and Trump got to show he was being a dealmaker who pressured foreign countries into creating US jobs while Abe got credit for his skills as a "wild animal tamer" who could control Trump and magically restore Japan's relationship with America to normal. The hilarious thing is that it worked on both sides hahaha we're all boned.
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Apr 1, 2017 04:19
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Ron Darling posted:I will say, in terms of the economy, it's mostly (in my opinion) because there's such reluctance to go outside the box. I find Japan to be one of the most innovative countries in the world, but it seems like dissent isn't tolerated within the corporate world. This isn't a perfect example, but we had one guy here, absolutely great reporter, hella gregarious with booming laughter, who will never advance to the top because he's deemed "too loud" for the higher ups. The whole "paint within the lines" mentality is completely bizarre to me. I've wondered how much of this will change though. Cultural ideals aren't completely contagious, so you can't expect that incoming generations will continue to push the same ball of poo poo that the prior generations have. A lot of the leaders in companies are still pretty old, probably born somewhere in the range of the 1950's to the 1960s when these ideals were defacto (hell anyone born pre-bubble collapse probably still adheres to them to some degree). Either way, because of the inertia to change, we're seeing companies slowly fall over. Sony has been suffering for nearly a decade now and they've sold off or have isolated their various businesses (ie: Sony Entertainment) to stem the collapse of their company. Toshiba and Olympus are in similar straits as well, but that's more of their own making I suppose. I suspect that the companies that rise of out of the ashes might look more familiar to people in the west than those in Japan.
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Apr 1, 2017 04:53
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icantfindaname posted:Japanese politics is too depressing to discuss in real time, also no native speakers/residents are in the conversation, only expats I am a native speaker of the language, but I haven't lived in Japan in almost 20 years. I don't even live in the same hemisphere, so I generally use this thread to follow what's going on back home.
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Apr 1, 2017 06:16
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Ron Darling posted:I will say, in terms of the economy, it's mostly (in my opinion) because there's such reluctance to go outside the box. I find Japan to be one of the most innovative countries in the world, but it seems like dissent isn't tolerated within the corporate world. This isn't a perfect example, but we had one guy here, absolutely great reporter, hella gregarious with booming laughter, who will never advance to the top because he's deemed "too loud" for the higher ups. The whole "paint within the lines" mentality is completely bizarre to me. 出る杭は打たれる (The nail that sticks up gets hammered down) One of the few idioms I remember from studying for the national Japan Bowl back in 2003-2004 that pretty much sums up this whole mentality.
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Apr 1, 2017 06:25
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icantfindaname posted:Pretty much every premodern culture was fine with being gay if you were an elite man. Modern sexual morality is just that, a product of the modern period, as I understand it. My favorite Renaissance Italy homosexual-relations story was that a cardinal in Venice (?) got real worried about the increasing popularity of male prostitutes, so he lobbied for female prostitutes to be able to advertise their wares visually in public. 
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Apr 1, 2017 06:26
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Ron Darling posted:I always enjoy coming back to the forums and reading this thread. Wait wait. Are you going to write a bullshit book about your career and how some yakuza boss wants to kill you?
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Apr 1, 2017 08:02
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Ytlaya posted:出る杭は打たれる (The nail that sticks up gets hammered down) You've got the free space on the bingo card now, only four more anecdotes about how they're a shame culture insect hivemind and you win the door prize https://medium.com/@patricksherriff/how-to-write-about-japan-593c77b85f38 quote:Show the readers you really understand the mysterious Japanese in a way that no other foreigner ever has, by mentioning zen a couple of times and then delving deep into your psyche (or dog-eared copy of The Sword and the Chrysanthemum) and repeat “In Japan, they have a saying, the hammer hits the nail that sticks out.” They have lots of sayings in Japan, but this is the only one you need concern yourself with because it tells the reader exactly how the Japanese are inscrutably unique and uniquely inscrutable: because they have to do what the group says. In other countries this is called peer group pressure or me-too-ism, but in Japan it is the only story. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 16:58
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Someone must have made a literal Japanese stereotype bingo card at this point. I can't believe it doesn't exist. Also, for people in the country, how big a deal is the Moritomo Gakuen scandal actually looking at the moment? It's got some mentions in the international press, but is it big enough to potentially bring down Abe's leadership? Or is it just damaging/embarrassing? CottonWolf fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 18:23
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CottonWolf posted:Someone must have made a literal Japanese stereotype bingo card at this point. I can't believe it doesn't exist. My impression is there's enough evidence he didn't actually personally order the land sale that it won't bring him down. It hurt his cabinet's approval a bit but you'd probably need one or two more scandals like this for the LDP to force him out
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Apr 1, 2017 18:38
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I guess it was too much to hope for. Though, I suppose rolling the dice on a new LDP leader would be a bit of a crapshoot anyway.
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Apr 1, 2017 18:44
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CottonWolf posted:I guess it was too much to hope for. Though, I suppose rolling the dice on a new LDP leader would be a bit of a crapshoot anyway. I think Kishida, the current foreign minister, is generally agreed to be the next leader. I don't think he's any less far-right than Abe though, though he's technically from what remains of the old centrist mega-faction that Ozawa was from.
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Apr 1, 2017 19:01
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Concerning the Moritomo issue: The accusations made by Kagoike are basically that 1) Akie Abe handed over a donation to him when just the two of them were present in a room (hard to prove), and then 2) the government interceded to to lower the price, etc.. It has been proven (there was a fax that has been published) that a government employee who was acting as Akie's secretary at least responded in a way that indicating she (the secretary) was trying to help Moritomo, although it had not been possible to get things done at that point. There is supposedly another follow up letter (I don't think it has actually been published) indicating that the government would do a bunch of stuff for Moritomo at the start of the next fiscal year, but I don't think an actual copy of this letter has been published. The LDP has been arguing various things such as the fax indicating a rejection of the request (Abe said this but it's really dubious), that the secretary may have been acting on her own, etc. The story still seems to be developing. When I saw the extremely aggressive LDP questioning of Kagoike in the House of Councillors, I initially thought maybe they would just browbeat him into submission. Shoji Nishida basically accused him of being a scam artist who had been trying to make up a story about an Abe connection to take advantage of the Abe name to get donations. They had taken the apparently unprecedented step of summoning Kagoike as a sworn witness (normally reserved for people subject to active criminal investigations, apparently) so they could keep telling him "You're lying! You're going to go to jail for purjury!" There was a moment where I thought the whole thing might really be made up, but with the fax it seems almost certain that there was some sort of government intervention. Unfortunately with the government having destroyed some minutes related to meetings on Moritomo (apparently routinely, but surprisingly quickly), etc., it may be hard to actually prove anything. The question is, if it can be established that Akie Abe intervened, will that be enough to take Shinzo Abe down? Edit: Also, a term that has been used a lot in reference to this issue is "sontaku seiji" meaning essentially bureaucrats taking the initiative to do what they think the administration wants without explicit instructions. If this is actually what happened then the most that will happen is that the bureaucrats will take the fall for it (I think they have already started moving towards punishing someone responsible for licensing the elementary school?). However, because there were direct interactions between the Kagoikes and the Abes, and Akie's secretary was apparently intervening (presumably with Akie's knowledge), this doesn't seem to actually describe what happened. mystes fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 19:33
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mystes posted:The LDP has been arguing various things such as the fax indicating a rejection of the request (Abe said this but it's really dubious), that the secretary may have been acting on her own, etc. Lol because if there's one thing Japanese employees are known for, it's acting on their own. Edit: I guess that could be taken as sontaku seiji. It still seems pretty dubious though. Dr.Radical fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Apr 2, 2017 |
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Apr 2, 2017 05:51
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Kenishi posted:I've wondered how much of this will change though. Cultural ideals aren't completely contagious, so you can't expect that incoming generations will continue to push the same ball of poo poo that the prior generations have. A lot of the leaders in companies are still pretty old, probably born somewhere in the range of the 1950's to the 1960s when these ideals were defacto (hell anyone born pre-bubble collapse probably still adheres to them to some degree). Either way, because of the inertia to change, we're seeing companies slowly fall over. Sony has been suffering for nearly a decade now and they've sold off or have isolated their various businesses (ie: Sony Entertainment) to stem the collapse of their company. Toshiba and Olympus are in similar straits as well, but that's more of their own making I suppose. I suspect that the companies that rise of out of the ashes might look more familiar to people in the west than those in Japan.
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Apr 2, 2017 09:23
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Iirc Rakuten has been known as a "Black Company" i.e. they practice the old ways of making your employees work overtime for free. They have public policies that are meant to make them seem like a new, innovative company like English being the primary language of their company but I'd be very surprised if that's actually practiced. Meaning if you were a foreigner and you wanted to get a job there, you would probably find that your Japanese needs to be at a pretty high level to be even considered.
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Apr 2, 2017 09:58
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Dr.Radical posted:Iirc Rakuten has been known as a "Black Company" i.e. they practice the old ways of making your employees work overtime for free. They have public policies that are meant to make them seem like a new, innovative company like English being the primary language of their company but I'd be very surprised if that's actually practiced. Meaning if you were a foreigner and you wanted to get a job there, you would probably find that your Japanese needs to be at a pretty high level to be even considered. Nah they've definitely take people with no Japanese for some positions. Supposedly they're getting better with the English stuff as well, though still a long way to go.
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Apr 2, 2017 10:06
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Worthy of note is this is the biggest Japanophile you will find and he doesn't work for a Japanese company so.
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Apr 2, 2017 10:19
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Rakuten might have some scummy practices, but the focus on English seems to be real. When I visited their offices during a class trip to Tokyo with my Uni class some years back, they were the only company where pretty much everyone we met spoke a passable level of English. They also seemed to have a lot of foreign employees compared to a lot of the other companies there, the Google offices being the other exception.
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Apr 2, 2017 10:34
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I'm reading the Japanese equivalent of 'Lying with Stats' which focuses on debunking home-grown stereotypes of Japanese twenty-somethings (e.g., proportion of 20-somethings virgins has risen dramatically, they drink less beer, they vote less). It's fascinating because a lot of this misinformation percolates out to Western media, and then the broader Western public. Two examples - 1) 20-somethings are terrible because they never vote. Fact: They vote less than their predecessors but the decrease is largely explained by a macro drop in political participation.  (The graph shows t-scores for Japanese voter participation by age from 1967 to 2014) 2) 20-somethings are more progressive (in Japanese political terms). Fact: There's no discernible skew in political leaning across age groups  (Graph shows 2016 votes for the various Japanese political parties broken down by age; left-to-right: LDP, DPJ, Komeito, Communist Party, Japan Innovation Party, Others) If you can read Japanese, I'd recommend the book だから数字にダマされる http://www.ebookjapan.jp/ebj/385089/volume1/
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Apr 2, 2017 13:28
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And speaking of Rakuten, I interviewed to join them post-MBA. Their management team is pretty focused on building an executive pool that's drawn from global talent. If anything, they tend to focus on HBS for their management program because Mikitani went there and he's a big fan. That being said, the company is doing the same old song-and-dance of Asian companies attempting to build a global conglomerate by M&A rather than growing organically. They've pullbacked from this due to poor performance with their overseas acquired BUs.
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Apr 2, 2017 13:32
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shrike82 posted:2) 20-somethings are more progressive (in Japanese political terms). That's very interesting. I'd always been inclined to believe that one, mainly because it mirrors the very strong "left" to "right" swing we get with age we get in the UK (and also that the very biased set of young Japanese people I speak to hate Abe with a passion).
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Apr 2, 2017 13:38
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Kilroy posted:The young Japanese who rise to the top tend to be like Hiroshi Mikitani and so on (CEO of Rakuten). If that's better, it's not a lot better. Mikitani is still a bubble kid/baby boomer though. He was born in the 1960s and would have been heavily influenced by a lot of the ideals of that era. When I'm talking about the "young people" rising up, I'm really talking about Millenials/GenYers.
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Apr 2, 2017 20:04
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Dr.Radical posted:Iirc Rakuten has been known as a "Black Company" i.e. they practice the old ways of making your employees work overtime for free. They have public policies that are meant to make them seem like a new, innovative company like English being the primary language of their company but I'd be very surprised if that's actually practiced. Meaning if you were a foreigner and you wanted to get a job there, you would probably find that your Japanese needs to be at a pretty high level to be even considered.
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Apr 2, 2017 20:29
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mystes posted:I think I actually heard from someone who previously worked there that they were pretty much hiring native English speakers to sit around and do nothing while all the real work happened in Japanese. That they're actually making an effort to make English important surprises me, THIS however does not.
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Apr 2, 2017 22:17
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CottonWolf posted:That's very interesting. I'd always been inclined to believe that one, mainly because it mirrors the very strong "left" to "right" swing we get with age we get in the UK (and also that the very biased set of young Japanese people I speak to hate Abe with a passion). Opinion polls I've seen on specific issues say they are a lot more liberal http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality/  http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/02/01/what-it-takes-to-truly-be-one-of-us/  I'm sure it doesn't translate to party affiliation because the DPJ is a miserable failure and is still trying to do the Ozawa style Third Way centrist thing
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Apr 2, 2017 22:22
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Dr.Radical posted:Wait wait. Are you going to write a bullshit book about your career and how some yakuza boss wants to kill you? Lol nah, we don't do 外人 staff writers - unfortunately I'm more a glorified researcher so my stories would have to be way more grandiose Kenishi posted:I've wondered how much of this will change though. Cultural ideals aren't completely contagious, so you can't expect that incoming generations will continue to push the same ball of poo poo that the prior generations have. A lot of the leaders in companies are still pretty old, probably born somewhere in the range of the 1950's to the 1960s when these ideals were defacto (hell anyone born pre-bubble collapse probably still adheres to them to some degree). Either way, because of the inertia to change, we're seeing companies slowly fall over. Sony has been suffering for nearly a decade now and they've sold off or have isolated their various businesses (ie: Sony Entertainment) to stem the collapse of their company. Toshiba and Olympus are in similar straits as well, but that's more of their own making I suppose. I suspect that the companies that rise of out of the ashes might look more familiar to people in the west than those in Japan. It's starting to change and you see that in younger generations, but demographics is destiny here. I think I read somewhere that in 2050 there will only be something like 44 million working age Japanese? It might not be exact but if they don't fix a lot of their problems in regards to labor and immigration they're going To run into a ton of problems Seth Pecksniff fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 02:23
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Fewer working age Japanese isn't a problem in of itself. It's the ratio of workers to retirees which is frightening. I've done a fair bit of research work on the Japanese pension structure (top-down as well as looking at individual institutions such as the GPIF, mutual aid associations), they're hosed way more than the West which has its own set of retirement entitlement problems. It's funny because you've had hedge funds bet against JGBs over the past two decades due to macro issues tied to this, and blown themselves up. But at the same time, you know something's got to give at some point when Japanese pension funds can't buy sufficient poo poo to keep yields so low.
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Apr 3, 2017 02:38
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Is there any way to fix it other than implement a reverse China style "Two child policy" (where families have to have two children)? I know that sounds dumb but I don't entirely see how their pension system is sustainable short of that or a mega-western style "lol you paid $1 into it heres 45 cents back when you retire" kind of f you
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Apr 3, 2017 02:59
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shrike82 posted:That being said, the company is doing the same old song-and-dance of Asian companies attempting to build a global conglomerate by M&A rather than growing organically. They've pullbacked from this due to poor performance with their overseas acquired BUs. On that note any good reading material around this pattern of M&A in Asian firms? It's definitely something I've noticed and learned a tiny bit about at one of my corporate finance classes a while back but haven't read up on much.
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Apr 3, 2017 03:02
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Ron Darling posted:Is there any way to fix it other than implement a reverse China style "Two child policy" (where families have to have two children)? The thing is that we know how to boost the fertility rate for women in 1st world countries. It's just that they're all things that Japan and it's government won't ever do. Mandatory parental leave for both parents. Support for working mothers. Paying enough to be able to afford kids. Battling the work/drinking culture so that parents have time for family. 7c Nickel fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 04:15
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Alternatively, greatly ease immigration requirements. But I think the Communist Party has a better chance of beating the LDP than that coming to pass.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:33
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Ron Darling posted:Is there any way to fix it other than implement a reverse China style "Two child policy" (where families have to have two children)? congrats you solved the puzzle A big flaming stink posted:Alternatively, greatly ease immigration requirements. But I think the Communist Party has a better chance of beating the LDP than that coming to pass. That won't actually fix the demographic crisis. Germany, which has had the same or actually lower birthrates as Japan since the 70s, has had massive immigration from Eastern Europe over the past 25 years and it's given them at best a 10 year delay till the exact same path as Japan Then longer term, maybe 30 years from now every other first world country, including the USA, will face the same crisis, as birthrates are higher than Japan/Germany but still below 2. There seems to be an assumption that the more liberal Anglo countries will keep the doors open to mass migration forever and IMO that's a really dumb thing to assume given current political developments icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 04:45
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7c Nickel posted:The thing is that we know how to boost the fertility rate for women in 1st world countries. It's just that they're all things that Japan and it's government won't ever do. Japan doesn't have the 80's style "go drink with boss after work" mentality anymore. Instead they just work longer. Japan is slowly making progress in all of these problems though. Mothers have pretty good leave benefits now in some places now (at least in the civil sector) and I think fathers do as well to certain extent but there is still a pretty big stigma on using it I believe. Any businesses that put too much pressure on mothers might also get labeled badly. In recent years the word/phrase mazahara (I believe this is the term used), or "mother harassment", has slowly started to enter the vernacular. They are starting to combat overtime as well. Japan eyes cap on overtime hours, equal pay under labor reform plan. They've talked about it for a few years now and have pleaded with companies to reduce overtime but obviously it hasn't done much. Now they are putting in some harder caps on it and giving law enforcement some teeth to act on it. The only thing that still remains a problem though are stagnant wages; which Abenomics has pretty much failed to really make a dent in. I don't see how they'll be able to fix that problem really. Maybe they could provide companies with some government benefits (tax breaks?) if they can show they are meeting milestones on salary increases across the company. Providing incentives to increase wages might cause them to go up and it might also result in some companies finally cleaning house and improving their work flow process. I think a lot of companies could afford to pay higher wages if they just improved some of their efficiency. Thing is though. Even if tomorrow they solved all the problems and people started making babies. They still wouldn't be able to stop the inverse pyramid with increased fertility. It'd still be a problem for about a decade or two before it righted it self. The truth is that they just need to open their borders. They've made a few steps in this direction, such as the Highly Skill Professionals visa process, which is a point based system that provides visa's faster than the usual method and also lets you get Permanent residence faster. The main problem is that it still barely does anything to dent their labor force issues since the people that could apply for it are either A) already in the country (does nothing to increase number) or B) Unlikely to come to Japan because the pay is bad or can't come because no company will pay high enough to get the points needed.
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Apr 3, 2017 06:23
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Kenishi posted:They are starting to combat overtime as well. Japan eyes cap on overtime hours, equal pay under labor reform plan. They've talked about it for a few years now and have pleaded with companies to reduce overtime but obviously it hasn't done much. Now they are putting in some harder caps on it and giving law enforcement some teeth to act on it. A 100-hour cap isn't much progress.
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Apr 3, 2017 07:01
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You have to wonder how much the government can "lead" the public in accepting foreign immigration even if they wanted to open up the spigot. I haven't looked at public opinion polls but given the endemic racism towards Chinese (who'd likely be the primary source of immigrants), I'm not sure if there's a solution that's palatable to the Japanese public.
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Apr 3, 2017 09:02
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DiscoJ posted:A 100-hour cap isn't much progress. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/03/23/national/social-issues/holiday-loophole-allows-employers-circumvent-overtime-limits/ quote:Despite an agreement reached by the government, businesses and a labor union that caps annual overtime at 720 hours, there apparently is a loophole that allows up to 960 hours of overtime if employees work on holidays.
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Apr 3, 2017 12:37
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