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Roadside_Picnic posted:Supposedly Germany's already running about fifty percent off of solar. It makes a lot of sense for Japan to pursue it because a lot of the costs are in R&D and Japan is very strong in high-tech engineering. Germany gets 3% of its electricity from solar.
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Jul 20, 2012 09:22
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Deceitful Penguin posted:You mean as opposed to the flourishing rural areas of the US, where the system you favour is in action? Domestic food production in most of the developed world will never be as profitable as imported food from economically oppressed nations; the only way you can make it "profitable" is to just get rid of all the people and when you reach that point, why bother? Why give a bunch of money to some suit fuckers just to keep a pointless industry going? It is indeed the correct policy to minimize the number of people working in agriculture, though subsidies are of course A Dumb Thing.
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Mar 20, 2013 14:14
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Bloodnose posted:Doesn't Takeshima actually have a permanent population of Korean people though? That one is a bit iffier than the Senkakus. With regards to history, Japan has a better claim to Takeshima than the Senkakus.
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Mar 27, 2013 02:44
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Koramei posted:I can understand why the governments care about these minor island disputes, but why on earth do general populations give two shits about any of them Yeah, wikipedia has serious problems with nationalists getting their way on various issues, e.g. the Japanese Nanjing Massacre article has three images in total, one a Chinese propaganda poster encouraging the execution of collaborators and the other two photos showing the Japanese being nice to local children and wounded soldiers respectively. Here they are for reference:   
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Mar 27, 2013 05:39
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Lemmi Caution posted:The activities of the occupying forces post-war had differing and continuing effects to the present-day. Japan was never really "de-Nazified" because the US had different priorities for Japan, its government, and relations with its immediate neighbors. Germany went through de-nazification, but there was much resentment of that process and a lot of people felt that the Nazis weren't so bad, except for the war losing part. I'd say it was more after the Cold War that the attitude you see today was truly formed, though the groundwork for it was laid starting in the 60s and 70s. That said, I don't think the comparison of Japan to Germany is that productive. Nazi Germany had a literal plan to eliminate millions of people based on ethnicity and featured strong continuity of leadership. Japan had neither of those, which doesn't make the murders committed by Japanese soldiers any less bad, but which does make for harder history. There's no Hitler or Final Solution for people to learn about and reject, rather you have criminality on an incredible scale, which is harder to comprehend and deal with.
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Apr 24, 2013 02:48
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Lemmi Caution posted:One thing that gets glossed over or simplified in the explanation of Yasukuni is that it also enshrines "volunteered" laborers who were killed, included Koreans. That may be more galling than the war criminals by themselves. I think that's a lesser issue, but even so, it all comes back to enshrining literal war criminals who also didn't actually die during the war.
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Apr 24, 2013 03:12
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NewtGoongrich posted:You have no idea what you're talking about. Imperial Japan's intentions in East Asia pretty much exactly mirror the Nazi's intentions in Eastern Europe. Hey guys, look at these Wikipedia articles I read that disprove something that wasn't actually said.  I was thinking of adding a footnote about the Three Alls in my original post, but figured that people would understand the difference. Brutal scorched earth policies and a "literal plan to eliminate millions of people based on ethnicity" are not, in fact, almost exactly the same thing. That's not to say, of course, that the results of it and the many, many other atrocities perpetrated during the Pacific weren't horrible and that racist ideology didn't play a role (it absolutely did), but such tactics aren't particularly uncommon in the history of warfare. The level of pre-meditation, the lack of any military excuse, and, above all, there being a literal plan to eliminate everyone who was a member of a certain ethnic group aren't really mirrored in Japanese policy. Instead, what you had was people operating under the assumption that the lives of non-Japanese were worthless. That assumption led to an incredible amount of murder, rape, and generally horrible things, but the comparison to Germany is inexact to say the least.
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Apr 24, 2013 03:49
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mystes posted:I don't think he actually intended to declare that there was no invasion, although it does sound like that. I think he was just trying to get away with sort of convincing right wingers that he was undermining the Murayama statement but without actually retracting it, by saying "what does 'aggression/invasion' even mean, anyway?" At any rate, this is so dumb that hopefully everyone will just interpret it as a retraction and he'll have to actually apologize and state a clear position. I'd say the main talking point used by right-wingers on this issue is that Japan was forced into invading China by the egregious and unacceptable provocations of the Nationalist government (and the same argument is used for Pearl Harbor/the invasion of Southeast Asia). So while Japan might have invaded China, it was only doing so to protect its honor and stave off impending aggression.
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Apr 24, 2013 15:50
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, I was going to say in many ways the LDP seems (sort of?) left to the DPJ since dramatic increases in sales taxes it is both regressive and pretty stupid considering Japan relies on consumer spending to such a significant degree. There doesn't seem to be a firm ideological basis for each party, but by virtue of policy there is at least some difference even if it Keynesian versus Freshwater. Support for a consumption tax is tricky to pin down from an ideological standpoint. Most European countries have significantly higher consumption taxes than America, which means that their overall tax structures aren't as progressive as income taxes would suggest. As for the LDP and stimulus, it's fine in theory, but in practice it seems like more money flowing into the coffers of people with connections. As for the devaluing the Yen, that's literally the equivalent of reducing wages to improve corporate profits. dilbertschalter fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 05:25
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ocrumsprug posted:In the same way that every Japanese apology for WWII gets invalidated in the eyes of their neighbors, by some crank in Japan, this is "China" making policy. Or by the literal Prime Minister saying roughly "it depends on whose perspective you're looking at, when it comes to deciding whether to call the war aggression or not," as was noted a few pages back. Granted, he backtracked on that statement, but it's hardly as though dumb views on responsibility for the war are limited to a lunatic fringe.
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May 9, 2013 17:50
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Protocol 5 posted:I'm skeptical of any model that requires essentially infinite population growth to work. The demographic issues are a serious problem, but when you look at energy and food independence, just throwing more people at the problem is not a silver bullet. The lack of capacity for domestic energy and food production to sustain the population at its current level leaves them extremely vulnerable to disruption of trade, and if the Strait of Hormuz is ever closed to maritime trade for any reason, they're totally hosed for oil. There's no realistic way to counter the issue of an aging population with more population growth without further exacerbating dependence on energy imports barring major advances in renewable energy technologies, and food imports are always going to be an issue. People who live to be 65 in Japan have a considerably longer life expectancy than 16 years. As for the broader issue, there are plenty of countries that rely on imports for what they need and that doesn't cripple them. It may be bad for ~national pride,~ but that's hardly the most compelling factor.
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Jun 12, 2013 04:43
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:It's the other way round. Lack of population growth is not the cause, but the result of bad economic policy and other horrible poo poo Japanese people have to deal with. I'm not so sure about the idea that weak economic growth is responsible for low population growth. The TFR in Japan is actually higher than in South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of which have done very well economically during Japan's two decades of stagnation.
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Jul 22, 2013 15:17
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Shibawanko posted:Abenomics is a ploy to finance Japan's industries through taxation and inflation, in other words, to finance the activities of the rich and the government at the expense of ordinary people, to extract surplus labor at the expense of purchasing power. The first sentence has a lot of truth to it. The rest of it mostly incoherent nonsense (in particular the thesis of the second article is such an absurd exaggeration as to be almost comical).
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Jul 27, 2013 04:07
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LP97S posted:A lot of Asian countries have incredibly strict laws about drugs and their use mostly because of history. The result is that they drink like fish. Are drinking rates really that high in East Asia? I often hear remarks to that effect, but is there evidence to back it up?
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Sep 13, 2013 06:43
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Sheep posted:The best thing is watching Japanese exchange students leaving for America thinking that weed is as dangerous as crack, only to return to Japan 11 months later as full-blown stoners. Well, part time work is far more common Japan than Korea. I'm not saying that accounts for all the difference, but it does make up a significant fraction of it. On the specific topic of alcohol consumption, the data on drinking is split into recorded and "unrecorded" consumption and it claims the latter is very low in Japan. http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alcohol_report/msbgsruprofiles.pdf
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Sep 13, 2013 14:57
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ozza posted:Geothermal power plants in onsens that were once tourist meccas seems like a great idea to me. Beside the power generation, it would give local economies at least a minor shot in the arm. God knows there are enough shuttered up Bubble-era getaways in the boondocks to choose from. I can't imagine there are enough residents left in a lot of them to object. Providing power for 300k people isn't the same as providing power for 125 million.
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Sep 16, 2013 08:55
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pentyne posted:Same day the US government shuts down? Japan has the highest ratio of public debt to GDP in the world.
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Oct 1, 2013 08:00
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VideoTapir posted:Why sales tax and not income tax or something else progressive? Japan has a very low consumption tax compared to most developed countries and a fairly high income tax.
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Oct 1, 2013 12:37
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Kenishi posted:Well, it definitely looks like the TPP is going to turn out exactly like I expected. I don't follow Japanese language papers so I don't know if they have been reporting on this or not. English Yomiuri is though. I'd be very pleased if that happened. Most of Abe's "reforms" so far have been of the easy variety, it would be impressive if he took on a major vested interest that has a terrible effect on the Japanese economy.
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Oct 8, 2013 09:07
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Zo posted:It seems like everyday my Japan google news feed has a story talking about Japan's low birth rate and how nobody wants to have sex and freaking out over it. What you're overlooking here is demographic momentum. South Korea is just as insular as Japan, but because its decline in birth rate is more recent, the death rate hasn't 'caught up' to the birth rate yet. In the very near future it will be dealing with identical issues. By Western standards, East Asian countries are very hostile/unwelcoming to immigrants. dilbertschalter fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Oct 23, 2013 |
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Oct 23, 2013 05:16
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Rosscifer posted:South Korea is odd though. 38% of all South Korean marriages involve a foreigner. It's a creepy trend when you consider how much of that is from those mail-order bride services. But they've ameliorated their birth rate problems by bringing in enormous numbers of women from places like Vietnam. But they haven't. South Korea's birth rate is lower than Japan's, by a non-trivial amount. The only reason its population is growing is that the fertility decline took longer to occur than it did in Japan.
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Oct 23, 2013 07:12
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:If they want more children born, they need young adults that are not hosed by the economy. They need people with secure and well-paying jobs. One job either needs to pay so much that it's enough for a family (yeah, right) or having kids and a career should be way easier than it is now. Saying that people getting paid more will increase the birth rate is a case classic case of "this thing I say should happen will make Other Thing happen," even when there's no good evidence for that at all. As for immigration, the immigrants will be poor relative to other natives, but on the whole very successful by the standards of their home country.
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Oct 23, 2013 07:38
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Mezzanine posted:http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/12/26/national/abe-to-visit-war-linked-yasukuni-shrine-during-morning-govt/ I have to say, whether intentional or not, I like that he did this right around Mao's birthday, i.e. the day official veneration of a leader whose policies led to the outright murder of several million Chinese and the starvation of tens of millions more reaches its peak. Still a grossly inappropriate thing to do, from both a practical and a moral perspective, but the hypocrisy of the Chinese government on this issue makes me highly unsympathetic to their rhetoric.
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Dec 26, 2013 14:15
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Lemmi Caution posted:Abe is a for real nationalist/revisionist and the totalitarian Chinese government exploits history to shore up their own power. They were made for each other. Neither the Japanese nor the Chinese public has any rational point of view on east asia, at least as us Westerners might view it. In my personal experience, Japanese and Chinese people have a lot of differences that are completely surmountable as long as no one jumps in to remind them that they are supposed to hate each other. I agree with most of this post, but I don't quite understand the bolded part. I feel like every other article I've read about Abe in the past year in mainstream western publications has included a line that's the equivalent of "he has a mandate to fix the economy and if he goes beyond that he'll run into trouble." In fact, I think this claim is exaggerated, at least on this issue- most Japanese people don't have a problem with the Prime Minister visiting the shrine, so I doubt it will hurt him much- though it's on the mark for constitutional revision and the recently passed secrets bill.
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Dec 26, 2013 15:25
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Grand Fromage posted:I've always been impressed by how straightforward and not nationalistic the museums I've visited in Japan are (other than the Yasukuni Shrine's comedy war museum but that is a special case) compared to other ones in Asia. The Beijing museum wasn't too bad, the Seoul one is a mix of decent and utter bullshit, and there's one in my city that claims Korean civilization invented whaling 12,000 years ago among other things. Whereas the main history museum in Tokyo has a whole exhibition room straight up saying how Koreans brought Buddhism and centralized government/civilization to the disorganized tribes in Japan. Well, South Korea never took over and colonized Japan and China never cut a brutal swath of destruction throughout much of Japan. It's not surprising that countries that were the victims of atrocities are more keen on public displays of overheated nationalism than countries that were the perpetrators. Of course that doesn't make ridiculous nationalism (e.g. still banning Japanese TV shows) correct, but I think it is worth considering in mitigation. More importantly, I feel like the dominant narrative of the war in Japan isn't accurate at all. It goes roughly like so: "Japan accidentally slipped into war with China and then again was drawn into a larger war it wasn't excited about participating in. During the war, both sides did some very bad things, the worst of which were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." While this may not be as forthrightly stupid as saying that Korea invented everything or all the bullshit claims about how China (or, worse, the CCP) played a key role in defeating Japan, it's still an enormous distortion of the historical record. For years, Japan's apologies to other nations of the "we are deeply regretful that bad things happened" variety. When a non-LDP government came to power this changed and since then every government has stuck to the apology statements made during the brief period of non-LDP rule, but a number of leaders have cast doubt on the sincerity of their affirmations. quote:Read what I wrote, I never claimed that all Japanese atrocities were the product of rogue soldiers. Pretty much every other regime (maybe not the Khmer Rouge) comes off favorably by comparison to Nazi Germany, so saying that Japan's crimes weren't as bad doesn't seem like a fruitful angle of attack.
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Dec 27, 2013 19:51
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Dr.Radical posted:Absolutely not. They can't be arsed to loving feed themselves a lot of the time let alone do laundry or use a vacuum. put on clothing, clean self, etc. historically at least.
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Apr 6, 2014 16:33
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punk rebel ecks posted:How is Japan's welfare state? Is it as generous as Europe? A bit less like America? Or even tighter? This discussion has passed by a bit, but I feel like a key point here is that "welfare" in Japan and other Asian countries exists in the form of zero marginal product jobs being available, either directly from the government or through social pressure on private companies. quote:with a big grain of salt. I'm reminded of that ridiculous thing Vice did a few months ago about the Japanese sex industry or that crazy-rear end Guardian piece that might lead one to believe that Japanese young people totally hate sex. Think about those two ideas for a second. If you're going to accept their premises that those two images represent "Japan", they're mutually exclusive. You can't have a booming sex industry and have young people refusing to bang. Clearly the answer is way more complicated and nuanced. I don't think they're as mutually exclusive as you're making them out to be.
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May 11, 2014 16:01
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shrike82 posted:To be fair, it's an expat thing everywhere in the world to bitch about locals and local customs. Yes, those terrible expats complaining about traditional Chinese customs like having no manners in public spaces and street making GBS threads. It might be that China is a much poorer and more backward country than the countries that most expats come from, hence they find it difficult to adapt. That or they're bad people. (the second isn't entirely untrue)
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May 12, 2014 06:04
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Randallteal posted:
It's more that Korea assumed its rightful place as one of the largest nations in the world by land area. This is one of Abe's favorite arguments- under the current (well, current until just now) setup, Japan can't to block missiles from North Korea targeting American forces.
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Jul 2, 2014 13:23
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Sheep posted:The infographic is demonstrating that in case of hostilities on foreign soil, American forces apparently presently evacuate not only Americans but also Japanese citizens. Under the present arrangement, Japanese forces are unable to help in those rescue operations or protect those rescue operations while underway even if America requests protection from Japan. thanks for the correction. i just saw "attacking country" sending a missile at the american ship with japan blocked from doing and assumed it was the example i mentioned.
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Jul 2, 2014 13:43
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mystes posted:Representative Kiyomi Tsujimoto (DPJ) has asserted that this scenario is completely fictitious and contrary to the US's policy. It's also dumb to play up this ind of issue, because it's obvious enough that these kind of scenarios aren't what's motivating the push for constitutional revision/reinterpretation.* *To be fair, they are important from the American perspective, hence the endorsement from the State Department, but Abe wanting to change the constitution has literally 0% to do with being able to better co-operate with America or whatever.
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Jul 2, 2014 16:42
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Dr.Radical posted:I don't see how him pushing it for a decade makes it any less about his right wing constituents or business. He's been pushing it for ages because he is literally an ardent nationalist, not because there's some shadowy cabal pulling the strings. Most of "business" in Japan would love nothing more than to improve relations with China. dilbertschalter fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 05:44
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pentyne posted:Japan's food prices are pretty insane. There's no way the Japanese government would ever relax the rice tariffs because they know their rice farming economy would evaporate. It's pretty similar to how heavily corn is subsidized in the US and not supporting farmers is a common attack ad against democrats. America's level of subsidies aren't on the same planet (or galaxy). http://japan-101.com/government/rice_trade_policy.htm Also, the "Japanese consumers won't like foreign rice" argument is sort of amazing, not because it's 100% false, but because it goes directly against the idea that enormous subsidies are needed to sustain domestic rice production.
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Jul 4, 2014 11:51
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Wittgen posted:Oh? I was under the impression that there Chinese Japanese and Korean Japanese who were second or third generation but not citizens because racism makes it really hard. Am I misinformed? I'm not really sure where to go to find out about the realities of Japanese immigration policies. Any information would be appreciated. You can become a Japanese citizen if you 'become Japanese,' which lots of people aren't really keen on.
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Jul 26, 2014 08:36
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Bakanogami posted:I dunno about freaking out. Abe's looking to legalize casinos before the olympics. It's something that's on the table, at least. It's not just japan, it's all of East Asia.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:26
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Wittgen posted:How does America justify having war criminals and rapists on our money? Pretty sure the first step is to not think of the people in question as war criminals. yeah, let's just equivocate out everything here.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:16
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Bloodnose posted:It's somewhat more despicable and less equivocatable when the people are actually convicted war criminals. Jackson got away with it and is on money. Same with Mao. They were bad, yes. But the fact that they were on the winning side of history means it's Less Bad to honor them. What makes it feel so silly is that while there are various things Andrew Jackson did that Americans are proud of and the same is true for Mao and Chinese people, the "Showa martyrs" were failures in just about every imaginable way. Japan lost two million soldiers, a million or so civilians, many of its major cities were leveled and after the war it lost its pre-conflict colonial empire and had its system of government rewritten by an occupying power. You can say that Jackson helped usher in a new democratic era and took on predatory financial interests, that Mao modernized China in various important ways (not that that sort of praise is necessarily correct or that it outweighs the bad things, but it's quite common in both cases), whereas with Japan from 1937 to 1945 the big "achievement" is 20 million+ dead Chinese and South Asian civilians. dilbertschalter fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 23:05
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Kenishi posted:The birth & death rates in the US are very similar to Japan, same with marriage and fertility rates. The reason the US is handling it better is because they have way more immigration, be it illegal or not. Not especially. America's birth rate is high by the standards of developed countries (tfr of around 2, which is almost as high as it gets for rich countries these days). That said, this statement is basically true for quite a few European countries and the problem is even worse in some other East Asian countries right now.
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Aug 28, 2014 07:36
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