Notes on Japan
Not the Nationalist Utopia Some Imagine
Christian Secor
2,112 words
Japan is considered something of a utopia on the world stage today, standing among the lauded Nordic countries and wealthy microstates in terms of its civilizational level. Japan has virtually eliminated violent crime, has a high standard of living, is technologically advanced, stays out of wars, and remains a top world economy despite having seen better days. Japan even has a homogeneous population. Many on the Right therefore point to Japan as an example of the success of positive nationalism.
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6 comments
In 2023, Japan opened the floodgates to mass immigration. The workforce is reportedly expected to be 10% foreign by 2030. Neighborhoods with large numbers of migrants are strewn with trash and Japanese women there are increasingly afraid to go out. (Thankfully such neighborhoods are still few in number.)
A couple months ago they had bloody riots in Tokyo between Turks and Kurds. It’s one thing to import masses of foreigners, but importing different masses that hate each other is idiotic. An article described the recent changes as Japan having “perfected” its immigration policy. It seems perfect only for those who would destroy the country.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but ultimately it’s their own problem to deal with. If they have anything going for them it’s an innate cohesion, a 99% Japanese population, and an ongoing object lesson in the suicide of the West… and one can hope that’ll be enough.
Never was an “ethnic utopia” at all : the Japanese mass media consistently aped western media:
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15238743
“Homogenous” Japan will swallow whatever the west feeds it:
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15241087
Humans are animals too, and most animals have problems breeding in captivity. If modernity is captivity we need to escape before we go extinct like sad pandas.
Terms like Modernity are easily bandied about. But what does this mean?
Less Americanism? How is Stalinist North Korea working out?
What aspects of “Modernity” need to be tossed and what needs to be saved?
It seems to me that the “rats in the cage” analogy might be overlooking the obvious: crowding. People no longer want to leave the house and go into the concrete jungle.
The population density of Japan is 876 people per square mile.
Japan has a 94 percent urban population.
Japan has a Total Fertility Rate of about 1.33 births per woman (and births plateaued about 2010). Japan has an aging population with a median age of 49.1 years old. That means that almost half of the population are over age fifty.
South Korea, which has an even lower TFR of 0.89 births per woman, has a massive population density of 1,302 persons per square mile. Their median age is 44.5 years, which isn’t much better than Japan’s. Their population growth is about to plateau.
North Korea has a population density of 563 persons per square mile. Their TFR is 1.78 per woman and their median age is only 36.4.
By way of comparison, the USA has a population density of 96 people per square mile, a TFR of 1.66, and a median age of 38.3. About 83 percent of the population is urban.
This may be somewhat misleading, however, because much of the land in the United States is open space that ain’t never gonna see a plow because rain don’t follow the plow. Also, unlike the Koreas and Japan, the United States has not been deemed anything like an ethnostate for six or seven decades.
Looking at Maricopa County in Arizona for an additional comparison, we have an area as big as the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, with nearly the same population. The population density is about 480 persons per square mile. Maricopa is the fourth largest county in terms of U.S. population ─ geographically larger than four U.S. states.
The racial demographic is about 53 percent non-Hispanic White, down from about 90 percent sixty years ago. The median age in Maricopa County is about 35 years (2010), which is probably young considering that a lot of the immigrants are retirees from frigid states like Minnesota.
Of course, Maricopa County is heavily urbanized but also has a significant agricultural output. It is the fastest growing county in the country, albeit by immigration rather than by fertility.
A key point is that the urban footprint of over 4.5 million people in Maricopa County that makes up over half of the state’s population is also surrounded by lots of open space (providing that you can figure out how to obtain water if you leave the metropolitan area).
A big nuclear plant about forty-five miles away from downtown Phoenix with an average production of over 3 gigawatts provides the electricity for air conditioning, which is a big draw for year-round residents and retirees. I’m old enough to remember when many if not most people did not have have cars or homes with air conditioning.
It is hard to tease out the Total Fertility Rates in Maricopa County since a lot of the growth is due to immigration from South of the border and from American retirees or refugees from Blue states. The percentage of births are about the same for Whites and Hispanics.
In the United States as a whole, the highest birth rates are in Utah and Idaho and up Tornado Alley from Texas to North Dakota.
The United States as a whole went from a TFR of 3.8 children per woman after World War II to below replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in the 1970s. According to Wikipedia, the current TFR in the United States is below replacement for the native born and above replacement for immigrants.
So why is this?
Well, again, Japan has a 94 percent urban population. There are many factors but I think crowding is a serious one.
I have heard many stories from interns and exchange students about the commutes on Japanese trains. Packed sardines comes to mind, and lots of shameless groping is not a myth. A rush-hour commute across metropolitan Maricopa County probably seems like a tropical cruise in comparison.
It does not seem a mystery to me why nobody wants to start families in such an overcrowded environment.
Owning even a modest home to start a family is becoming impossible except for the wealthy in the United States. I am wondering how hard it is to for a couple in Japan or South Korea to rent a private flat where a guy doesn’t have to decide whether he is going to do a No. 1 or a No. 2 before he can squeeze into the bathroom door.
What percentage of one’s income goes to housing? If you can’t telecommute, how far and how long does it take to travel to work?
Housing is a massive concern for family formation that needs to be addressed. And if you could eliminate the Marxists and toxic waste from education, I don’t really see why you couldn’t pay women to go to school or draw a decent paycheck as long as they had babies. You could probably even provide better perks like big tax breaks for the married.
🙂
The Japanese are das Volk ohne Lebensraum much more than the German were and are. The Japan’s continental expansion of 1930’s was not unjustified.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I doubt that the Chinese or many others would agree.
I had a friend in History school whose family were Germans that went to Dutch Indonesia after World War I and were agronomic experts who oversaw large plantations. I think they took Dutch citizenship, but technocrats of any kind were in such high demand that they could write their own tickets.
The Japanese invaded Indonesia after Pearl Harbor because they needed vital oil and rubber, and under their rule they began to dismantle the European colonial system.
Marxist theory holds that profit is made on the backs of someone else, which is why Blacks today think that because some ancestor may have lazily picked cotton that the world owes them a living.
Not that the occupying Japanese were motivated by Marxism, but they clearly had anti-Western sentiments and saw themselves as conquerors who would fill those shoes with non-Europeans.
White people were massacred with bamboo lances by the “liberated” natives until the Japs discovered that they still needed somebody to competently run the plantations and industries, which the Japanese war machine depended upon. The Japanese then had to quell the situation with the natives.
My friend’s family was saved only because the hired help liked them and (at the risk of beatings) the foreman told the Japanese commander that his former boss was his servant who was indispensable to operations.
After the war, the family joined many other White refugees and came to the United States before the real Marxism and Jihad could take off.
🙂
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