Japan today has the world’s third-largest economy, only recently overtaken by China’s.
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Japan’s national output is high both because Japan has a large population (second only to that of the United States among rich democracies) and because it has high average individual productivity.
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In relative terms, Japan’s proportion of its gross domestic product (abbreviated GDP) that it devotes to R & D, 3.5%, is nearly double that of the U.S. (only 1.8%), and still considerably higher than that of two other countries known for their R & D investments, Germany (2.9%) and China (2.0%).
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Japanese life expectancy is the highest in the world: 80 years for men, 86 for women.
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Japan is the world’s third-most egalitarian nation in its distribution of income, behind only Denmark and Sweden.
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Literacy and attained educational levels in Japan are close to the highest in the world.
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As foreign visitors to Japan quickly notice, its capital Tokyo rivals Singapore as the cleanest city in Asia, and is one of the cleanest in the world.
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(Interpretative texts at Japanese archaeological sites sometimes proudly point out site evidence for Japanese cleanliness already in ancient times.)
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Visitors also notice the safety and low crime rates of Japanese cities.
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Ethnic tensions are low compared to the U.S. and Europe, because of Japan’s ethnic homogeneity and very small ethnic minorities.
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Japanese agricultural productivity is high because of Japan’s combination of temperate climate, freedom from tropical agricultural pests, high rainfall concentrated in the summer growing season, and fertile volcanic soils.
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As a result of all those environmental advantages, Japan was unusual in the ancient world in that, already at least 10,000 years before the adoption of agriculture, Japanese hunter-gatherers had settled down in villages and made pottery, rather than living as nomads with few material possessions.
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Until Japan’s population explosion within the last century-and-a-half, Japan was self-sufficient in food.
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The debt is currently about 2.5 times Japan’s annual GDP, i.e., the value of everything produced in Japan in one year.
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First, most of the debt is not owed to foreign creditors, but to bond-holding Japanese individuals, Japanese businesses and pension funds (many of them owned by the government itself), and the Bank of Japan, none of which play tough with the Japanese government.
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Despite all the debt that the Japanese government owes to Japanese themselves, Japan is a net creditor nation for other countries, which owe money to Japan.
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Second, interest rates in Japan are kept low (below 1%) by government policy, in order to keep a lid on government interest payments.
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Finally, Japanese as well as foreign creditors still have so much confidence in the government’s ability to pay that they continue to buy government bonds.
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The other fundamental problems most often acknowledged by Japanese people themselves are the four linked issues of women’s roles, Japan’s low and declining birth rate, its declining population size, and its aging population.
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Whereas women account for 49% of Japanese university students and 45% of entry-level job holders, they account for only 14% of university faculty positions (versus 33%–44% in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France), 11% of middle-level to senior management positions, 2% of positions on boards of directors, 1% of business executive committee members, and less than 1% of CEOs.
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Work obstacles for women include the long work hours, the expectation of post-work employee socializing, and the problem of who will take care of the children if a working mother is expected to stay out socializing, and if her husband is also unavailable or unwilling.
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Instead, 70% of Japanese working women quit work upon the birth of their first child, and most of them don’t return to work for many years, if ever.
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Little child care is available to Japanese working mothers because of the lack of immigrant women to do private child care (see below), and because there are so few private or government child-care centers, unlike the situation in the U.S. and in Scandinavia, respectively.
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Low and dropping birth rates prevail throughout the First World. But Japan has nearly the world’s lowest birth rate: 7 births per year per 1,000 people, compared to 13 in the U.S., 19 averaged over the whole world, and more than 40 in some African countries.
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For the whole world that number averages 2.5 babies; for the First World countries with the biggest economies, it varies between 1.3 and 2.0 babies (e.g., 1.9 for the U.S.). The number for Japan is only 1.27 babies, at the low end of the spectrum; South Korea and Poland are among the few countries with lower values.
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Part of the reason for Japan’s falling birth rate is that Japan’s age of first marriage has been rising: it’s now around 30 for both men and women.
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A bigger reason for the falling birth rate is that the rate of marriage itself (i.e., the number of marriages per 1,000 people per year) is falling rapidly in Japan. One might object that the marriage rate is also falling in most other developed countries without causing the catastrophic drop in the birth rate that Japan is experiencing, because so many births are to unwed mothers: 40% of all births in the U.S., 50% in France, and 66% in Iceland. But that mitigation doesn’t apply to Japan, where unwed mothers account for a negligible proportion of births: only 2%.
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Japan is already the country with the world’s highest life expectancy (84, compared to 77 for the U.S. and just 40–45 for many African countries), and with the highest percentage of old people. Already now, 23% of Japan’s population is over 65, and 6% is over 80. By the year 2050 those numbers are projected to be nearly 40% and 16%, respectively. (The corresponding numbers for the African country of Mali are only 3% and 0.1%.)
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Japan’s ratio of workers to retirees has been falling catastrophically: from 9 workers per retiree in 1965, to 2.4 today, to a projected 1.3 in 2050.
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Japan is, and prides itself on being, the most ethnically homogenous affluent or populous country in the world. It doesn’t welcome immigrants, makes it difficult for anyone who wants to immigrate to do so, and makes it even more difficult for anyone who has succeeded in immigrating to receive Japanese citizenship.
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As a percentage of a country’s total population, immigrants and their children constitute 28% of Australia’s population, 21% of Canada’s, 16% of Sweden’s, and 14% of the U.S.’s, but only 1.9% of Japan’s.
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Among refugees seeking asylum, Sweden accepts 92%, Germany 70%, Canada 48%, but Japan only 0.2%.
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Foreign workers constitute 15% of the workforce in the U.S. and 9% in Germany, but only 1.3% in Japan.
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For instance, it is not widely known that 10% of the victims killed at Hiroshima by the first atomic bomb were Korean laborers working there.
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The percentage of Japanese opposed to increasing the number of foreign residents is 63%; 72% agree that immigrants increase crime rates; and 80% deny that immigrants improve society by introducing new ideas, unlike the 57%–75% of Americans, Canadians, and Australians who do believe that immigrants improve society.
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“Unlike Germans, the Japanese have not had a catharsis and rid themselves of the poison in their system. They have not educated their young about the wrong they had done. Hashimoto [a Japanese prime minister] expressed his ‘deepest regrets’ on the 52nd anniversary of the end of World War Two (1997) and his ‘profound remorse’ during his visit to Beijing in September 1997. However, he did not apologize, as the Chinese and Koreans wished Japan’s leader to do. I do not understand why the Japanese are so unwilling to admit the past, apologize for it, and move on. For some reason, they do not want to apologize. To apologize is to admit having done a wrong. To express regrets or remorse merely expresses their present subjective feelings. They denied the massacre of Nanking took place; that Korean, Filipino, Dutch, and other women were kidnapped or otherwise forced to be ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers at the war fronts; that they carried out cruel biological experiments on live Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and other prisoners in Manchuria. In each case, only after irrefutable evidence was produced from their own records did they make reluctant admissions. This fed suspicions of Japan’s future intentions. Present Japanese attitudes are an indication of their future conduct. If they are ashamed of their past, they are less likely to repeat it.”
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Until 1853, while Japan was closed to the outside world and did negligible importing, it was self-sufficient in natural resources.
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Forced to depend on its own forests, and alarmed by their declines in the 1600’s, Japan pioneered in developing scientific forestry methods independently of Germany and Switzerland, in order to manage its forests.
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Japan is also the major country most dependent on imported food to feed its citizens. Japan today has the highest ratio (a factor of 20) of agricultural imports to agricultural exports among major countries.
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Japan appears to be the developed country with the least support for and the strongest opposition to sustainable resource policies overseas.
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“In spite of my experiences during the Japanese occupation and the Japanese traits I had learned to fear, I now respect and admire them. Their group solidarity, discipline, intelligence, industriousness, and willingness to sacrifice for the nation make them a formidable and productive force. Conscious of the poverty of their resources, they will continue to make that extra effort to achieve the unachievable. Because of their cultural values, they will be lonely survivors after any catastrophe. From time to time they are hit by the unpredictable forces of nature—earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis. They take their casualties, pick themselves up, and rebuild.… I was amazed at how life was returning to normal when I visited Kobe in November 1996, one-and-a-half years after the [massive] earthquake. They had taken this catastrophe in their stride and settled to a new daily routine.”
Homogeneous countries tend to outperform countries with high duversity.
Culturally homogenous, sure… Ethnically? Mmmm… Might I mention Rome, as a counter-example?
If you’ve got an overarching cultural matrix to plug into, you don’t need ethnic homogenity. And, I think the “homogenous” nations are at a severe disadvantage for cultural adaptation and flexibility, in general terms. Japan has been an exception, but when you examine all the other homogenous examples, you start to see some different outcomes. I think Japan is an alluring case, but the actual facts of their success are not due to their homogenity, but in other things like an inherent internal flexibility. They’ve been doing this “adaptation” thing since day one, when the first refugees showed up with high technology from China and Korea. The locals happily swiped everything from them, and started the tradition of using whatever cultural and technological innovations came down the pike. Not every homogenous culture does that, or can do emulate them. Japan may well be unique, and to project that homogenity is the reason behind their success is suspiciously convenient. I think it is actually something else, TBH.
“If you’ve got an overarching cultural matrix to plug into, you don’t need ethnic homogenity.”
I think there is much truth in this, and many of our current problems with immigrant assimilation are due to the weakening of the cultural matrix.
However, re Rome: while it is the true that the Roman *empire* was ethnically diverse, was this also true of those who were actually Roman *citizens*? I don’t think I’ve seen any data on this one way or the other.
Well, there’s degrees of homogeneity.
Genetics in the past 15 years seemed to show that the neolithic base of the population of the British Isles is mostly common, there’s still Celtic in the English [they didn't all die or flee to Wales], and there’s plenty of Saxon and Scandinavian in the Celtic fringe.
If anything, Britain and Ireland are more ethnically homogeneous than they are culturally homogeneous.
Or, as I am tempted to do myself, if you want to think of “ethnicity” in slightly more recent than two to five millennia ago terms, then Britain is about as ethnically heterogeneous as it is culturally heterogeneous. That is to say, enough of both to cause plenty of discord but not much of either by world or historical standards.
Just an example, largely true for much of Europe. Mediterranean farmer substrate, varying degree of steppe admixture, then churning about of the resulting ethnolinguistic subcultures for a couple of millennia. A few new adhesions here and there.
That’s pretty homogeneous by any reasonable standard. I find some folks consider it emblematic of Diversity, and therefore use it to justify all modern claims of Diversity regardless of consideration of any matters of degree. By the required standards of our own time, none of the successful Western nations were all that diverse in their times.
Japan does set the gold standard. But as you note their origins- I always giggle a bit when Japanese nationalists complain about the Koreans, or outside observers point out the presence of Koreans as Japan’s most important minority, each in turn to justify their larger claims. It’s true, it’s just that that strikes me as somewhat comparable to comparing Germans or Dutch to the English.
As to what makes the Japanese a success, I expect it’s not the mere fact of homogeneity, it’s that they are homogeneous and Japanese.
In a somewhat recent discussion of crime and policing, some colleagues compared Japan to various other countries doing less well. I forget the details. THe whole question of orderly behaviour versus disorderly was raised. I cavalierly pointed out that some of the distinction probably rested with the fact that the Japanese are Japanese and people X are people X.
Put that way, without need of further exposition, I was surprised to find this was greeted with casual acceptance rather than derision and outrage. I guess everyone isn’t insane yet, not at the basic level.
I’m not sure how dynamic a society I’d call Rome. Good at conquering and administration and at engineering, and adaptable to templates from the Greeks. But only selectively innovative at best, and not so much even that after Augustus. More like “stable” for a certain value of stability. Still as impressive to me as it ever has been to anyone, but they benefited from making themselves the universal state and having only one real rival for centuries, and that on the fringe.
Other than that, they collapsed when dominating the Mediterranean civilizational zone was no longer enough, and outsiders had grown in numbers and capability enough to pop the bubble.
The period of their greatest success and expansion might be loosely compared to early America. They had an impressive, fusion cultural model to sell, and many bought it. But they also had a common Italic population base that was expanding enough to provide both huge manpower and populations for colonies. It all had the citizenship from the end of the Social War in the early first c BC. The Gauls IIRC got citizenship en masse in the time of Claudius. Of note, culturally variant though they were, the Celts were the closest to the Italics among IE speakers in language and genetics. Spaniards, like the Gauls tended to get a lot of citizenships, for similar reasons, and they also had a lot of Roman colonies among them.
Most other citizenship was handed out on only an individual basis to key elite figures or others on the basis of selection by officials, sometimes towns who had done something to serve Rome, so it did extend beyond Italians at an early date but not in huge numbers. All free subjects in the Empire only got citizenship in 212 with the Constitutio Antonina, a law of emperor Caracalla.
I would suggest no connection whatever with the following huge political, military and economic crises or the decline of the empire.
Rather that the measure was a logical consequence of the evolution of Rome to universal empire, and so were those crises. But I would note that this was not in a period of particular Roman success, nor was there ever again any such thing for the Western empire.
1. One race, one religion, one language, one history one set of cultural mores as agreed upon. And all MAINTAINED as such.
2. Japanese their only regret from WW2 from my perspective is LOSING the war.