> Everybody speaks the same language and has the same cultural norms, which are the foundations for any high-trust society.
This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.
The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.
Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.
Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.
The Japanese government, like France, doesn't keep track of ethnicity. That number means citizens and everyone just reports it as if it's ethnicity. You wouldn't be able to tell if some of them are half Korean or Chinese.
Tokyo in particular has a lot of immigrants these days, and I think you'd only notice if you read their nametags at the convenience store.
Last year, less than 9,000 foreigners naturalized into a population of 123 million.
In order to naturalize, you must present a compelling case to do so: you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education, must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially, must have no criminal record in Japan or elsewhere, and nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
I said "half" for a reason, I wasn't talking about naturalized citizens but rather their descendants or people with part foreign ancestry. Zainichi Koreans are the main example I think.
Nope. You must give a reason statement but it doesn't need to be compelling.
> you must speak, read, and write Japanese to the level required by compulsory education
Technically true but misleading - yes it's permitted to leave school at 14 in Japan, but very few children do.
> must demonstrate that you can and will supporting yourself financially
Up to a point. It's more "must have a household income equivalent to a minimum-wage full-time job, or equivalent lump sum assets, and not be behind on your taxes".
> nominally must be married to a Japanese citizen
What? No.
> Japan does not allow dual citizenship. If you naturalize, you are required to show proof that you have surrendered any non-Japanese citizenship.
Right, which is exactly what makes "less than 9,000 foreigners" a very misleading figure. Naturalisation gains you little compared to living as a foreign permanent resident, and requires renouncing citizenship, so most people don't.
For the overwhelming majority of people just becoming a permanent resident is more than enough - there's not a strong need to become a Japanese citizen vs. permanent residency outside of the right to vote, and for overwhelming majority, the trade-off isn't worth it.
But Japan is not a particularly difficult country to naturalize in if you so desire. The N1 can be studied for and passed without being fluent. Supporting yourself financially basically means having roughly full-time employment. No idea where you got the idea you need to be married to a Japanese citizen, not true at all.
In the million of these discussions I've seen, this is usually the first/only explanation people jump to. (moreso for people only superficially familiar with Japan).
I'm speaking more generally about all comparisons between countries. The US is constantly compared to the Nordic countries and people constantly wonder why they're so much better on axes like healthcare and education. Very little attention is given to the obvious explanation that it's easier to treat and to educate a relatively homogeneous population.
… In the 1980s, Ireland was _extremely_ homogenous. This was not a place that people came to, it was a place that people left. Today, 20% of the population was born outside the state, and Ireland has one of the highest immigration rates in the world.
Spoiler: The education and health systems in 1980 were _far_ worse than today. Like, really, there’s no comparison. They’re not exactly world leading now (in particular the health service has a constant staffing crisis) but they were really quite bad by European standards back then. When I started primary school in 1989 or so, there were more than 40 kids in my class; today there’s a cap of 30 and the average is 22 or so. Health, education, and social services were bad because we didn’t spend enough money on them.
Organisation and resourcing seem like more obvious causes of problems with US healthcare and education than _demographics_, tbh.
Strongly disagree. People jump to that when they see a healthy society that's relatively homogeneous, and ignore counterexamples like relatively homogeneous countries, or states within countries, that have poor education/healthcare/etc. It's a post-facto explanation with no predictive power, and people jump to it only because it's superficially obvious.
Please do elaborate—what is the "this" that is not new? People cherry picking words out of which to construct strawmen to attack instead of actually engaging with the ideas actually put forward?
> Genetic profiles? Advocating for racial purity on HN, that's a new one. Wow.
You know full well that's not what I said. Deliberately misconstruing someone's words to make them sound crazy is unfortunately common enough on HN.
One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo, to the point where people genuinely have begun to believe that they don't. There's a world in which we respect the effects of genes while still also respecting individuals as fellow humans. I hope some day we get to that world—many lives will be saved and improved if we can get past this politically-medicated denial of the science of genes.
> Have a Jamaican newborn adopted by a Japanese family in Japan and a Japanese newborn adopted by a Jamaican family in Jamaica and see how each ends up.
If "genetics cause a real difference" here, what are they? If the difference is negligible in contrast to the influence parenting and society have, why not acknowledge that? To just ignore it is pseudo-science.
I didn't respond to that because OP's line of argument was just:
* Misconstrue what I said to be supportive of ideas of racial purity.
* Pretend that I didn't already build in culture into my original argument ("the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for")
Obviously culture plays a role, and culture can be adopted. I didn't respond to that part of their post because I already argued as much. I'm very much in agreement with them that culture is an enormous factor, and in many types of outcomes it's certainly the largest.
Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
What they're missing—and what too many people feel like they're not allowed to talk about—is that genetics also plays a large role in many types of outcomes, especially in the realm of healthcare. Ignoring that because it's politically inexpedient is a problem, and pointing it out doesn't make me an advocate for racial purity: we can talk about the role of genetics and the difficulty in treating a diverse population while still believing that diversity is, on the balance, a good thing!
> Where I disagree with them is the idea that mentioning genetics at all makes me a) wrong and b) an advocate for racial purity.
FWIW I don't have that impression, that's not what I'm arguing against, I just think the cultural factors (speaking the same language fluidly) are really so much more important that I'd even say they're the only thing that "really" matters. For example, how much does healthcare have to do with social cohesion? If there were no people with myopia or only people with myopia in a country, would they get along better?
Also, consider how women were and are neglected in medicine.
Taking account of genetic differences seems mostly an issue of just actually doing it. If only women or men or Japanese people lived somewhere, the doctor could make a few, tiny, assumptions more. If people are mixed, they have to investigate what's in front of them, and while that may be a bit more work or more costly in a few instances, I think it would just make medicine more robust.
> One of the worst long-term consequences of Nazi rule has been the degree to which pointing out that genes do cause real differences has become taboo
I think this hot take should be reconsidered! Surely the above consequence is not anywhere near the top 10. There were entire ethnic groups virtually wiped out, cities leveled, European society set back decades.
And: the cautionary tales for naive reliance on genetic explanations for "good" versus "bad" tendencies in society go way beyond Nazism -- historically, they didn't even start there.
This is rarely talked about but is so important, and any comparisons between countries that fail to take this into account are severely missing the mark.
The US is 59% white but even that racial category is largely a human construct that doesn't reflect the truly bewildering variety of national origins that lumps together.
Norway, meanwhile, is 75% ethnically Norwegian. Finland is 88% Finnish. Japan is 98% ethically Japanese.
Many things—from healthcare to crime prevention to sanitation to education to democracy—become substantially easier the smaller the range of genetic profiles and cultural backgrounds you have to account for.