I was just in Japan and they had ads for this coming line that we weren't quite sure what they meant. Interesting to hear that it opened, and is the last subway line planned.
I don't have comments about the economics of Japan's railways, but I was extremely impressed with the system itself:
- The app to direct you through the system was really handy. Enter a starting and ending location, and it told us how to get there perfectly. Over the entire week we were there, we didn't have any issues taking the wrong train.
- You pay by distance traveled by tapping a card when you enter the subway and again when you exit. Different from the systems in the US I've travelled (specifically Chicago) where you tap once at the beginning. Also impressed with how quickly the system read your card.
- The stations where you can make connections are labeled really well with arrows noting where to go next and how far away they are. However those connections can be really long distances. I think the longest was 700ish meters, a little under a half a mile. Seeing 400m on a sign seemed normal.
- Despite the distances between the connections, I don't think we had to transfer more than once ever. The lines were very well related.
- The stations themselves covered a giant area under the ground and had a ton of numbered exits. Take the wrong exit and you could be a long way from where you were trying to go. But we also used the numbers to specify where we were coming from if we were meeting people, and guides used them in directions.
- The trains themselves were impressively quiet. Granted Japan is in general, but these were notably quiet. Kind of a shock to come back to Chicago and hear the secondhand music or people yelling on the phone.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Really impressed with Japan in general though. Highly recommended for people to visit.
Japan is very impressive in some ways and very...unimpressive in others. It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US. That and their strange insistence on using fax machines and cash for everything. But yes, when it comes to taxi cabs and those amazing toilets that warm your ass-cheeks while playing music, if feels they're easily 75-100 years ahead of us.
I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
The streets were immaculately clean, but they put their bags of garbage right on the curb where everyone could see them blocking the way.
We saw a demonstration of Asimo, the human-acting robot, which could hop on on leg at this point. And then we would go to get food and they only accept cash.
There were "smoking only" areas on the streets (Shibuya for example), as a way to corral and even shame smokers. And yet most places accommodated indoor smoking.
We could go to restaurants and pre-order from a vending machine and give the ticket to the chefs, but in those same shops, along with most coffee shops (even the western ones), they didn't have easy access wifi.
Habits are difficult to change. Cultures must be even more difficult.
I completely agree and an interesting way of putting it. Just to think of the counterpoint to this:
I think my biggest takeaway from the USA was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
They have dirty streets, but then keep their garbage tidy when throwing it away?!
On the one hand, they don't really have robots, on the other hand you can survive completely without cash by paying for absolutely anything by card.
Even ordinary little restaurants have free wifi, but nowhere did I see a pre-order machine. They hadn't even heard of them, and we've had those since at least the 70's.
Oh absolutely! I think the main issue with the garbage is that there aren't alleys where you can have dumpsters and trucks that run through them. Doesn't mean it's odd to see trash bags on the sidewalk. Their culture of trash seems to go beyond cleanliness too actually. There are no public trash cans anywhere, not even in bathrooms (all blow dryers) and they expect people to take their trash with them.
With the robots, I think it's more of an issue of deciding what type of robot is "right". Do we want to focus on robots that can walk and act like humans? Or those that can make ordering food easier? Cash wasn't difficult to deal with, but it's tough to argue that cards and magnets aren't the future.
I don't want to come off as someone who says cash is dead in 20 years. It was really easy paying that way, and doesn't have the tracking aspect like the US has, whatever that's worth.
London transport was the same, due I believe to the IRA. Clear plastic bin bags now hang everywhere instead of bins, which are unsightly but safer I guess.
Safer only in the sense that there's less shrapnel from the bins themselves, which is part of the reason why trash bins make such terrifying bombs in the first place. However, drop a bunch of nails and other shrapnel with your bomb, and the effect is now potentially greater because there's no shell to take most of the blast. I think the more modern bins that have very narrow openings are probably better from a safety point-of-view, since most trash is rather small anyway and terrorist bombs seem to mostly be rather clunky affairs. The split bins that have specific openings for things like papers, cups, and petty trash, are even better since they add an environmental aspect.
It bugged me so much to walk through for instance Liverpool Street Station, or others, and not finding a trash bin to throw away whatever petty trash I'd collected on the way (napkins, chewing gum etc.) When someone pointed out the terrorism aspect of trash bins it was a bit of a revelation to me, and since then I've had much more respect for the people involved in street planning, including the design of public trash bins and such.
The cash and reservation machines were definitively good examples because those things are simply obsolete. Paying through your phone or with a credit card (apart from tracking you mentioned) is easier and less expensive for the economy (more efficient) no matter how you put it, it's just changing a few bits on some accounts. The same goes for reservations: when you have your smartphone everywhere with you and could do it from anywhere, a whole machine dedicated to it is completely obsolete.
Other differences definitively aren't so clear. The trash is a good example, but a more glaring difference is how little crime they have. Crime is almost non-existent and there are no firearms, this can make parts of the US and large parts of the word seem comparatively barbaric.
Japan values privacy more than other cultures. Cash is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Even ordering online you can buy things by (1) place the order and get code (2) go to convenience store, tell code, pay cash. Merchant knows what you ordered but payment processor does not know who you are, only that cash was paid for order #XYZ. Similarly adult videos in hotels are paid by cash. You put cash in card dispensing machine and get code. Type code into TV.
That explanation only makes sense superficially... why wouldn't they just legislate privacy, or invest in online systems that are inherently private? (client side crypto and whatnot) -- it's by no means infeasible.
Neither client-side encryption nor legislation help if - for example - the company you've bought porn from is hacked and their customer database leaked.
Anonymous cryptocurrencies then? I see that would be more complicated...
But still technical anonymity sounds like a weak justification for technical obsolescence. For cash, credit card systems on retail don't even get your name... I think it could be arranged online even with traditional systems. Specially if it was a national demand, this is the kind of thing you can force companies to do with laws (or they would develop themselves).
I think a more obvious explanation would be related to their insularity -- they are probably the least integrated developed country (due to geographical, linguistic and cultural reasons). Some of those technologies by themselves aren't really that significant for personal productivity (I think that can be another factor), but combined they make a big difference I think.
>I think the main issue with the garbage is that there aren't alleys where you can have dumpsters and trucks that run through them. Doesn't mean it's odd to see trash bags on the sidewalk.
I think that differs between prefectures? I've often been to the south (Kyushu) and there each apartment building has a small building in front where the garbage bags go, and in that tiny building are several "zones" for different kinds of garbage. The garbage men just take the bags out of that building.
> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
I don't know that it's the right way to put it — after all mayhaps things are just as odd the other way around — but some things were definitely jarring, like the ubiquitous vending machines (cheap and with cold and hot drinks) next to houses with no central heating (heated room by room mostly with kerosene heaters) or the weird ubiquity of "busybody" jobs (e.g. any form of road encumbrance having one person on each side directing traffic, and we crossed a lot of roadworks).
The busybody jobs are actually a social policy. At some point the government decided it was better to have full employment than idle hands, which is why Japan has such a low crime rate.
How much does that cost? Could the US afford to do that? Why aren't we talking about "the successful example of Japan's public stimulus in job creation" as an alternative to e.g. basic income?
Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around.
I definitely noticed the busybody jobs. Bunch of people working at the subway stops for safety I guess? Trash collectors on the streets sweeping leaves into their collections. People guarding semi-obstructed parking exits to make sure no accidents occur, no matter how easy it is for the drivers to see the sidewalk.
Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.
> Very true, but I'm not sure what you mean by the other way around. […] Then again, it's really hard to know that much about a culture in only a week. And these are pretty giant generalizations we're talking about.
And that you don't make the other way around, was to note that others may see some of the things in our own cultures as way out of date while others are surprisingly futuristic, we wouldn't know because for us that's just the normal "now", we've grown with these things there or developing so them meshing together is normal
> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.
It's probably easiest to think of current Japan as being the highest culmination of mid-80s technology and thinking. The rest of the world moved to the next three major technological revolutions: personal computers, the internet and smart phones.
Japan's entry into the PC market was timed in sync with the 80s boom economy, which meant every conglomerate on the islands turned it into a fractured, incompatible mess. Even imported standards, like the IBM PC standard, were turned into incompatible islands of technology like the FM-Towns. MSX was the big hope for a standard, but for various reasons failed to get to market in the U.S. (the biggest market) and died like everybody else did when IBM PCs came to market (notable exception Apple).
This meant there was no real PC market in place for the internet to attach to. While everybody else everywhere in the world was getting PCs specifically to send email and surf the early web. Japan funneled the internet into impossibly limited flip phones, turning it into not much more than an AOL-like information portal that the carriers could have just provided themselves -- but also meant it took longer to become the kind of full-on cultural phenomenon it became elsewhere.
Smart phones are, in many ways, a miniaturization and untethering of both previous technological waves and Japan, stuck using very limited internet on flip phones and the occasional PC didn't catch on to this trend.
Thus the first wave of PCs caused a boom in the U.S., the second wave of the Internet caused a wave everywhere but Japan, and the third wave caused a boom in the U.S. (Apple again) and now caught up South Korea (which coincidentally imported the Internet and PCs as a single phenomenon during their later economic boom so they had the environment where smartphones made sense) and to some extent Taiwan.
Japan missed all of this stuff and the catchup efforts never made it off the islands. Even in Japan, the top smartphones are iPhones and Japanese Internet sites look like late 90s design.
Developing export channels for physical goods is almost hilariously expensive. If you haven't just been doing it, getting a new channel going is very hard -- and having few channels for export of PCs and smartphones and an already well developed and competitive global market meant that the incentive to export Japanese made PCs and Smartphones no longer existed (this combined with a general downswing in the Japanese economy making access to capital investment for export pushes more difficult). Japan also spent the 80s dictating how the rest of the world was supposed to do business with them, while other export driven economies were more pragmatic in their dealings with everybody else and so the kinds of relationship building everybody else does was foreign to aging Japanese businessmen.
This all combines for the both the very inward looking domestic market only focus Japan's tech industry has taken over the last 10-20 years and the lack of general technological and cultural development clearly visible in Japan. It's not that the Japanese are stupid or not creative, just that fortune didn't favor them and their stuck waiting for better conditions to coincide with the next technological wave.
I think a big big part of this is that English is hard and Japan is just large enough that they get away with doing everything in Japanese (compared to something like.. Estonia). They have their own Physics and Engineering journals, their own textbooks on everything, their own programming world. In the tech sphere they basically don't really have to learn English at all to be successful and so they end up being incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. They put in a lot of resources in getting people to learn English and yet it doesn't seem to pay off (I don't know what the solution is)
The horrible web design to me can only be partly explained by that though. As a people with an special eye to detail and design this is simply incomprehensible to me...
I worked over there for a year. Dropped right into a RoR and Android shop and coded with them just like an American style one so at least anecdotally, they don't really have a different programming world.
Ruby was built in Japan. But shops like yours are rarity: in patio11's words, "Metropolitan Nagoya has literally thousands of people who can write assembly code that you’d literally trust your life to (you have before and will again, unless your sole method of transportation is bicycles), and probably only a few dozen who you’d want working on a web application."
Part of the problem with the Japanese computer industry was that Commodore seriously undercut the Japanese manufacturers on price. The Japanese companies were used to trouncing American companies in electronics on the price and bang-for-buck fronts; with the release of the VIC-20 in Japan (called the VIC-1001 or something), Japanese electronics firms were put on the defensive and not able to mount an effective counterstrategy. So they catered to a Japanese market rather than competing for the world market. When it looked like the PC was to be the clear winner of the platform wars, some firms (like Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Sony) managed to gain a toehold in the portable market, but the damage was done.
The smoking area thing isn't a shaming technique. Japan is (or at one point was) the only first world nation where smoking is not on the decline. Tokyo is pretty dense, so the smoking areas is a way to keep people from getting burned on the street. If you think about it, an adult holding a cigarette down low is eye-height for a toddler. Smoking in Japan is a very sedentary activity, too. You'll see it, but it's not very common for people to walk and smoke at the same time.
Smoking is very much on the decline in Japan. It's still much more common than in the West (eg. smoking rooms in hotels are still a thing), but it has vastly improved since 2000 or so.
Smoking outdoors is bad because it's crowded and smokers end up scaring kids in the face etc.. In other words they're not looking at from the same perspective as westerners. It's not about smoke in the air.
The predilection for cash is more cultural than technological I think - they've had NFC payments w Suica cards for decades.
I don't think their PCs are particularly backwards either - they have some ultrabooks that never make their way to the US that are pretty sexy. Component pricing is a bit more expensive than the US (about 30% even with Yen devaluation) but you can say the same for just about anywhere in the world (heck, I'm in TW right now and even the best pricing is at parity w US pricing, on average it's 20% more even though half the brands are HQ'd here).
For a time last year due to the Yen devaluation, prices for Apple products was ~15% cheaper than stateside.
I'm unaware of computers being high priced in Japan. Prices on Apple.com or Dell.com are +/- 2% difference. Haven't used a fax machine in Japan since about 2002. Cash ok, but cash = privacy which Japan values more than just about any other culture.
> It's like they're super-high-tech in everything - except computers, which are very expensive compared to what you can get here in the US.
High-tech/lo-tech and expensive/cheap are different axes. Everyone in Japan was doing the whole text message thing 15 years ago, back when most of us were just coming to terms with email. The same can be said about GPS navigation.
They are infatuated with hardware and appliances. That could be blueray players, toilets, robots, game consoles. Maybe it is a cultural thing, but that's how I see it.
Thinking about it, how much software do you know that has been written in Japan (I can think of Ruby, games don't count as they fall under game console, think PC software), compared say to Western Europe or US. It would seem they are at the same level as any of those countries and there would an equal distribution of software written but that's not the case.
This is where I come back to my working hypothesis that symbol based languages make computers more awkward to Adopt and engage. And to that same point, fax machines seem to make sense.
Aside from kanji, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. Their language is complex, but it also seems to have a lot of redundancy built in, even if romaji doesn't count as an unofficial extra Japanese alphabet by now.
Quora has an illustration[0] of a keyboard with english and hiragana characters mapped, and conversion to kanji by software. It seems awkward, but not to the degree that it would stifle adoption considerably. Admittedly, this is a naive view on my part.
N.b. this article links to Spike Japan, which is a very long-form blog by some literary British type guy who visits rural/suburban Japanese towns and tells you all about how they're nearly abandoned due to the oncoming population crisis.
But whenever I've linked his articles to someone who actually lives there, they've pointed out he just visited on a holiday so all the residents have left to go do something more interesting.
People like to hear what they want to hear. "Ghost cities in China," "Sweatshops where your clothes are made." Funny thing is in the back of their mind they actually do believe their Nike Shoes are made by Children, are outraged, and continue to buy them.
Nope. China (365/sq mile) has less than 1/2 the population density of Japan (836/sq mile) and they instituted population control recently. Slowly shrinking populations are generally good for the average person and with most of there debt being internal Japan does not need to grow total GDP.
As to rail lines losing money, how much do you think the average road make per year exactly.
I'm sorry, but basically anyone familiar with the demographics disagrees with you.
(1) a TFR of 1.2 is not slowly shrinking, it is a collapse
(2) you end up a dependency ratio of more than 1 retiree per worker very quickly. So no, it's not good news for anyone born today.
(3) it is even worse, because Japan has the world's longest life expectancy. so that 1 child is going to have to support 4 generations of senior citizens.
Any kid born today is going to be burdened by an incredibly expensive social net, making it even HARDER to afford to have enough children to even manage replacement. It is a serious catastrophe.
It's not that bad since Japans infrastructure requirements are falling as well. And old people often don't require as many resource inputs as children and working age people. Unless you are talking the US with it's relatively unhealthy older population and bloated healthcare system[1]
[1] You know where someone is checking out, the system gleefully spends a hundred grand to make sure their last few months of life totally sucks
It tends to balance out, while they need more health care, they use less of other resources. But put it this way, the US spends about 17% of it's GDP on healthcare. So an aging population is a serious issue. Say you double that and now it's 34% of GDP (yikes). Now consider Japan, 10%. And Japan has a significantly older demographic already. So say it rises 50% over twenty years to 15%. That's still better than the US right now. China's healthcare expenditures are 5% of GDP.
Your wrong. Read up on the "per capita" effects of the Black Death which was linked to a temperary prosparity spike.
In modern times.
2) the effects of declining population reduce the number of non productive children and increases the number of working childless females which more than compensates. It also drastically reduces new infrastructure needs.
3) your math is way off. A 65 year old worker +25y would be unlikely to have two 90 year old parents let alone four 115 year old grand parents. They would also have .7 children in the work force (65 - 25 ) = 40. So you don't stack more than one generation pluss it's 1.4 children per two parents.
This is also just starting Japan had positive population growth in 2010. And negative 0.7% in 2014.
The real issue for nations is needing positive GDP growth to keep up with external debt.
>Read up on the "per capita" effects of the Black Death which was linked to a temperary prosparity spike.
The Black Death decreased the dependency ratio. The birthrate deficit will increase it. Furthermore the "spike in prosperity" was generally overstated, and may have been a result of increased trade (due to Mongol influence).
It took between 150 and 250 years for some areas to recover so the dependency ratio was only impacted for a relativly short part of that.
Foreign wars are a more common ways for the issues your taking about as they kill workers not children or the elderly. WWII failed to have the issues your talking about.
PS: We might be entering a time when economy's are more manpower limited than resource limited, but unemployment trends in the US don't support that assumption.
WWII was devastating to the economies of Europe, Russia, East Asia, and North Africa. Do you just make stuff up or what?
The period 1330-1480 was not marked by significant economic progress. Europe only started to get ahead of the rest of the world economically after the founding of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange around 1600.
I said foreign wars, so US would qualify not any of the areas you mentioned.
The Black Death ended in 1353, so your timeframe is way off. And yes, total GDP was down, but per capita GDP was up as much as 35% in some areas which is a massive difference for the time period. Standard of living actually fell as populations recovered, though agricultural efficency had improved. 1350 + 250 = 1600, 1350 + 150 = 1500.
Interesting cut-off date of 1480 you have there considering the whole Portuguese-in-Africa thing not to mention an extreme influx of wealth starting about 12 years later.
China is in big trouble demographically. They recently relaxed the one child policy, and that isn't really enough. Sinking populations are bad when it comes to the pyramid nature of taking care of elderly.
Much like the US has all sorts of scrub lands in the west that knock down the population density numbers, China has all sorts of scrub lands in the west that knock down the population density numbers.
Not just scrub lands. They literally have mountains everywhere, even between heavy populated eastern cities. If you take a bullet train from Beijing to Guangzhou, it is heavily tunneled for much of the entire trip, which makes the task even more amazing.
> Although China's agricultural output is the largest in the world, only about 15% of its total land area can be cultivated. China's arable land, which represents 10% of the total arable land in the world, supports over 20% of the world's population. Of this approximately 1.4 million square kilometers of arable land, only about 1.2% (116,580 square kilometers) permanently supports crops and 525,800 square kilometers are irrigated.
> China's limited space for farming has been a problem throughout its history, leading to chronic food shortage. While the production efficiency of farmland has grown over time, efforts to expand to the west and the north have met with limited success, as such land is generally colder and drier than traditional farmlands to the east.
China and Japan really aren't that far off on topology.
That is all out west, where water resources are limited and altitude is very, very, very high. You can't grow much at 3000+ meters, even if you had all the water in the world!
I absolutely got tired of eating meat in north Xinjiang since they couldn't grow anything out there.
So here is China's topography. East China is mostly mountains. You can grow things in the occasional valley and plains. Or you can terrace the mountains (done in Japan also). West China is more higher mountains (but not so scrunched together as in east China), and very high plains (Litang is a city in Sichuan at 5000 meters). The occasional agriculture still happens (e.g. central Xinjiang), but its mostly desolate.
Soil is generally much worse at altitude, but you can grow a wide range of crops up to ~5,000 feet and some vegetables up to ~7,000 feet. The lack of water is the largest limiting factor, followed by minimal needs.
Anyway, if you go by % of land under cultivation China and Japan are close but Japan has much higher population density which historically was supported largely through fishing where China was much more focused on grazing animals due to geography.
There is some agriculture in Tibetan Himalayan areas, but you are limited to mostly staples (barley is popular). The areas where animals graze in China are not densely populated, and not much of that meat is exported east to densely populated areas, at least when compared to pork (China's most popular meat) and chicken (China's second most popular meat); grazing animals are mostly limited to Muslim niche foods (well, not niche if you are Muslim!). Grazing animals have not had much effect on China's population density (and if you think about it, the huge amount of land required to graze animals necessarily limits population density).
Jiangsu, a Chinese province of 79 million people, has twice the density of Japan, a country of 125 million. However, Jiangsu is one of those provinces that is completely flat. Much of the densities of China's mountainous provinces (like say Hebei) are quite similar to Japan.
"ou can grow a wide range of crops up to ~5,000 feet and some vegetables up to ~7,000 feet. "
Meters, not feet. You wouldn't even notice 5000 feet for agriculture. Corn, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, and many other essentials were originally developed and cultivated at well over 7000 feet. Now 7000 meters is quite a challenge.
Are you seriously claiming that the places he visits are only temporarily depopulated because everybody is on holiday?!
He's not pulling these stats out of his ass: the town of Yubari used to have 120,000 people, and now has 9,362. This is of course extreme, but basically the entire countryside is following along the same lines.
Here's a random prefecture (Aomori) on Kaso-Net, which shows the areas officially classified as "depopulated" by the Japanese government, meaning they've lost >25% of their population: http://www.kaso-net.or.jp/map/aomori.htm
Red means it contains parts that are depopulated, yellow means it's about to be, green means the area as a whole is already over the limit.
As you stated Yubari is an extreme example. It was a coal mining town. The mines closed down in the 1980s.
There is a global trend of concentration in big cities with the service industry, woring women, specialisation...
There are a few things I would like to point out about this article:
• He goes on about linear trains being confused with maglev trains. Huh? In the exact Wikipedia article he links to, it has a section on maglevs that use linear motors (including JR's SCMaglev), and he describes a linear train (the Linimo = Linear motor) as a maglev later on.
• Before JNR (the old state-owned rail company) was split into separate companies, it was hemorrhaging money from the cost of running marginal routes. Japan is a developed country, why does it need more infrastructure?
• I'm not sure about the Hokuriku or Hokkaido shinkansens, but calling the Chuo Shinkansen is a public work is wrong. JR Central are financing it entirely on their own. They seem to think it's a viable investment, so good on them. US $72 billion overall isn't that bad. That's only ten billion more than it cost to develop the JSF, or 72 Instagrams, and this is actually expected to make a profit at some point (sooner if you believe it brings an economic benefit to the cities it is connecting).
I can't really trust this article at all. Reader beware?
1) I think you just proved my point. The new Sendai subway uses a linear motor, but is not maglev, while the Linimo and Chuo are maglevs and thus use linear induction motors more or less by definition. However, these are both generally just dubbed リニア in the Japanese press.
2) The privatized JRs still hemorrhage money due to marginal routes, most are loss-making and only JR Central makes sizeable profits. Until the Iwaizumi Line was shut down last year, JR East had not shut down a single line since privatization in 1987, despite >50 of its 60-odd lines losing money.
3) JR Central is notionally privatized, but it's still de facto an arm of the government. The new line is being built with the central government's explicit approval and implicit financial backing.
1) I see. Why didn't you just say that more clearly in your article then? The Japanese press runs some zingers sometimes (all the boasting about The Tokyo Skytree, the world's tallest tower* comes to mind).
2) That's why I think not building any more lines could be a good idea. I guess we agree on that.
3) I would like to read more about that (seriously). Could you please give some sources? Japanese language is fine.
I guess another option is to work to increase the population again. There's no implicit reason why Japanese couldn't have more children (the immigration option does seem to be off the table).
The robot option, however, is definitely on the table. It's government policy in Japan to develop robots for elder care.[1] It's just starting to work.
And how do you propose that would happen? They followed the same demographic trend of birthrate decline as GDP and urbanization rose as many other countries. There's no rolling that progress back, and I don't foresee any particular reason they'd become an exception to that rule. It's far more likely the politicians and/or society as a whole will come to its senses and start promoting immigration, but I don't really see that happening either.
There is a natural trend to have less children and have them later, but that's not the whole story. Urbanisation means that jobs move into the city, so that's where the worker go, but that also the most expensive places to live. Old people generally live in the country side.
So the people that you need to make babies, first are naturally less inclined, and even if they are, they live in a very expensive environment. The older generation that could help them don't even live close by so that one additional complexity.
Then there are some Japan specific stuff like the stupidity bad work-life balance. That was bad with single worker family, but that just not feasible when both parents are working.
There is a lot in there that is in the power of the government to help. Free nurseries, quality schools in cheaper area of big cities (note it is useless to give help to buy, just help people where they are instead). Cheap activities to keep the kids occupied during the holidays. Tax breaks. Penalising overtime. Lots of media coverage - having a kid should look something desirable.
There is a trend, Japan won't beat the trend, but right now they are way worse than the rest of the world and they can definitively do something to get back in the pack.
edit: Thinking as a parent. There are a lot of practical difficulties with children that are difficult/expensive to overcome when both parents are working: school and nursery time - generally they open way after you need to be at work and close way before, especially school. Here in the UK, school close a whole 3 hours before either my wife or I stop working. What am I supposed to do short of having relative to care of them, we will need to pay a private school where they offer to keep them a bit longer for a ridiculous fee on top of ridiculous admission cost.
"There is a trend, Japan won't beat the trend, but right now they are way worse than the rest of the world"
Far from the worst. And the European countries in the link are artificially propped up by immigrant births; their true citizen birth rate is even lower.
I really don't think government incentives will solve this sort of societal problem - but even if they could, I suppose it would involve Japanese governments actually considering this a problem first.
If the social safety net becomes weaker (which one would expect if its current strength becomes demographically untenable), then immediate family in the next generation becomes the dominant personal safety net, and larger family sizes are incentivized (its basically one of the processes that led to declining birth rates in the developed world running in reverse, as social safety nets weaken rather than strengthening.)
Note that I'm not saying this is painless, as its a social change which is very slow and lagging the driving force.
It requires a cultural shift. But those kinds of shifts do happen, particularly when they make sense and have the support of the government. After WW II a number of countries promoted large families, and that's what they got.
>It's far more likely the politicians and/or society as a whole will come to its senses and start promoting immigration, but I don't really see that happening either.
Whether that constitutes "coming to its senses" is really a question up for debate. Mass immigration is trading one set of problems for another. They might be substantially worse off.
"A future this or any other transport technology lacks in Japan, for the Tōzai line is almost certainly the last subway line Japan will ever build."
"Ever" is a very, very long time! There might not be any new subways for a few decades, but the idea of a "subway" itself is only about a hundred and fifty years old. How could one possibly know whether Japan will need new subways in seven hundred years? And seven hundred years is just an eyeblink, compared to "ever". The human species is about a hundred thousand years old, and most animals have been around for far longer than that.
They said "almost certainly", and put "last subway line Japan will ever build" in bold font for emphasis. In any case, that really isn't a very strong argument:
"The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer. The lowest form of these is to disagree with the author's tone. E.g.
I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion.
Though better than attacking the author, this is still a weak form of disagreement. It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. Especially since tone is so hard to judge. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.
So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much. Is the author flippant, but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. And if the author is incorrect somewhere, say where." http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
> Matsutani’s suggested cure is shutting down excess capacity to free up scarce labor, paring back investment, increasing wages and freezing taxes
In my opinion the solution is for Japan to default on their debt obligations. They're already aggressively doing that in the classic stealth way, with currency debasement. The problem is, that approach is going to take decades, which ensures a non-stop erosion over that time. It would be drastically better to do it all at once, and to then get on with rebuilding while they have a larger working population. And while they're at it, reform the government that got them there to begin with so it doesn't happen again. There's no scenario where they can ever pay back their national debt, and payments on it are consuming a very large portion of their budget. If they take the long road, it's going to be a really bad 20 years at least, as their current problems are going to get far worse.
Isn't most of Japan's debt owned domestically? Making local companies and retired people go bust by defaulting on debt they own doesn't sound like a good way out.
I don't have comments about the economics of Japan's railways, but I was extremely impressed with the system itself:
- The app to direct you through the system was really handy. Enter a starting and ending location, and it told us how to get there perfectly. Over the entire week we were there, we didn't have any issues taking the wrong train.
- You pay by distance traveled by tapping a card when you enter the subway and again when you exit. Different from the systems in the US I've travelled (specifically Chicago) where you tap once at the beginning. Also impressed with how quickly the system read your card.
- The stations where you can make connections are labeled really well with arrows noting where to go next and how far away they are. However those connections can be really long distances. I think the longest was 700ish meters, a little under a half a mile. Seeing 400m on a sign seemed normal.
- Despite the distances between the connections, I don't think we had to transfer more than once ever. The lines were very well related.
- The stations themselves covered a giant area under the ground and had a ton of numbered exits. Take the wrong exit and you could be a long way from where you were trying to go. But we also used the numbers to specify where we were coming from if we were meeting people, and guides used them in directions.
- The trains themselves were impressively quiet. Granted Japan is in general, but these were notably quiet. Kind of a shock to come back to Chicago and hear the secondhand music or people yelling on the phone.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Really impressed with Japan in general though. Highly recommended for people to visit.