Antiochus
Member
A fascinating article on Politico exploring the benefits of the Japanese social political model compared to what's going on in the West right now:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...japan-terror-insularity-213807#ixzz45nSrp1ol
What the author dare not raise, and only whispers, is that the entire Japanese political and social model of stability uber alles, which he extols, is entirely the results of a "xenophobic" immigration system that has been the de-facto bipartisan consensus of its leading political parties (both LDP and DPJ) since after WW2. If the author really wanted to tackle the vices and virtues of the Japanese system, he should have concentrated on their immigration policies and start from there instead of rehashing a handful of platitudes over and over in this article
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...japan-terror-insularity-213807#ixzz45nSrp1ol
Japan has found a separate reality—a separate peace if you will—from the globalization paradigm that has dominated the West since World War II. The country’s experience over the past quarter-century raises the question: How open does a modern nation need to be in order to be “successful”? That should prompt us to ask, in turn, whether we in the West have been overstating the benefits of openness and globalization, and underestimating the virtues of social cohesion and stability.
All this warrants a fresh look at the long-tainted “Japan model.” At least as viewed by the West, Japan has spent the past quarter-century under a cloud. After the Japanese asset price bubble popped in 1989, the once-and-future “Pacific Superpower” (recall all those headlines from the 1980s, declaring things like “Your Next Boss May be Japanese”no longer interested investors, pundits and the media. “Japanese” traits such as lifetime employment, so recently lauded, were quickly reinterpreted as rigidity, risk averseness, and a general inability to deal with a new era of innovation that valued the individual over the group. In particular, it became an article of faith in the West to decry Japan’s insularity, whether economic or socio-cultural. Japanese society, ethnically monolithic and anti-immigration, was derided as fatally parochial in the new, modern borderless world.
Yet the era of Western superiority proved fleeting. The West’s vacation from history in the 1990s ended with 9/11. The crash of 2008 had the West scrambling to avoid economic collapse, and neither the American nor European economies have recovered anything like their buoyant growth of the 1990s. Fifteen years after 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the intrusive steps taken to counter it are a depressing overlay to daily life, yet the scourge of the Islamic State continues to grow and has now reached into Western societies. Meanwhile, despite the advantages of globalization, its costs and the socioeconomic damage done by the massive displacement of old jobs—especially middle-class industrial jobs—have been badly understated. Government approval rates in America remain at historic lows, and a majority of Americans believe race relations have worsened in recent years. The West’s complacency of the early 1990s has been displaced by a host of troubles.
Japan’s contrasting history during approximately the same time period—since the collapse of its bubble circa 1990—forces us to consider how open borders need to be, and to judge the trade-offs societies are willing to accept between growth and opportunity. Can a country be “globalized” and “modern” yet not “open”? Japan offers the example of a society that is willing to be less engaged with the world and to maintain certain socioeconomic barriers, thereby trading some growth for physical security and economic and social stability at home.
What the author dare not raise, and only whispers, is that the entire Japanese political and social model of stability uber alles, which he extols, is entirely the results of a "xenophobic" immigration system that has been the de-facto bipartisan consensus of its leading political parties (both LDP and DPJ) since after WW2. If the author really wanted to tackle the vices and virtues of the Japanese system, he should have concentrated on their immigration policies and start from there instead of rehashing a handful of platitudes over and over in this article
