cheaper housing, higher wages, less crime, less pollution
The only people hurt by stable population are giant corporations who want cheap labor and more consumers. Japan will be fine, they'll just increase productivity with technology rather than throwing bodies at problems
US should solve the problem by giving bigger tax deductions to incentivize middle class to have more kids and free child care. But instead of the logical decision, our politicians tell us we need to bring in millions of immigrants
Japan is in a very different position than Western countries such as the US or Canada.
They have a very small % of non mountaneoues land suitable for city building. Add to that their inability to build tall buildings and the huge population, and it is quickly apparent that Japan could do with fewer people in the country.
Now the obvious problem of having an aging population is collapse of any system that depends on the young to fund an aging generation that is now a net burden for the government.
Option 1 :
When immigration is not an option to artificially ramp up net contributors, the population will have to come to terms with an uncomfortable reality. That, the aging population can't avail the benefits they were promised when they worked their asses off, because the smaller young population can't bear their burden.
This ofc, is extremely difficult to implement in practice, because older people are big on voting and will destroy any politician who even suggests this. But, the other alternative could lead to an even worse outcome than the mass migration idea.
Option 2 :
The aging population keeps drawing from the system at the cost of an increasingly burdened working population and the debt keeps rising. Eventually, debt will be too large and the one generation capable of putting a dent in it will be far too crippled by economic burden of now dying populace.
Your comment seems to be an eventual outcome of option one. Where government support for systems for the retired vanish, and again people start liquidating assets to make up for vanishing welfare. As a result, housing may become affordable and the younger generation could gain some much needed stability and options.
I am not an economist and the economic implications of any of these events go over my head. It will however be interesting too see an experiment where a country tries to maintain a stable economy and QOL for their population for a country with much older average citizen, than he norm.
While Tokyo keeps growing at the expense of smaller cities and rural areas, a constant supply of new, taller buildings kept prices from skyrocketing like they did in London, New York, and San Francisco. Today, Tokyo doesn't feel like an overcrowded city: public transportation keeps expanding and increasing capacity, traffic jams are exceedingly rare, and the municipality has been hard at work to plant more trees and improve the air quality.
Quality of life is truly excellent here. You can see for yourself by watching some of these excellent videos made by a Canadian national who relocated to Japan 5 years ago with his family: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwxJts-6yF33rupyF_DCsA
There are probably ways to incentivize populating the countryside, but it hasn’t been addressed successfully.
Uh, what?
After a generation, those immigrants will have children who are Japanese. Their native home will be Japan.
If your point is about ethnicity, then I don't see what the problem is. It's also ridiculous to suggest that Japanese ethnicity will cease to exist. Sure, you'd see more race mixing, but again, how is that a problem?
The US still has native American ethnicity, and that's pretty much as extreme as immigration gets - any modern immigration system is never going to have that level of disparity.
The quality of life for young people is not good in Japanese society right now, sounds like your motivation is more about preserving some notion of racial "purity" than anything that actually matters.
Since Japanese culture/society will not accept anybody into their "inner circle" those immigrants will build parallel societies. A diaspora usually heavily connected to their original homeland and not their host. If those get really big, they will have influence in politics which again will change the face and culture of Japan forever.
This has nothing to do with racial purity. It has to do with what is in the best interest of the Japanese people.
Japan is more than a piece of land, or a group of people who make television programs and video games for you to enjoy. They are many millions of families each with a rich history that the world would be poorer for losing. And yes, if they stop having children or they lose their island then all of that will be lost.
Denying them this is tantamount to denying their humanity.
Immigrants (and furthermore children of immigrants) can and do respect and uphold the culture of the nation they move to. The idea that immigration destroys culture is patently false and there are countless counter-examples.
This view of immigration as "replacement" is just obviously wrong.
Another factor that you didn't consider is that prices dropping due to economic decline doesn't make life cheaper for people who live in that same economy. Their income is of course linked to demand on the labor market.
And last but not least, population can also drop due to expatriation, which inevitably grows in times of economic decline.
Honestly, it sounded like you took any opportunity, no matter how remote, to put a couple of soundbites from a domestic politics menu. They may be your fervently held beliefs, that's great, but if your goal is to persuade,you need to provide backing and details and reason; if your goal is to contribute, it has to be connected to conversation at hand; if your goal is to rant, mission accomplished but not everybody is interested in this forum becoming a soundbite board.
There's an international audience here, and though we're all amply aware of US politics and have our own opinions, discussing Japanese demographics and as a non-sequitur injecting "Democrats are trying to bring in people to vote for them", well... if you cannot see your post from other people's eyes, you may be too deep into specific partisanship for a random person on the internet like me to aid.
(additional two points: - I would react the same way no matter which side is picked; I don't like Michael Moore any more than Ann Coulter, Al Franken more than Glenn Beck. There's people who want to engage in meaningful discussion, and there's people who want to spew soundbits and propaganda. - That being said, on average Hackernews audience does have an overall leaning, which your post may have gone against)
...My 100 Croatian Kunas :)
However, a number of comments downthread have also been rapidly flagged to death. The speed of it suggests a moderator has decided that his morals are so much better than others' that he has the right to silence others' views despite those views not breaking any rules.
It's common in any thread like this on HN. I suggest reading with showdead on (you can turn it on in your profile settings). You get a wider variety of opinions that way. It's nice to break the filter bubble.
In case anyone wants to avoid their own flag/ban, the hidden but eagerly-enforced rules seem to include:
-- You are not allowed to speak roughly when making a point against San Francisco ethics position (you're allowed to speak roughly in favor of SF ethics). (This is the hidden rule you broke.)
-- You are not allowed to give any notion that different population groups have any sort of characteristics distinct from each other (especially not IQ). Note that it's accepted in mainstream science that ethnic IQ differences can be consistently measured, but there is disagreement whether the cause is genetic or environmental, with significant support among scientists for both positions [0]. Basically, for moral reasons, HN requires that you support one side of this ongoing debate. It may or not be actually correct (scientists still arguing about that) but it is certainly politically correct. (Some commenters downthread broke this hidden rule).
In fact thinking about it a little further, a California citizen would have been in a vastly better situation had it not been home to that many low income immigrants. Of course, that would've also meant hugely lower chances of progressive winning there.
To sum up, the progressives it appears import poverty when the region is doing rather well and then campaign on more taxes to alleviate this said increased poverty.
If this is not plain desire for political victory, what else could it be?
Then everything will be affordable again for young Japanese citizens and a good longterm economic outlook for the future is the best thing you can do to stimulate birthrates.
If Japan wants to screw it up, it should allow mass immigration. This way asset prices can stay high and the native Japanese will eventually cease to exist. We will speak of them in the future as great ancient civilization. Similarly we speak of ancient Greeks today.