Bucolic Japan

https://twitter.com/DissidentRight/status/900387460978532354

I'm guessing that Mr. Derbyshire's Chinese in-laws have been extremely mean to him; else I don't quite get his hostility towards his children's motherland. He should be happy that they'll get to choose to live in the world hegemon no matter what happens during this century. But no, he keeps criticizing the empire.

To his credit, he criticizes the other, as of now foremost empire, the USA. I guess it's this small-town conservatism thing. This dream of ethnically homogeneous, small countries, tied by very strict but widely shared cultural norms, and ruled through direct citizenship participation. Yes, it's kinda nice. There's this bucolic flavor to it; and if we look at revealed preferences, people all over the world pay big bucks to visit those kind of places (Switzerland, northern Italy) every year. To the point, tourists visiting Japan is a booming industry, with over 20 million visitors last year.

But as nice as homogeneous, peaceful towns/countries are; the logic of history doesn't care. Northern Italy was this collection of small sovereign city states. Then they consolidated into a few states ruled by the biggest cities, Milan, Venice. Then Napoleon came with his steamroller and it all went to hell. The fact that Switzerland still exists has all to do with it being a bunch of (back then) unproductive real estate freezing up in the Alps, and not due to its superior government.

Anyway, to the point, Japan. I know Japan. Very well. There's no fucking way in this universe or in any of the infinite universes out there that the 21st century is the Japanese century. Yes, Japan is a fairly pleasant place to live. No crime, by our standards. Very clean; awesome infrastructure. Amazing service by workers so polite they put Victorian butlers to shame.

But Japan is dying. Japan was the first country to stop breeding (and refuse to mask it with foreign workers), so right now it has a 25% old-age population. One in four Japanese are over 65 year old geezers. Who get pensions and consume untold amounts of free healthcare. Who pays for that? Well young people; who haven't seen their salaries raise, even nominally, for decades, mostly due to raising payroll taxes. The money-printing hasn't produced any inflation, but it has produced a bubble in the stock market and prime real estate.

Young people aren't stupid, they see the writing in the wall. If Western populations have been losing testosterone due to getting their balls busted by feminism since the 1970s; modern Japanese have lost the will to live, period. 40% of Japanese are virgins by age 30, men and women. You'd think it's all the lying Western press, fake news. Oh no, I know the place. It's true, people. National decline is a scary thing. Japan is in steep decline.

Oh, but the don't have immigrants! Bullshit they don't have. Try to buy any groceries in central Tokyo and not see a Vietnamese or Bangladeshi kid in a 7/11 uniform. There's 2 million immigrants. There's foreigners everywhere. 2 million in total. Yes, of course, compared to what's going on in the West, that's nothing. Japan has a rational policy. It doesn't take "refugees". It takes workers, on their terms. Pretty harsh terms. Japan pays low salaries and makes people work really, really hard. Plenty of foreigners just won't take it. Japan is very far away, it's expensive, the language is crazy hard, there's little fun to do out there. And the sort of Japanese boss who takes foreign workers (agriculture, low-margin manufacturing and the like) are often nasty, nasty people. The conditions some workers are made to accept would make many Dubai employers blush.

Of course, that's the only way to run an immigration policy that pays for the accepting country. Japan doesn't have an immigration industry. There are no foreign foundations paying for the colonization of the country by hostile foreigners. The government doesn't fund QUANGOs to bring them. It doesn't give welfare quotas to their cities to advantage foreigners over natives. The Japanese have their country, and want to keep it. Yes, they'll take any foreigner who is willing to work for them, without making any accommodation. Japan is their country and they like it as it is. Good for them.

But... Japan is not going anywhere. Don't believe the hype over the recent GDP growth figures. It's all bullshit. Japan is losing 1 million workers every year. The electronics industry is dead. Sharp was bought by the Chinese, Toshiba is bankrupt. The videogame industry is dying, completely outdone by America's. Japan tried to start an aeronautic industry, with the much hyped Mitsubishi MRJ, but the plane sucks and Mitsubishi Aircraft is bankrupt. Japan today can only afford to eat meat because Americans like to drive Toyotas and Hondas. Japan's future is closely tied to America's. As the USA declines, so will Japan. But the USA has the best real estate in the world. You can fill the USA with Mexicans and Africans and they'll still have plenty to eat, if only. Japan though, is a bunch of volcanoes on the path of the Asian monsoon. They can barely feed 30 million people by themselves. Their economic boom only happened because they happened to be an American vassal in a strategic zone. But America will soon run out of money to feed their vassals.

What then? The Japanese century? Hah. In all likelihood they'll be China's bitch in 2 or 3 decades. And China will not be kind to them. The Chinese empire used to be kind to its vassals, giving them vast amounts of money in exchange for pathetic shows of allegiance. But China doesn't have an empire now. It has a micro-managed, internet-connected demotic regime, with hundreds of thousands of people engaging in government PR. Japan better practice their kowtows very well if they want the Chinese people to show them clemency.

So again, let us not lose sight of how the modern world works. Hell, how the world has always worked. Good government is nice. But nations don't live in a vacuum. Foreign policy is as important as internal policy. It doesn't matter how well governed a nation is, if the international situation isn't good. Venice was very nice, nicer than France; Napoleon crushed it. Same for all those nice bucolic principalities across Germany. If your neighbor is big he is going to crush you, sooner or later. This is a fundamental principle of history. To that, add globalized economies today. Hardly any country is self-sufficient today, even potentially. Every single developed country today is an American satrapy. How long will the US be able to afford them? What then? Certainly not the Japanese century. Nor the Swiss century. Gentlemen, there is no Patchwork, and there will never be. The logic of Empire always applies.

Have I mentioned there's a growing community of Japanese converts to Islam? Of course it's still tiny, but it's really funny. And given the sexual market in Japan these days (40% incels, remember), there's plenty of incentives for it to grow.

[…] Bucolic Japan […]

"Get ready for the Japanese Century"? I could understand someone making that statement back in 1987...

Napoleon would have had a harder time steamrolling Venice if Venice had had a couple hydrogen bombs. Nobody's going to conquer Japan in the next hundred years. Economically, sure, hard times are likely coming. But if Japan can keep its head and refrain from mass-importing workers to replace their people, why can't it maintain its independence and adjust to a smaller, more sustainable population?

This was the point I was interested in making...Japanese real estate doesn't seem so terrible from all the way over here.

As I understand it, his wife is from dissident Cantonese stock and would not identify with the ruling Han State.

Calling Japan independent right now is a huge stretch. It's a colony of the Seventh Fleet. And it will be a colony of whoever replaces the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific. Japan has plenty of plutonium, but it's negotiating giving it away. They don't even want nukes. They know they're useless if you can't even feed your people.

Japanese demographic decline is eugenic. Japan is overpopulated, especially for the developing age of declining energy consumption per capita. They are wisely transitioning to a lower population. USA is doing exactly the opposite of both these things. Dysgenic breeding and immigration, and extremely unwise population growth when physical limits are about to impose pressure on the existing population level. China is not going to be the next global hegemon. They are too shystery, for just one of their problems. People impose this false narrative of a baton that gets handed off from empire to empire, most recently from Britain to USA. The future is simply going to be more multi-polar; no need for a new dominant global power, or even an especially "global" world order. USA will decline on a relative basis and China will have a lot more say, especially in their historical sphere of influence.

Didn't he marry in Manchuria? At any rate, the Cantonese are Han, there is no ethnic discord there. Stop making stuff up.

"Developing age of declining energy consumption" is inmiseration. It's people getting poorer, the middle class being wrecked, it's not some abstract force. The people having the most kids in Japan are most certainly not the smartest, so in that sense the new Japanese generations aren't going to be the best engineers. They'll probably look better, though. China might not be becoming a global hegemon; but they're gonna dominate the Western Pacific a lion guards his den.

They are also useless if you don't have the will to use them. Japan will not have an upcoming century, no guarantee China will either or anyone will. Not bad odds on a Dark Age in a few decades And as far as population decline , the problem isn't aging its being stupid enough to build systems that require constant growth and cheap labor which nearly everyone is doing Also being willing to allow grossly overpopulated nations to decline helps , so long as there is enough food, it will reach natural equilibrium in time. An example, California where I live has a population of around 40 million and its grossly overcrowded, Japan a shade smaller has population 3x that 120 million ! Its ridiculous on its face, as you noted unsupportable and makes people miserable. Functionally the systems we have turn everywhere into an open air jail where people are consumer/inmates. People can't rebel directly for the most part and wouldn't know how to self govern if they did to what to rebel into (Caveat the Left but they have bad ideas) so they fight back the way anyone in a behavioral sink would, by not reproducing unless they are waging demographic war or are driven by cultural considerations that won't sustain the societies they are taking over anyway Its self correcting

I second this. Japan will get nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons stop empires... as long as there is a will to use them.

No they don't. What nuclear weapons is conventional warfare to attain an empire... which is why both the USSR and USA got so good at using soft power.

Prevent, that is.

China has no oil. There is not going to be a successor to the 7th fleet imposing order and calling the shots, and dominating Japan. There is simply going to be relatively more disorder.

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

You're pretty much on point. As George Friedman (of Stratfor) predicts, 21st century is (still) the American century. Unless the US somehow plunges into a civil war (an important caveat). Of course, he also thinks that Japan (allied with other countries, one of which, he believes, will be Turkey) will try to be resurgent around mid century. You don't believe so, apparently.

I dont agree with everything pettis says, particularly some of his priors, such as that american markets are robust and the ipods amazon app store create value. But if even half of what he says is right about china, they'll face the complete reorganization of their capitalization or potentially worse. Unlike the japanese model which has moderate accounting for moral hazard focused on remolding individual workers rather than between capital firms, pretty much zero of any of that exists in china. Financiers often cant even explain the concept. Japanese sovereign funds invested in overseas projects can pay for many domestic projects with capital gains alone. this becomes easier if the cost basis of the japanese economy is trashed butvthe structure remains intact. there is no point in destroying your homogeneity or authority structure to goose up inaginary gdp value if gdp doesnt actually help, and if most of your workers arent actually working. something tells me theyre aiming to act like a trust fund nation, and the rest of abenomics is a theatre to avoid u.s. ire and allow the u.s. to destroy itself. there was a little known forbes writer who often mentioned this and he recently seems to have been softly shoah'd. japan seems the most sane nation. yes, their people are regressing into fungible units of capital. yes, this makes then want to die. was this ever avoidable though? whoever reaches the top is going to turn their country into a demotic death machine or work on turning all people into interchangeable capital investments on ssris. neither is a disqualifier therefore, against hegemony.

I agree that demographics are one of those forces that have a really great inertia, but robots and medical advances are no slouches either. Even if Japan's numbers are less, if each of their forces is commanding a fleet of a 100 drones, they will be quite terrifying to contend with. About medical advances, any prediction of the future should consider the possibility of the healthspan (time when people are functional and healthy) increasing due to advances which will make tomorrow's 70 year olds a lot more vigorous than yesterday's 70 year olds. Bowhead whales get 200 years. We should be able to do atleast as well, eventually.

Keep dreaming.

So Japan is dying. What do the Japanese think about it? Do they think about? Is it a tabu topic? Europen civilization is also dying. The Europeans largely deal with this by denying it.