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Japan-based backend software dev and small-scale farmer.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • No. This would have lots of weird impacts. In the countryside, a lot of employees are quite old. A lot also do childcare for their grandkids at least some of the time. A lot of farmers would be gone as well. There’s also a lot of paperwork that suddenly needs to be done grinding a lot of government to a halt. A lot of businesses as well since, from what I’ve seen form friends’ older relatives dying, a lot of people do NOT have their shit in order and Japan has lots of small businesses and sole proprietorships.

    Depending upon the wording of the policies and suicide, life insurance companies might have big issues or families might have huge monetary issues. I guess we can pretend they don’t all die at once and clog up the whole morgue and funeral infrastructure which is a whole other thing.

    The religious and political implications could be interesting. Bhuddist gravesites in Japan for family graves tend to be very expensive to buy and maintain.

    I could actually keep going for a while, but the short version is that, at least in the short term, it would likely do more harm than good. This says nothing of the actual emotional impact on people.











  • We’ll have to see what happens with the upper house and then the next elections. The LDP have failed to many, especially younger, voters. They see overtourism, falling wages, etc. the young groups get a lot of info from SNS, a lot of it less than the full truth. A lot of disinfo on what we get/do as foreigners in Japan (I’m a permanent resident here for a decade).

    Thankfully, not all went far right. Some went for the dpftp which is another non-traditional party. The cdp is the main opposition, though they didn’t do spectacularly either.

    I guess the question is if this is a blip or the new normal and how much impact they will have in the new government. If Japan doesn’t do something about misinfo and disinfo, I think things will get very bad.

    Edit: some more I forgot. There’s a big issue with (often unlicensed and illegal) short-term rentals. There have been news stories lately about people, often rich Chinese, buying buildings and jacking up rent to drive people out to turn the whole thing into rentals for Air BnB and the like. This is not super common but it is illegal (can’t just unilaterally raise rent like that and also there are licenses required to run the rentals). When Japanese are crunched financially, stuff like this hurts a lot. One thing sanseito mentioned was foreign property ownership which, for reasons like that and rich foreigners in general coming over, buying property, and causing prices to rise, resonated.

    To clarify rumors about foreigners, it’s that they’re not paying pension and insurance, using more welfare, etc. Historically, this was an issue with some not paying pension and insurance (both legally required) but most still did pay. However, it should also be noted that some Japanese don’t pay and the welfare and similar usage isn’t super different and not high. Status of Residence renewal procedures even added more stringent checks on this and recently, even PR holders can be kicked out if they willingly stop paying anything after the process of obtaining it.


  • I don’t know that it is the primary factor, honestly. Jobs keep moving to places like Tokyo where daycare has a lottery system and is super expensive if one doesn’t get into the free one. Add to that that, since corona and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prices for a lot of things have gone up leading to a cost of living crisis. for many as wages stay stagnant.

    Indeed, there was an election yesterday and these were some things that were being mentioned by politicians in the lead-up. In Tokyo, it looks like they are trying to make daycare and school tuition free, which would be a big help. Several schools have even had trouble properly providing meals lately because of the sudden rising costs of food (fees for school are paid at the beginning of the school year so schools have to budget for higher prices and will have worse meals at the beginning to avoid having money for none at the end). Even the far-right anti-foreigner party ran on some kind of payments for kids. Another party talked about getting things less centralized in Tokyo and trying to spread the population out or at least support hose that remain in the countryside.

    As for why it wasn’t faster, rules have been on the books forever, but people and culture make it different. People feel huge pressure not to make waves so they will clock out and continue working. The more recent legislation has actually addressed this and put some responsibility on the worker themself in my understand, which may help. Corona also showed people what could be and many were angry when forced to go back to the old status quo (and one can see comments about people’s manners and patience on the train and other places getting worse in the time since). There’s also what is called “power harassment” and the like and lots of old, entitled fuckheads in positions of power at companies who think they are untouchable and, thankfully, are slowly going away.