Newsweek Looks at "Multi-Ethnic Japan"

[Mulboyne]

[Samurai_Jerk]

Pretty interesting article, but I'm not sure about this:

And despite the vagaries of life in their new country, most of the foreigners in Japan are living better lives than they would have back home. That's certainly true of the Brazilians in Homigaoka.

I did a research paper on Nikkei Brazilians and according to all the info I came across that's not true. Most of them are well educated and middle or upper middle class. They often had a higher standard of living back home but the value of the yen versus the real makes it worth their while to put up with rougher living conditions.

Of course a semi literate high school drop out born in Japan might have it pretty tough if his family were to return to Brazil.

[Taro Toporific]

Newsweek: This is the New Japan...more...

Here's an interesting half-truth from that Newsweek article: "immigrant workers always have lower productivity than natives." Not exactly: Gaijin almost always work for bottom-of-the-nightsoil-barrel JAPANESE companies with lower productivity.

[INDENT]
....Immigration proponents do perpetuate the occasional myth. One common misconception: that immigrants alone can counter the demographic decline. Economists say that just isn't so. Robert Alan Feldman, an economist at Morgan Stanley, points out that immigrant workers almost always have lower productivity than natives, meaning that vast numbers of foreigners have to be brought in to make up the gap. (The solution, he says, is to find ways to encourage greater productivity from underutilized members of the population, such as women and the elderly[I]...more...
[/INDENT]

[Big Booger]

The solution, he says, is to find ways to encourage greater productivity from underutilized members of the population, such as women and the elderly

I had a student in a conversation class bring up this very same solution... and I told him sure... Get the old timers who are pissing their pants, falling down, breaking bones, can't see well, to work in factories, labs, and other jobs that require motor skills and eye hand coordination... Bullshit.

And then the women... oh send them to work in droves... and then watch as the "Japanese family" tears itself apart. while mom is whistling while working at her new found job, the children are home alone masturbating to tentacle hentai porn, dad is pissed because his dinner is not ready when he gets home and soon divorce rates are through the roof (they already are but would be more so), and children are left to their own accord and grow up without supervision.

ANd there are just so many women and elderly. Eventually the entire population itself will shrink and even with these added homegrown workers there will still be vacancies... (who's going to pay the taxes that support the old people?) and at what age will retirement be, 90, 100??? Bullshit.

[Taro Toporific]

I had a student in a conversation class bring up this very same solution... and I told him sure... Get the old timers who are pissing their pants, falling down, breaking bones, can't see well, to work in factories, labs, and other jobs that require motor skills and eye hand coordination... Bullshit.

Ditto Bullshit: The average age of a construction worker in Japan is 57 years old!
Damn, it...I spent most of my 6 week summer vacation in the States doing interior trim--kitchens mostly--with my step brother. We are both over 50 and the constant joke was that we were twice as slow as the last time we worked together in our mid-20s. Part of the reason the criminal construction industry in Japan is such a pile a doggie dodoo is the low abilites of those 57 year old framers. (The myth of "traditional" Japanese carpenters is nice joke for suckass wannabes overseas.) Sheesh.

[Charles]

Damn, it...I spent most of my 6 week summer vacation in the States doing interior trim--kitchens mostly--with my step brother. We are both over 50 and the constant joke was that we were twice as slow as the last time we worked together in our mid-20s.

Ah, but you're looking at it from the wrong angle. You're actually working twice as hard! Let me explain with one of my favorite jokes.

On a construction site, the crew had to unload a truck full of 50 pound bags of concrete. They had a new guy, on his first day, so the foreman was watching him closely. All the regular crew went up and grabbed two bags, one over each shoulder, and hauled them over to the site. But the new guy just grabbed one bag on each trip.
Pretty soon, the foreman came over and asked the new guy, "hey, what's the deal with hauling one bag when everyone else is hauling two?" The new guy says "yeah, I was wondering if I should mention that, your crew is a bunch of slackers, they're making only half as many trips!"

[dimwit]

In Imabari there is a towel factory and it is only been kept open by the low paid Brazian 'trainees'. The ones that my wife met were certainly not middle class by any stardard; they spoke no English, little Japanese and looked poor. I have met the well-educated immigrants but they are few and far between and too small to make any difference to Japan demographically.

Generally, rather than having older people work, I think it is more important to get people out of unproductive jobs like farmers and public works construction.

[Greji]

I think it is more important to get people out of unproductive jobs like farmer

Farmer? Got me on that one Dimmer! I like to eat, so why would a hyakusho be unproductive?

[Mulboyne]

And then the women... oh send them to work in droves... and then watch as the "Japanese family" tears itself apart. while mom is whistling while working at her new found job, the children are home alone masturbating to tentacle hentai porn, dad is pissed because his dinner is not ready when he gets home and soon divorce rates are through the roof (they already are but would be more so), and children are left to their own accord and grow up without supervision.

Any evidence to support those conclusions? There's no correlation between female workforce participation and divorce rates. Not just between countries but also within Japan itself where divorce rates were high a hundred years ago.

There is a good chance that the current disincentives on combining motherhood and work have led to larger numbers of women foregoing marriage and children. Equal pay for men and women might be enshrined in legislation but those who do have children are often unable to return to full-time positions and end up with lower-paying part-time jobs which require longer hours to earn anywhere near a full time salary and mean less time with their families.

The answer to both these problems would be to make working conditions more acceptable for mothers so women don't see having children as a career-killer and they can enjoy better employment options if they wish to rejoin the workforce.

[dimwit]

Farmer? Got me on that one Dimmer! I like to eat, so why would a hyakusho be unproductive?

Cause there is about 30 times too many of them which is one of the primary reasons things like rice are so damn expensive in Japan.

[Marvin Feltcher]

Sorry!

[ichigo partygirl]

It was a very interesting read, Like others have said i find it hard to believe that the conditions in Japan would (always) be better than the conditions of their home countries. I guess it depends on the countries and where they live in Japan.
From living in Shiga the Brazilians i encountered there were outwardly very lower class looking compared to the Japanese in the area. They generally lived in pretty shitty housing complexes and seemed to have little/no comprehension of Japanese.

I really hope for the benefit of FGs who rely on visas and for Japan's future that the government wakes up and really starts formulating a survival plan for their future - because frankly telling them to have more babies isnt going to be enough

[Big Booger]

Any evidence to support those conclusions? There's no correlation between female workforce participation and divorce rates. Not just between countries but also within Japan itself where divorce rates were high a hundred years ago.

There is a good chance that the current disincentives on combining motherhood and work have led to larger numbers of women foregoing marriage and children. Equal pay for men and women might be enshrined in legislation but those who do have children are often unable to return to full-time positions and end up with lower-paying part-time jobs which require longer hours to earn anywhere near a full time salary and mean less time with their families.

The answer to both these problems would be to make working conditions more acceptable for mothers so women don't see having children as a career-killer and they can enjoy better employment options if they wish to rejoin the workforce.

You're link compares cultural mores and norms from now to 100 years ago. As your link pointed out:

As recently as the late 19th century, there was little stigma attached to divorce and multiple marriages were common. A civil code and new laws on family registration introduced in 1898, however, led to a sharp decline in divorce rates...

So Japanese have had 100 years of basically low divorce, with women primarily staying home and caring for the family AFAIK. When you change that abruptly by removing the mother figure from the care of the family and inject that mother figure into the workforce through change, do you not think problems are bound to happen?

And comparing olden times to modern times is way off base due to huge changes in society of Japan from pre-meiji till today:

...the high divorce rates of the Tokugawa and early Meiji period functioned as a means to regulate the spouse selection process, showing that wives and their natal families could, and often did, initiate marital dissolution. Indeed, before the promulgation of the Meiji Civil Code, the whole concept of marriage for ordinary people was quite different from what we understand today, and indeed remained so for a few decades afterwards.

http://www.japansociety.org.uk/reviews/05divorce.html

I would assume that children in families where the mother works full time similar to the father then rates of divorce would be higher. It's an assumption I made based on no research. Consider it opinion rather than anything studied. I seldom publish works, but if needed in the future I'll try to cite sources and research topics in depth before posting an opinion on fuckedgaijin.

I do know from personal experience that children I have met who grow up in a single parent family in Japan tend to be dysfunctional. Nearly every "troubled" child I have taught, upon asking about the background, they either live with mom, dad, or the grandparents due to divorce in their lives.

The answer to both these problems would be to make working conditions more acceptable for mothers so women don't see having children as a career-killer and they can enjoy better employment options if they wish to rejoin the workforce.

Sounds great. I am sure those mothers will have time to do a full time job including overwork, as well as manage all the responsibilities that make up being a housewife in Japan, (cooking, cleaning, bento-making, sports day visits, morning flag waving for elementary kids and so on...)
Most of the housewives I have met in Japan already have a full time job... they don't want nor need a second one... but I have only met a few 20-30 housewives here... so perhaps my sample is a bit small and regionalised. Perhaps I should come up with some anketo (questionnaire) and distribute it randomly throughout all the major cities of Japan and including sporadic country towns to insure a truly random sampling.

Reality is, many housewives already have it rough. They work hard and put in the hours. Sure they may be about to pull in a part time... but a full time job in Japan requires more time than what is available to do the job as well as being a mother at home.

I think the same would be true of a house husband.. it'd be tough to manage the family and work a full time job.

If not divorce then the quality of the family will suffer as mom and dad both will be absent longer from the family as opposed to at least one being home and available. I think (again another opinion based on lack of research and citation) that children of younger ages would seriously suffer from a lack of a parent being home to care for them.

Oh childcare might help but it's not the same. And as they get older and see less and less of their parent's it comes to question, who's child is it... the parent's or daycare.

I think this problem of shrinking population needs to be dealt with in a variety of ways. Perhaps make getting jobs for women easier and stop discrimination based on marriage and children so they do feel comfortable trying to manage a home and job (but I see problems in that).

Inviting foreigners in and paying them salaries similar to natives would probably take care of the "reduced productivity)... but again that's another assumption/opinion (damn me and my opinions).
When you ask foreigners in, pay them crap wages, make them live in secluded communes of foreign villages and then try to kick them out as soon as their visa expires with no hope... I doubt I would be as productive as I possible could be as well....

Elderly working might take care of some service jobs like the well-known rojin flag wavers.... but elderly can't do all jobs especially those that require heavy lifting, balance, eye-hand coord. etc...

Injecting foreigners here comes with problems too but it's better than running out of money and watching taxes shoot through the roof to help care for those rojin.

[Mulboyne]

BB, your argument seemed to be that a working mum doesn't have time to look after the kids so they go to hell and then dad gets angry because he doesn't get his meals and the stresses result in a divorce explosion which is bad for the kids again.

That's an argument that seems to rule out any role for a working mother in society which doesn't seem a practical starting point when the female participation rate in the workforce is already at 55% (higher than Germany). It also doesn't explain why the high proportion of women in the workforce post war wasn't also associated with rising divorce rates and dysfunctional families. In short, there are a whole host of other factors at work which mean that there isn't the straightforward causal connection between working mothers and broken homes that you describe.

That postwar period alone means that there was never 100 years of women primarily staying at home and stable, low, divorce rates. The divorce rate declined steadily to a low in 1963 and subsequently increased. Juvenile delinquency may be hitting the headlines now but it was just as high in the late 70s so again there is no neat correlation. I would agree, though, that it was common during a large part of the postwar period for a married woman to leave the workforce and only consider returning to a part-time position after the children had grown up.

A couple of years ago there was a report that it cost 13 million yen to raise a child to 21. This claim was met with widespread incredulity and there was more agreement with a private research institute which estimated it would take at least twice that amount and maybe as much as 60 million. For many families, the costs of raising children in Japan can only be met by two incomes so that would seem to provide even more incentive to shape working conditions so that they suit mothers and allow fathers more time with their families.

Single mothers are a big issue as you mention and I would agree that a child will surely benefit from having both parents around. Whether or not the mother was working before the divorce it is almost certain that she'll be working after it. At nearly 90%, a higher proportion of single mothers work in Japan than in any other developed country but their income amounts to only around 40% of the average household income. That's perhaps not surprising when a woman's income is about 65% of the average man's. It does, however, mean that a lot of these households are on or around the poverty level. Around two-thirds are divorced which makes them older on average than their counterparts in the US where the biggest group is the never-married, including teenage mothers. Only one fifth report receiving child support payments from the father.

It would seem to me that rather than bemoan the fact that women are in the workforce, it would be better to recognize it as part of society and work to create the conditions where there is income equality and employers who respect the obligations that parents have to their children. Improve working conditions for mothers and you'll help the families and if it encourages more mothers to consider staying in or joining the workforce then so be it.

[Big Booger]

So with 55% already in the game, that leaves 45% not but could be.. of those how many actually want to? I dunno.

Regardless, lest we forget to think about the topic at hand, 45% of the women who don't work still couldn't possibly make up for the retirees soon to be a burden on the Japanese system.

[Samurai_Jerk]

Well I read a lot of academic studies like "Brokered Homeland" by Joshua Hotaka Roth on Nikkei Brazilians for my paper and most claimed that the Nikkei were generally middle class and educated. BTW, I've been to Brazil and in my experience not that many people there do speak English. Even if they are middle class.