An interesting article that overlooks major societal flaws in Japanese society. The lack of marriage, extremely low birth rate, overwhelmed white collar workers and high volume of psychological disorders suggest a nation that is in decline. The prevalence of luxury items in Japan only underscores this. There is a worship of certain prestigious goods in Japan that trumps all other items: the level of materialistic worship there is troubling imo.
I'm sure Nathan could explain it better than I could.
The problem is that the way East Asian societies are constructed make these things much, much, much harder to deal with. Japan isn't a Confucian society in the same way that China and Korea are but it still has Confucian influence and an incredible amount of pressure to build relatively standardized family structures. What those family structures are exactly has changed from idealization of extended lineages (家
ie, literally 'house') to 'nuclear families', at least in urban areas, in the same way that it did in the West (indeed, it changed in Japan
because it changed in the West). This means that everybody in Japan knows and feels particularly keenly that the low birth and marriage rates are a problem. The issue is that because Japan's economic culture is constructed in such a way as to foster outright obsession with one's job as a positive trait (which the economic culture doesn't seem to realize is mutually detrimental with the emphasis on family) most people who are in the standard, corporate Japanese economy perceive it as
somebody else's problem. Add to this the fact that even though more and more women are working outside the home childcare services are basically nonexistent, there's a powerful rampaging social meme (partly caused by some of the more questionable aspects of the Victorian bourgeois classes as imported during the Meiji period and after) that expressing religious beliefs of any kind is 'gauche' and 'uncool' even though in terms of actual observation and practice Japan is still one of the most overwhelmingly religious countries on Earth, the fact that half of the people live on five per cent of the land and ninety-eight per cent of the people live on about a third of the land (and this is a land about the size of California but with four times the population), and the fact that the Pacific War is
still a
huge national trauma even with most of the people who can remember living through it in their last decade or so of life if not already dead, and you get a country where between one and two per cent of the population is or is on the verge of becoming 引き籠もり (
hikkikomori, defined as 'people who refuse to leave their house, and isolate themselves from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months....in the most extreme cases....remain[ing] in isolation for years or even decades'), between ten and twenty per cent suffer from a culturally-specific psychosis that's a lot like social anxiety disorder but much much worse and incredibly self-recriminating, and there have been seven Prime Ministers in the past six years.
Japan is certainly not in 'terminal decline' as a civilization but its present culture, particularly in terms of its relationship with the rest of the world, is completely unsustainable and the smarter people in Japan realize that. There's an entire culture of people who are voluntarily living as if they were under austerity or even wartime measures despite the fact that they're manifestly not, a huge part of the serious cultural output (like Miyazaki Hayao anime, for example) is whimsical about the fact that rural Japan, which has gone through rougher sh**t than this by a mile, has more resources to withstand the overall unsustainability and keep its current standard of living more or less intact but because of cultural pressures and corporate employment patterns young people are still moving into the cities, one of the most popular novelists' magnum opus is about a group of night-shift bento factory workers cutting up mob hits in their spare time (with Buddhist subtext!), and in general there's a sense of at least
some kind of inevitable crash that will seem apocalyptic for a while but in the long run be something in fact more or less along the same lines as the Genpei Wars or the Sengoku period. Not the sort of thing you'd want to live through twice, but in some ways more of a purifying than a destructive fire.
