I couldn't bear to include the rest of the stupid Washington Post title.
On low birthrates - that's what immigration is for. That's what Sweden does, and it might not work out perfectly* but it works. Municipalities that take care of loads of immigrants do well economically - and also have nice food. I mean, a big newspaper just used my small town as the perfect example of Sweden's "Sudden Dying Town Syndrome" but we have damn nice food. And my town is doing well economically - thanks in a large part to all of the new Swedes here.
Japan isn't Sweden. It's culture is homogenous and peculiar in a way that few other places even get close to. It's going to be a hard thing for Japan to open it's doors to all the filthy heathens. It's easy to say that all they have to do is open their doors to immigration but even countries like the U.S. that were founded on immigration have a hard time operating in their own interest with a sane and beneficial immigration policy. It's easy and flip and say, "open up the doors," but pretty hard to do when a massive influx of foreigners will massively disrupt a society that's been humming along to it's own tune for most of human history.
To add: Japan is so homogeneously racist that your family can live there for generations and never gain citizenship. There's an entire subculture of Japanese that are considered the lowest of the low because their parents were born overseas in China during the occupation of WWII. To full-blooded Japanese parents. Yamato Japanese account for 86% of Japan's population. 1.6% of Japan's population is ethnically not Japanese. Go to Japan, one in 200 people you meet will be Chinese. One in a thousand will be from the Philippines. Japanese law fully permits Japanese citizens from refusing to hire someone from Okinawa.
I'm not saying allowing immigrants in will solve all issues, or that allowing immigrants in to solve issues is the right reason to allow them in. Allow immigrants in because we are all human beings and we should help each other and see the fact that you have now have more citizens as a bonus.
Er, well, yes, but immigrants won't replenish your culture, if it's traditionally homogenous (unlike, say, the US'). If your Japanese or Swedish birth rates drop to nothing and your immigration rates skyrocket, your country is no longer Japan or Sweden. I actually agree with the right of center folk on this one (although not on the policies they come up with because of their ideas).
WARNING Long rant incoming. Ahem. Every country is made up of waves of immigrants, not just the US. And Sweden isn't even traditionally homogenous, we have 5 recognized minorities and many more that are unrecognized. We have a rich culture of immigration and importing skilled workers. In the 1600's we imported Flemish smiths for our quarries, the most common inscription found in Sweden from viking times is "There is no god but Allah" - since we traded with the middle east and took their coins.
We took a french nobleman and made him our king, we've had Queen Kristina that converted to Catholicism, abdicated, and ran away to Rome, we have tonnes of loanwords from several languages since we've never been an isolationist country. We have a native people, the Sami people with their own language and rich traditions. We've treated them horribly in the past but we are trying to make that right. When Sweden realized what was going on during world war two we adopted an "We'll take them all" stance towards Jews - even though we were one of the first countries to start to sterilize people and had the institute of racial biology that was as horrible as you imagine. We have a lot of Romani people living in Sweden and a tonne of Swedish slang comes from their language. We were pretty shitty towards them in the past too, but we're working on it. We have groups of Finnish speaking Swedes since we used to rule Finland in a really shitty and colonial way - and there are still a ton of Swedish speaking Finns with their own beautiful dialect in finland. And the "homogenous culture" you think of (slightly Christian, quite secular, white and blond, using the Latin alphabet etc) isn't even that old. Until the 1200 or somewhere around there Sweden wasn't christian, we believed in our pagan gods. Christianity was brought to us by missionaries in the middle ages. We also used the rune alphabet for a long time and you can still find Christian rune carvings in really old churches. We still celebrate old pagan festivals like midsummer by erecting a giant fertility symbol and dancing around it. Until the 1800's we didn't even see ourselves as Swedes, we identified more with the surrounding villages than with the whole nation and a King that didn't care. It wasn't until a wave of nationalism swept the whole of Europe that we started seeing ourselves as Swedes. (It was this wave that led to the first world war) We used to own a large part of the Baltic, Finland bits of Germany etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Empire) and until the beginning of the 1900's we also owned Norway. Sweden didn't take it's distinctive shape until the 20th century.
So, sorry no. No. If we didn't have immigration we wouldn't be the country we are today. Bonus; We had an almost literal pirate princess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Cecilia_of_Sweden
Nope. The homogenous culture I am thinking of (not a fan of people telling me what I'm thinking) is a bunch of Scandinavians, or nearly so. Correct me if I'm wrong, certainly, but those five minorities you mention -- all of them are pretty Scandinavian. Finns. The Flemish. Or Sami that have been there for five millennia. Etc. On a far, far, far different order of magnitude of heterogeneity than the US, or I'd imagine, even France. A common refrain from anthropologists and so on to the people who point to Sweden as a utopia is that with a tiny and relatively homogenous population, it's a hell of a lot easier to be a utopia. They are correct. In any case, importing skilled laborers (or indeed Jews, as history bears out) into an already healthy population is very different from having a wholesale different culture enter yours and, because of low birth rates, begin to replace it. That's not happening yet, but it could. And "immigration" isn't a carte blanche key to survival for Japan, as if the only problem is having enough bodies, never mind what their culture and beliefs are. Undoubtedly. That neither means that all immigrants are created equal nor that replacing all Swedes in a microsecond with a corresponding immigrant would fix the problem. Reduced to the absurd, surely you can see that doesn't make any sense. EDIT: I'm not sure about the Roma. They've tended to be outliers throughout history. In any case, the number of Swedish Roma is miniscule.If we didn't have immigration we wouldn't be the country we are today.
Yes, they/you are correct - it easier when you have a population that are largely raised with the same cultural values to keep those values - but when those values begin to include "Don't let anyone in that doesn't look like us because our utopia might be ruined" it is no longer an utopia. At least not to me. And by the way - Sweden isn't an utopia. More than 10 percent of our population votes for a fascist party, our school system is fucked up after a few reforms, and generally the view of Sweden as a socialist utopia is widely outdated. It was in the 1980 we were the most equal country. Since then we've become one of the countries in which social inequalities are rising the fastest. I mean, we've had riots. I'm not saying letting everyone in to the country will keep it perfect, spotless and crimefree - but that is not why you welcome asylum seekers. You welcome them because they are fellow humans and you can offer them a better life and an escape from the hell they're trying to escape from. The fact that it helps birthrates is just a bonus really. And yes I know I've gotten riled up - and that telling someone that they're thinking is a shitty thing to do . But you are trying to explain my country and culture to me - someone who has grown up, gone to school, and lived there.
Yes. Yes. Just guessing based on book really, as ever. I'm very drunk now it didn' take long but we have highlighted the things we agree on here. Immigration isn't bad it also isn't a panacea.And by the way - Sweden isn't an utopia. More than 10 percent of our population votes for a fascist party, our school system is fucked up after a few reforms, and generally the view of Sweden as a socialist utopia is widely outdated. It was in the 1980 we were the most equal country. Since then we've become one of the countries in which social inequalities are rising the fastest.
You welcome them because they are fellow humans and you can offer them a better life and an escape from the hell they're trying to escape from. The fact that it helps birthrates is just a bonus really.
And yes I know I've gotten riled up - and that telling someone that they're thinking is a shitty thing to do . But you are trying to explain my country and culture to me - someone who has grown up, gone to school, and lived there.
Is "not interested in sex" actually "more interested in a career" (on the female side)?45 percent of women and 25 percent of men, ages 16 to 24, are "not interested in or despised sexual contact."
Since 2006, Japanese women have complained of soshoku danshi or "herbivore men," so called for their lack of interest in the opposite sex.
Because they're forced to choose, inevitably lots of women who might otherwise have a family and a job are only seeking the latter. That sense of pessimism about marriage appears to be partially driving the lack of interest in romantic relationships, and thus in sex. This chart shows common reasons expressed for staying single, by Japanese men and women ages 25 to 34. The shaded bars represent the subsequent national surveys, from 1987 through 2011: It appears so, for the most part.Japanese women, for their part, often avoid romantic relationships because Japanese laws and social norms can make it extremely difficult for women to have both a family and a career. Japan is extremely unusual in that it is highly educated and wealthy but still has some of the worst systemic gender inequality in the world; it has a European-style economy but South Asian social family mores. Professional women are stuck in the middle of that contradiction. It's not just that day-care programs are scarce: Women who become pregnant or even just marry are so expected to quit work that they can come under enormous social pressure to do so and often find that career advancement becomes impossible. There's a word for married working women: oniyome, or "devil wives."