> I argue that Japan is a harbinger state, which experiences many challenges before others in the international system.
A good example is housing. Japan had a gigantic housing bubble a decade in advance than the USA and Europe. It is also interesting to see that meanwhile declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city, it has made many town houses almost free. I would expect this to be replicated elsewhere.
Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Japan is not the world, but it seems reasonable that can give a heads up for many problems that other places will experience in the future.
I think housing is a bad example to use wrt Japan.
Japan is one of the few markets in the world where, for the most part, only land has value. Buildings LOSE value over time. This is for multiple reasons but mostly due to ever-changing earthquake-related construction regulations such that it's almost always cheaper to rebuild from scratch than keep an edifice and retrofit to regulations.
This is also why Japan has more architects than any other country- if buildings are not kept and are almost always destroyed after a 30 year mortgage, the owner can build whatever they want and not have to be concerned about resale value- so lots of unique residential architecture.
Alastair Townsend first covered this in ArchDaily years ago and it went on to be covered extensively by NPR and other outlets.
> Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
I think they may have escaped to evergreen technology for consumer electronics, but one might argue America is equally as trapped by historical infrastructure. Japan's infrastructure is interesting as it's clear much of it was built in the 80s and 90s, but it's still serviceable and their big bets on trains turned out to be rather future proof. When walking the streets, especially somewhere like Osaka, you can see much of the signage, bridges, pedestrian crossing buttons are very old indeed. You do often feel like you are in a future-past of some kind.
None of these statements apply universally across both countries mind you, there is good rail in the US and modern infra in Japan as well.
"Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change."
I believe that their mindset and stance towards technology is simply different.
Japan had a history of "gadget technology", which was revolutional in the 90's before the Internet became ubiquious.
I am guessing that they (myself included) were dissapointed in the direction technological advances went. Their vision maybe didn't happen, but that doesn't make it wrong, or that the current technological trends are right.
Situation in Germany: House prices are going down the last few months, but much more slowly than they consistently rose during the preceding 15 years. At the same time interest has sharply risen.
Compared to prices there's a much bigger decrease in new construction, which I'd interpret as people increasingly not pursuing houses and instead piling onto the rent market. Urban/suburban/"sprawl" houses were basically a DI(preferably-NK-and-wealthy-parents-chipping-in) and beyond thing before, I'd suspect houses will continue to shrink while drifting even further up the income distribution and everyone else must rent for life - at an average rent/income ratio of around one third which has only ever been going up, and is of course much higher for non-DI households.
Home ownership rate has always been falling and continues to do so (fell below 50 % in 2022). It'll get a lot lower when boomers start leaving their houses (feet first most likely), because baby boomers have far high home ownership rate than following generations. And with recent changes to the way houses are legally valuated and inheritance taxation I'd suspect many kids of baby boomers can't actually afford to inherit their parents houses and will have to sell.
I dunno where this is supposed to converge to. Everyone renting at >50 % of net income (which is already not at all uncommon, especially for singles in cities) from huge housing companies?
> Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change
The fax machine in Japan is always treated like it's proof they're stuck in a timewarp, an earlier age, and just haven't moved on.
But I think it makes sense. Japan was introduced to fax technology early on. Japanese is traditionally written vertically. It is written with Chinese characters. In handwritten Japanese, people actually invent/modify characters on the spot. (Much as how Engl. text might be littered with randomly-invented abbr'vns.) They're not going to be able to enter those into a computer easily.
Some Japanese newspapers were using traditional typesetting techniques right into the 21st century because vertical text support was, and largely still is, an afterthought in most publishing software. Software has only recently gotten to the point where it can replace a fax machine and handwriting, for reproducing Japanese texts in the manner the Japanese expect. Besides scanning/taking a photo of a page and emailing it, which isn't enough of an improvement to motivate the change. (Particularly as business faxes just end up digitized and emailed anyway.)
> Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
You already see it in some countries that just skipped cable TV, desktop PCs and wired internet, and that went straight to smartphones with mobile internet (or wifi). These are countries where you can do everything with your phone, whereas here some (e.g. government, banking organizations) are still trying to catch up and adjust.
Housing in Japan is so peculiar that it seems difficult to draw global lessons from it. Are there any other countries in the world where a perfectly servicable house that is over 30 years old is literally worth less than nothing (because it "must" be demolished before the land can be reused)?
>Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
I've lived in Japan for eight years and the only time I've ever been asked to fax something was by an American company. I told them no.
>Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Would beg to differ. Japan is one those nation with extremely advanced space, robotic and nuclear tech. They can be a nuclear power over night if they are allowed to legally. Far as space, they landed probe on asteroid for space mining (https://www.space.com/41898-hayabusa2-deploys-hopping-robots... ).
> declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city
Despite overall declining population, Japan's major urban centres are actually increasing their population. Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and more are all growing cities.
Declining population isn't entirely relevant. Japan's major cities still continue to grow, and western countries will probably continue to grow as a whole due to immigration. I still suspect that we will see housing bubbles pop in some major western cities, but many will fight it to the death. I predict that whole industries moving to areas with more reasonable housing policy will be the cause. We already see it in cases with investment in Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine until a year ago), and southern U.S states. Part of me hopes that these cities with horribly selfish housing policy end up like the declining western cities that lost out when manufacturing went overseas.
Europe - sure
US has mostly solved our population aging problem with having fairly open immigration and high immigration numbers relative to the rest of the developed/rich world..
Now if politics change that, it's another story.
Considering older people tend to use computers and be more tech savvy while younger generations only interact with tech on their phones it will be interesting how this turns out.
People like Peter Zeihan argue that the USA seems like it will have a large replacement population just because they had a large population to begin with (boomers -> Millenials -> Gen Alpha). There are things that can blunt this (Millenials can't afford to have kids) but so far it seems like it is holding fairly steady. Given this it would be difficult to argue for them getting stuck in some specific technological era.
Japan has too many socio-political peculiarities for lessons to be translatable to other democracies. Especially when it comes to politics, its nearly a one party state with LDP having governed more than 50% of the time since the founding of the democracy.
"The LDP has been in power almost continuously since its foundation in 1955—a period called the 1955 System—except between 1993 and 1994, and again from 2009 to 2012. In the 2012 election, it regained control of the government." – Wikipedia
On my second corporate trip to Japan I mentioned to one of my Japanese counterparts that I enjoy visiting Tokyo because it is like visiting the future.
I wasn't referring to some futuristic veneer like Akihabara, but overall the way a society can function with the density that is Tokyo.
It's important to note (for those who didn't read the article) is that this article is not about why and how Japan is a Harbinger state but rather why scholars study Japan.
Yes and: I'm more interested in comparisons than trends, which often just feels like punditry.
Like how misc constitutions effect democratic participation. Like how misc court arrangements and criminal law impact policing. Like how land use impacts public health. Etc, etc.
Once you start reading about history you will laugh at the challenges of today.
Like it literally couldn't get worse for the Netherlands than 1672 and we got through that (in fact look at the mighty France and England today who's laughing now).
It is extremely funny that many people believe that Japanese “trapped” in 90s technology and they don’t have access to the shiny new things we have in US. In fact they have better access than us. Some people just choose not to, because not all new technologies are created to improve lives of normal people.
"Harbinger" is an unusual word, and it's interesting the way the paper distinguishes between "leader," "bellwether," and "harbinger."
In Japanese politics during the nineties there were a couple of parties whose names were commonly translated as "Harbinger Party" (Sakigake) and "New Harbinger Party" (Shintō Sakigake). (Or maybe these names referred to the same party?)
At least Japan has the capacity to launch satellites whereas the Brits failed to launch a small batch from an out of production Virgin Boeing 747 shortly after SpaceX had launched over 50 then 100 satellites in one go.
Although Jaxa's last attempt was a fail consistent with the Brits.
What I couldn't understand was why Sony couldn't keep up with Apple's stellar hockey stick growth when it had the talent in hardware. Don't know about the software because Microsoft.
This isn’t an article saying “Japan sucks, Britain is the best!”. It is saying that Japan appears to have encountered some social and economic problems a few years ahead of the rest of the developed world.
All of the tech in (say) the iPhone was already in use elsewhere. Apple's great success was (1) bringing it all together and (2) selling consumers on one great leap forwards. That's where Apple beats the likes of Sony: Not in incremental improvements but in creating new product categories and marketing them so that 100m+ consumers want one on launch day.
Britain gave up it's independent launch system program partly because it was part of the ESA and partly because it bought Polaris/Trident from the US. Virgin Space is actually a US company not a British one, but their launch system is cheap and definitely worth persevering with.
[+] [-] hourago|3 years ago|reply
A good example is housing. Japan had a gigantic housing bubble a decade in advance than the USA and Europe. It is also interesting to see that meanwhile declining population has not reduced price of houses in the city, it has made many town houses almost free. I would expect this to be replicated elsewhere.
Another interesting one is technology. Japan got trapped in the 90s, the fax era, and it is difficult to change. Will also the USA and Europe get stuck technologically as the population grows older? Again, it is to be expected.
Japan is not the world, but it seems reasonable that can give a heads up for many problems that other places will experience in the future.
[+] [-] gkanai|3 years ago|reply
I think housing is a bad example to use wrt Japan.
Japan is one of the few markets in the world where, for the most part, only land has value. Buildings LOSE value over time. This is for multiple reasons but mostly due to ever-changing earthquake-related construction regulations such that it's almost always cheaper to rebuild from scratch than keep an edifice and retrofit to regulations.
This is also why Japan has more architects than any other country- if buildings are not kept and are almost always destroyed after a 30 year mortgage, the owner can build whatever they want and not have to be concerned about resale value- so lots of unique residential architecture.
Alastair Townsend first covered this in ArchDaily years ago and it went on to be covered extensively by NPR and other outlets.
https://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-ho...
[+] [-] ehnto|3 years ago|reply
I think they may have escaped to evergreen technology for consumer electronics, but one might argue America is equally as trapped by historical infrastructure. Japan's infrastructure is interesting as it's clear much of it was built in the 80s and 90s, but it's still serviceable and their big bets on trains turned out to be rather future proof. When walking the streets, especially somewhere like Osaka, you can see much of the signage, bridges, pedestrian crossing buttons are very old indeed. You do often feel like you are in a future-past of some kind.
None of these statements apply universally across both countries mind you, there is good rail in the US and modern infra in Japan as well.
[+] [-] wheelerof4te|3 years ago|reply
I believe that their mindset and stance towards technology is simply different.
Japan had a history of "gadget technology", which was revolutional in the 90's before the Internet became ubiquious.
I am guessing that they (myself included) were dissapointed in the direction technological advances went. Their vision maybe didn't happen, but that doesn't make it wrong, or that the current technological trends are right.
[+] [-] formerly_proven|3 years ago|reply
Compared to prices there's a much bigger decrease in new construction, which I'd interpret as people increasingly not pursuing houses and instead piling onto the rent market. Urban/suburban/"sprawl" houses were basically a DI(preferably-NK-and-wealthy-parents-chipping-in) and beyond thing before, I'd suspect houses will continue to shrink while drifting even further up the income distribution and everyone else must rent for life - at an average rent/income ratio of around one third which has only ever been going up, and is of course much higher for non-DI households.
Home ownership rate has always been falling and continues to do so (fell below 50 % in 2022). It'll get a lot lower when boomers start leaving their houses (feet first most likely), because baby boomers have far high home ownership rate than following generations. And with recent changes to the way houses are legally valuated and inheritance taxation I'd suspect many kids of baby boomers can't actually afford to inherit their parents houses and will have to sell.
I dunno where this is supposed to converge to. Everyone renting at >50 % of net income (which is already not at all uncommon, especially for singles in cities) from huge housing companies?
[+] [-] retrac|3 years ago|reply
The fax machine in Japan is always treated like it's proof they're stuck in a timewarp, an earlier age, and just haven't moved on.
But I think it makes sense. Japan was introduced to fax technology early on. Japanese is traditionally written vertically. It is written with Chinese characters. In handwritten Japanese, people actually invent/modify characters on the spot. (Much as how Engl. text might be littered with randomly-invented abbr'vns.) They're not going to be able to enter those into a computer easily.
Some Japanese newspapers were using traditional typesetting techniques right into the 21st century because vertical text support was, and largely still is, an afterthought in most publishing software. Software has only recently gotten to the point where it can replace a fax machine and handwriting, for reproducing Japanese texts in the manner the Japanese expect. Besides scanning/taking a photo of a page and emailing it, which isn't enough of an improvement to motivate the change. (Particularly as business faxes just end up digitized and emailed anyway.)
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
You already see it in some countries that just skipped cable TV, desktop PCs and wired internet, and that went straight to smartphones with mobile internet (or wifi). These are countries where you can do everything with your phone, whereas here some (e.g. government, banking organizations) are still trying to catch up and adjust.
[+] [-] rwmj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|3 years ago|reply
I've lived in Japan for eight years and the only time I've ever been asked to fax something was by an American company. I told them no.
[+] [-] x98asfd|3 years ago|reply
Would beg to differ. Japan is one those nation with extremely advanced space, robotic and nuclear tech. They can be a nuclear power over night if they are allowed to legally. Far as space, they landed probe on asteroid for space mining (https://www.space.com/41898-hayabusa2-deploys-hopping-robots... ).
[+] [-] wk_end|3 years ago|reply
Despite overall declining population, Japan's major urban centres are actually increasing their population. Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and more are all growing cities.
[+] [-] gonzo41|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeroCalories|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveBK123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tudorizer|3 years ago|reply
I think there are other uses of tech far beyond it that are far better integrated in the Japanese society that in the western world.
[+] [-] ROTMetro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nebula8804|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] looseyesterday|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaokeyoga|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattnewton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] srvmshr|3 years ago|reply
Link:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-united-st...
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|3 years ago|reply
I wasn't referring to some futuristic veneer like Akihabara, but overall the way a society can function with the density that is Tokyo.
[+] [-] cdiddy2|3 years ago|reply
"Japan's prime minister says his country is on the brink of not being able to function as a society because of its falling birth rate."
How Japan handles this will either tell the rest of the world how to do it or how not to do it. Lets hope they figure it out
[+] [-] csomar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|3 years ago|reply
Like how misc constitutions effect democratic participation. Like how misc court arrangements and criminal law impact policing. Like how land use impacts public health. Etc, etc.
[+] [-] MomoXenosaga|3 years ago|reply
Like it literally couldn't get worse for the Netherlands than 1672 and we got through that (in fact look at the mighty France and England today who's laughing now).
[+] [-] eternalban|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] up2isomorphism|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin66|3 years ago|reply
In Japanese politics during the nineties there were a couple of parties whose names were commonly translated as "Harbinger Party" (Sakigake) and "New Harbinger Party" (Shintō Sakigake). (Or maybe these names referred to the same party?)
[+] [-] fomine3|3 years ago|reply
This is often called "課題先進国" in Japanese discussion, translated like as "Pioneer in Taking on Challenges" or "developed country facing challenges"
[+] [-] alexanderglenda|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] abudabi123|3 years ago|reply
Although Jaxa's last attempt was a fail consistent with the Brits.
What I couldn't understand was why Sony couldn't keep up with Apple's stellar hockey stick growth when it had the talent in hardware. Don't know about the software because Microsoft.
[+] [-] smcl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkanai|3 years ago|reply
Apple's strength is it's software. Sony lost out because it could not compete with Apple's software.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumhead|3 years ago|reply