A World Divided

Today I found myself debating with a student, something I like to avoid but if they seem to be engaged and not angry I will continue the discussion without changing the topic and just try to keep the mood as light as possible and continue.

It was very difficult today. I managed but just barely.

It had much less to do with her any more to do with me. I am always very aware of cultural narratives and how they influence people, more than most, but usually I don’t get triggered by them, I just try to do what I can to give a wider perspective without forcing anything on anyone.

We were talking about the Japanese economy and how service and quality is going down. It’s true, but the idea that Japanese is becoming a poor country feeds into this narrative of isolationism and xenophobia that is more and more widespread today.

The debate becomes do we open the boarders more and let foreigners influence Japanese society more or do we close off Japan and deal with the struggle. Both of this ignore the fact that Japanese society severely discourages taking risks and cares more about long work than good work, which seem like a much bigger issue than the border.

But that conversation isn’t as sexy and it would require individuals to take some responsibility rather than blaming someone else.

The idea that Japan is somehow a poor country is absurd. It’s still the #5 in overal GDP despite being #12 in population, and while the middle class is facing more and more stress, it still has one of the most well distributed economies on earth.

Rather than looking at the true causes of this, finding easy answers could lead to even more unreasonable xenophobia, and the defendents of foreigners are mostly idiots who want much more open boarders without much regard for the impact.

Then the consensus becomes about “high quality foreigners” which basically means “we want rich privledged kids who fit contribute to the status quo” instead of “we want people who want to contribute in their own ways and are connected to the wider society rather than staying in their own bubble and clashing with locals”.

Policy always looks for things thet are measurable and it’s difficult to measure how much people actually contribute to society so it defaults to measuring how much money they make. And then the policies that result are unfair and tend not to solve the problems they are meant to solve.

My student was completely respectful and reasonable but I could feel some popular media narratives that are, from my persepctive meant to manipulate.

She’s a very smart woman a bit older than me, and usually seems curious to hear my perspective, and I think usually i present it in a pretty unbiased way.

But today felt a bit different.

I didn’t get angry at her or fail to give her a proper lesson, but I became way more defensive of my position than I would like to be.

Recently the rising sentiment in Japan that foreigners are to blame for the countries problems is getting to me. This idea is absurd at it’s root, but easy to make a case for because there are foreigners who cause problems. There is a logical thought process but the problems are a anecdotal and the solutions don’t adress the problem directly because that’s very hard to do.

Instead it’s a war of sentiment and narrative where a complex and respectful discussion is required but instead we get tribalism.

Many people in Japan see countries in Europe which have much higher rates of immigration and higher rates of crime. I completely empathize with any concern about becoming more like this. But Japan shares no borders with anyone. It has extremely strict laws about immigration which are enforced even more than they need to be.

So while this concern is reasonable, the fear that it leads to and the narratives that grow around it are all pretty much based in racism and xenophobia. Then people use the most extreme cases to justify their stances without much regard for how they’ve basically forced us all into tribalism.

Rather than trying to increase its economic output and innovation, Japan has pushed to become a tourist paradise and attract all kinds of foreigners only as tourists. Meanwhile the immigration policy is rather strict, making it difficult for foreigners to start their own companies and nearly impossible to work as a freelancer.

The issue of tourism is compeltely seperate to immigration but the two are combined easily by anyone who is not thinking about this in a nuanced way.

In addition the shrinking population leads to a very deceptive narrative about a “lack of workers”. Companies compalin about how hard it is to find workers but the reality is that because of inflation, wages aren’t enough for locals to see certain work as worthwhile and so that has led Japan to open it’s doors to more people from poorer countries.

A vast majority of these people are very respectful to Japan and work hard and there aren’t many illegal immigrants here compared to Europe or the US. A vast majority are respectful of the environment and doing their best. The problems are far fewer than other countries.

The quality of service here hasn’t decreased because of more foreigners (3%, not 30%, not 13%). It’s decreased because of inflation. But no one wants to hahe that discussion because it traces back to the debasement of money and that’s the whole foundation of the scam that banks and govenrments around the world are engaged in.

So instead of trying to actually solve fundamenta issues, the debate becomes about symptoms and fears of potential new symptoms that still haven’t manifested and don’t need to manifest.

I suspect the same happens in other countries too, the logical argument is that a country needs to take care of its own people before it invites more people in, but the problem is that the country has no intention of ever doing that, and Japan First or America First camp even less so.

Both the side focused on human rights and equality and fairness and the side focused on national interests are paid for by lobbyists who don’t care about you or me or anyone but their doners and so both sides seek to distract and divide us, because they need an enemy to keep our eyes off the causes and amplification of inflation.

Both sides have people with logical arguments but those people can’t hear each other over the noise of the loudest and least genuine voices among them.

The only solution I know is if more of us get more engaged, and I mean that in a very different way than I often hear it said. It’s not about volunteering or joining organizations or even voting.

It’s about being friendier and more understanding to our neighbors and knowing more about our towns and seeking first hand accounts and doing our own reaearch and exploration rather than always defering to one camps opinion or the other.

It’s about acknowledging our own impact on the world rather than defering to others to solve our problems.

But I didn’t say most of this to my student today. I just challenged the ideas I heard that sounded like they came from the simplified media narratives that try to divert attention away to the real cause of current issues. Just a bit. I was a bit less gentle than usual, and so I apologized to her after class. I hope she accepts my apology and I hope we can talk more about this next week.

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