My home country, the UK, has already been through this cultural erosion which is why I respect Japan's right to defend its own. London in particular has become a place for everybody and at the same time for nobody. It's a city of people of different values and wavelengths with very little shared strata compared with Tokyo.
Funny to see this sentiment here but in the USA if a conservative-leaning politician talks about "preserving our culture" or saying that immigrants should "assimilate" they are accused of being a code-word (or even an overt) racist.
US conservatives get no benefit of the doubt thanks to years of racism and racist policy. It is clear that they are reactionaries looking to codify white supremacy.
However, American culture has moved on (a lot) from that though. For several generations, it has been described as a "melting pot" or understood through the lens of The New Colossus mounted on the Statue of Liberty.
The question is, do you think it's fine for the same line of "Japanese supremacy" thought to apply in Japan, and if so, why do you think it's different?
Completely different. American culture is immigrant centric. I am an American, and I refuse the biblical indoctrination that some wish would represent "our" culture. Why should conservatives get to dictate what America's culture is? As far as I am concerned, we are a nation of immigrants, and no one should assimilate to certain ideas. In particular, because these ideas can be weaponized. The Church can mangle with the state, because America is mostly evangelical. Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l), because America's most affluent are Jews. Services can be refused on the basis of one's romantic inclinations. Some people end up as more free than others. So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart. They are merely choosing the rhetoric that resonates most with lower classes (as history has taught us is a strategy that worked with peasants in the days of yore), because a critique of upper classes or billionaires or those that profit from our toil is them biting the hand that feeds them.
> Free speech can exclude criticism of foreign nations (like Isra-l)... So I reject this culture claim that you are defending and do not accept that these conservatives have America's best interests in their heart.
Do not pretend like liberals were on a different page than conservatives on that issue before the election. Support for Israel was happening under Biden and would have continued under Harris; Trump's the one who did a bait-and-switch with pretending he'd be more neutral until he got in. And conservatives have been called antisemitic by liberals far more than the reverse.
> American culture is immigrant centric.
What does this mean? Because to me, it means we don't have a culture and never will have one. What does immigrant-centric mean to people who are born not immigrants, besides getting out of the way for the next generation on its way in?
It was only under the current admin that permanent residents were detained, and American citizens were doxxed openly (I agree that deans of colleges were fired and students at Ivies doxxed by Ackman and his cronies during the previous admin). All because criticism of Isr-el. And sure, both parties are pro-Isra-l and always will be (at least until lobbying is eliminated or America-first lobbies are the only ones allowed). Hell, an op-ed written by a lady got her detained a la Gestapo. As to your second point, much of America continues to be defined by immigrants. Tesla is the best selling auto maker, and Elon an immigrant is behind it (who overstayed and was illegal for some time as a matter of fact). Chobani yogurt. Nvidia was founded by an immigrant. I could go on. I'd argue conservatism is getting in the way of the next generation, by hindering growth. Tourism in the US is down 22%. Those hurting are American businesses, and small ones in particular
London isn’t an example of cultural erosion—the pie has simply grown. The same applies to New York. Diverse cultures enrich London; they add to it rather than diminish it.
Absolutely absurd. Why is it people feel the need to make out that western cities are somehow magically immune from the exact same detrimental effects that they happily accept about everywhere else?
"Enrichment" is a buzzword for the insulated elite happy that they have new things on their lunch menu, somehow ignoring all the negatives that come with it.
I can't help observing that Britain established a global empire (so vast in scope that they could truthfully say the sun never set upon it, until quite recently) and made it clear to the countries they colonized that Britain, and particularly England, was the center of civilization. We're surrounded by the artefacts of this empire, from Imperial measurements in the USA to Greenwich Mean time being the default timezone to which all others are calibrated.
If you establish a vast trading empire, and tell the often surprised new inhabitants of it that the empire requires their spices/ silks/ slaves, can you really be surprised that the more enterprising and adventurous colonised people gravitate toward the point of origin? Is it some sort of mystery that there should be more people from Algeria and Congo in France, or why there are so many Indonesian people in the Netherlands?
I feel a similar perplexity about many people in the USA making loud complaints about cultural adulteration despite a good quarter of the land having previously been part of Mexico and this being reflected in most of the place names (to take but one example). Some commentators object with an absolute straight face to hearing so many people speaking Spanish in cities with names like Los Angeles.
Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis.
It's entirely irrelevant why migrants want to come, when you have an existing population that is being harmed by migration policy.
It's simply that the wealthy benifit from increasing labour supply; this is the "enrichment" you get. Not an improvement in culture or conditions, an increase in wealth concentration.
It's entirely reasonable for a citizen in an English speaking nation to complain about other languages becoming common, as it is direct evidence of the migration policy that is doing them harm.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am indifferent to the plight of former colonial nations experiencing the same phenomenon in reverse.
Migration is a policy issue, not some natural force like osmosis.
There's a whole discipline called social physics successfully leveraging models from physics, chemistry, and mathematics to analyze and predict social phenomena. Just as the behavior of flocking birds can be reliably modeled with a few differential equations, so can a great many social changes.
There is a disgusting degree of callousness with this comment.
It's not a "colonial nation" that is being harmed by migration, it's working class people. Meanwhile the same classes that benefited from colonialism now benifit from the wholesale destruction of communities.
Every empirical study I have seen shows that high migration lowers happiness and trust. Does that align with your pseudoscience?
Not as callous as pinning all social problems on migrants who mostly just want economic opportunity, and who generally commit crime at lower levels than the domestic population. Nor is it as callous as shrugging off the social and economic losses inflicted on those countries when they were colonized in the first place, or 'granting' them freedom without compensation for the looting, murder, and de facto enslavement.
working class people
I've got a feeling you're not a socialist, though.
Always amusing that lowering the percentage of natives in a culture is an improvement, "enrichment", "vibrancy", and so on, but only in one particular kind of direction...
And interestingly, the people who utter this ideology are usually from the natives - because fundamentally it's a type of narcissism - a kind of "I'll show you" or "I like you being hurt" that feels pleasurable or gives a sense of superiority.
Can't imagine this ever being tolerated within China and Russia though, perhaps that's why they're the current bogeymen.
Yup, this happens to any melting pot city (Paris, New York, LA, San Francisco, etc).
The downside of multiculturalism is these places become low-trust societies.
Do you dare leave your bike outside unlocked in these cities?
Of course, being Japan, they also have a compulsory bike registration scheme and police can and do (not-so-)randomly stop people on the street to check that they're not riding stolen bikes.
I am from a country in South East Asia, and its sad here as well. We have absolutely 0 connection to our ancestors from just 100 years ago. We (and me) have truly forgotten and don't have any identity beyond the surface level. We suffered from Arabification of every part of our culture.
I honestly think the original culture is pretty much extinct. Very, very few of the incoming generation even desire to uphold and rekindle that culture. In fact, it is despised.
This is such a weird notion. Waves of immigrants have created some of the biggest most economically productive cities the world has ever seen. If Tokyo goes this route, only greatness lays in its future.
The rest is just nostalgia, and that's fine. But realistically, a big piece of Japanese culture will be well preserved in the new culture that will emerge. As it is, we've stopped lamenting the arrival of Buddhist influence on the island, so too will other immigration influences.
Hopefully Tokyo actually rejects this western culture and mentality as fundamentally self-effacing instead, and rejects your kind's weird notions and narcissistic pronouncements of cultural superiority (so weird they'd want to be them - all Asian and Japanese like - omg gross, enrich them right away!) instead.
Eventually they may even come to view the westerner, evidenced by their minds in such a shocking condition, as a fundamentally grotesque thing, and go full closed-country again - especially after their power wanes. Certainly one case would be more beautiful than the other!
