"If Japan's finances collapse, social order would collapse as well. That would be a tough environment to raise children."You can find it a huffing-and-puffing Reuters piece on a heretofore unknown sweeping social trend: Japanese buying overseas real estate and non-yen currencies in order to have a safe haven to which they will flee prior to Japan's descent into chaos. (Link)
I know that it is in the writ of wire journalists to alert their most important readers (private investors and money managers) as to emerging social trends. That way said readers can get in on the opportunity before everyone else does. It is in the writ of editors, however, to cool the jets of journalists with "Uhhhh, how sure are we that we are not being sucked into someone else's marketing scheme?"
As for the book whose sales supposedly validate the trend of Japanese seeking security oversees, Escape from Japan (Nippon dasshutsu), check out the home page of its publisher, Asa Publishing (Link - J).
Yes, there's the link, that jittery thing on the right.
8 comments:
Can you just the F@@# tell us what you mean? What is the deal with the publisher? Jeez. How you waste people's time.
Anonymous -
Animating the title the way they do is not a bit cheesy, in your opinion?
As for wasting people's time, I am sorry.
Oh well. I thought it was funny. I guess I enjoy wasting time. ;)
Does that jittery bit symbolize the financial collapse or the next big earthquake that will hit Tokyo (tomorrow) [in the next four years] {insert your own preferred version}?
Japan has been chinbotsu in the eyes of someone or another since 1973, so it's not like this is a new trend at all.
I too thought that article was ridiculous, so lacking in evidence of broader trends
My general thesis is whatever Japan's problems are these next few decades, they're only about 20% in relative magnitude to the US's.
We've still got more 30M baby boom retirees to support by 2030. Japan's retiree population will rise from 30M now to 35M by 2030.
Japan's baby boom was a little wavelet compared to the US's 1946-1964 demographic surge, and the fact that the US baby boom replaced itself (plus 50M+ immigrants) means the US is going to have many more people to feed in 2030 compared to Japan.
It's better to have too few workers than too many. Japan has the idle labor capacity to get through its demographic challenge fine.
The US, on the other hand, is cruising for a major bruising in its continual living in denial.
"If Japan's finances collapse, social order would collapse as well. That would be a tough environment to raise children."
Yes, we had a belly-laugh about that line at work, too. But then, people manage somehow to rear kids in Mogadishu and Sana'a (a few too many, perhaps), so perhaps we're being too preciously first-worldy about things.
“I know that it is in the writ of wire journalists to alert their most important readers (private investors and money managers) as to emerging social trends. That way said readers can get in on the opportunity before everyone else does.”
You *are* joking, aren’t you? Reuters journalism is strictly for the plebs.
“As for the book whose sales supposedly validate the trend of Japanese seeking security oversees, Escape from Japan (Nippon dasshutsu), check out the home page of its publisher, Asa Publishing.”
Hey, that book has garnered 35 (mostly) positive reviews at amazon.co.jp. It must be right!
Someone needs to write an expose on the bankruptcy—moral, intellectual, and indeed financial—of the bulk of the Japanese publishing industry, but who is that someone? When we’re done, we can take on Reuters (although this shabby article is just a reprise of similar scaremongering a couple of months ago in Shukan Diamond, to name but one offender.)
pachiguy -
As regards the collapse of social order quote, what struck me was the utter self-absorption of the speaker, without the least hint of social responsibility or her embeddedness in her own culture.
As regards Reuters, since no one pays for news anymore, investment tips must be what keeps the Reuters empire afloat, plebian or not.
As for exposing the publishing industry, the idea of exposure presumes that it at some point transitioned from being a provider of information and ideas to merely being an arm of Marketing. I have no certainty as to whether or not publishing has ever been an independent or autonomous entity. There may be nothing to expose, unless you are proposing to explain a propensity as attributable to Japaneseness.
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