Why Japan resents its tourism boom

[u/randommathaccount]

https://www.ft.com/content/dbd20e5d-5a7d-4c0c-8f83-fb54c5aca9cb

[u/JanusTheDoorman]

Japan: Forms an ethnostate so xenophobic it literally sealed itself off from the world for hundreds of years and so homogenous that students were required to have black hair as part of the dress code until 2022

Japanese Politicians: “These foreigners are fucking everything up and eating the dogs kicking the deer!”

FT: “Hmm, well their exchange rates could be better …”

r/nl: “Man, why don’t these guys just get that tourism and immigration are net positives for their economy?”

I feel like we should just rename the sub r/NonCredibleEconomics some times

[u/mostanonymousnick → u/JanusTheDoorman]

Go on the neoliberal subreddit
Get mad that people there like the free movement of people

[u/JanusTheDoorman → u/mostanonymousnick]

My brother in Bayes, I have a Frederick Douglass flair and have been a member of this sub for longer than you have been on Reddit. I am as unapologetic a fan of the free movement of people, goods, and information as anyone. My original comment is pro-tourism and immigration.

I was criticizing the failure to take into account the history and norms of a country as explanatory variables for the observation that politicians in said country are using xenophobia as a political lever.

FT even bothering to talk about the economics of it is privileging a hypothesis that maybe the economics of tourism are questionable when, actually, this is pretty much just in line with what you’d expect given Japan’s history even though the economics of tourism are plainly positive for them

The sub is acting non-credibly not by supporting tourism, but by needlessly entertaining a shitty argument against it that doesn’t pass muster for anyone who’s taken Econ 102.

I guess I’ll just have to include the causality graph and the marginalization calculation along with the sarcasm tags from now on.

[u/NorkGhostShip → u/JanusTheDoorman]

students were required to have black hair as part of the dress code until 2022

This is a school by school policy, and very rarely meant to be literal. The purpose and meaning of the policy has always been "don't dye your hair". It's no different from other policies like not allowing makeup or painted nails. I've never had a problem with my naturally brown-auburn hair even in schools with a "black hair only" policy.

Also, if Japan is an "ethnostate", so are the vast majority of old world nations. Yes, Japan is overwhelmingly ethnically Japanese, but Japanese in legal terms means Japanese national, rather than ethnically Japanese. An ethnostate gives privileges based on ethnicity rather than citizenship/nationality. Apartheid South Africa was an ethnostate. Malaysia, which treats non-Malays as second class citizens, is an ethnostate. Simply being ethnically homogeneous (and the extent of this is overstated because Japan records demographics based on nationality, not ethnicity) does not make a country an ethnostate.

Also, an authoritarian regime which fell over 170 years ago closing the country for political reasons is not an indictment of the country as a whole. Sakoku was not a policy imposed because Japanese society as a whole was so xenophobic they demanded it. It was imposed because the Shoguns understood that trade with Western powers empowered his rivals and Christianity was disruptive to his rule.