Japan Sucks

[Gap Hag]

South Korea tried that, and it can be argued that while it did make life for them better, it also at the same time contributed to how that country is the Late-Stage Capitalism hellhole that it is today.

Can you go more into this? i don't think of south Korea as largely Christian.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Japan is cool; they like baseball, rice, and web design that hasn't changed since the 1990s, just like me.

 

[crowabunga]

Japan is peak escapism for weirdos who live in blighted, trash ridden first world cities.

Hah, I feel called out. Japan (and Singapore) interest me not because of weebshit but because I want to go somewhere I can for once experience urban environments without trash, paranoia, and obvious decay (that aren't just tourist potemkin villages).

 

[SwiftBucks]

Hah, I feel called out. Japan (and Singapore) interest me not because of weebshit but because I want to go somewhere I can for once experience urban environments without trash, paranoia, and obvious decay (that aren't just tourist potempkin villages).

No I'm the same way. It's just so pleasant to see liquor not locked up, I dont have to speak through bulletproof glass at the beer store and the chances of getting stabbed with a dirty needle are essentially nil.

Hokkaido has a lot more decay than Honshu, but even then it's just abandoned buildings and theyre not all set on fire and used as drug dens. Imo Hokkaido really gives you a better insight into the life of an average nipponese, and it's pretty rough.

I almost feel like the nonstop positivity in the media and ads along with the cleanliness are what stops a lot of people there from committing suicide. If you worked 14 hours of backbreaking labor for pennies and had to live in a place like Chicago, why bother living at all?

 

[Hypercop]

I almost feel like the nonstop positivity in the media and ads along with the cleanliness are what stops a lot of people there from committing suicide.

There's also this unique level of calmness to Japanese society that's like the polar opposite of America. Nips may work long hours but their working pace is much slower and calmer than what you get in the states, with freedom to do things like take brief naps on the job. I get the impression it's very easy to spend many years in a dreamlike haze over in Japan, just calmly floating through life and before you know it many years have passed and you're old and gray

 

[SwiftBucks]

There's also this unique level of calmness to Japanese society that's like the polar opposite of America. Nips may work long hours but their working pace is much slower and calmer than what you get in the states,

I think that only applies to reputable companies, and is a privilege for respectable kaishain. It looks like it's getting rarer to land those kinds of jobs and lots of nips are employed part time or precariously. It's also entirely untrue in their factory work. All those konbini bentos are made overnight so they're fresh, and the assembly line doesn't stop. Employees are told to wear diapers and there is absolutely no regard given to repetitive stress injuries. You will bend over the same way ten thousand times, if it ruins your back you can live in the park.

 

[Thiletonomics]

I almost feel like the nonstop positivity in the media and ads along with the cleanliness are what stops a lot of people there from committing suicide. If you worked 14 hours of backbreaking labor for pennies and had to live in a place like Chicago, why bother living at all?

It doesn't explain why their suicide rates are still one of the higher countries, although again Worst Korea outdoes them, because of their lack of positivity in their media and ads, and their said hyper-competitiveness. Also, actual shitholes like China, Venezuela, Haiti, and South Africa have lower (?) suicide rates, although someone would most likely kill your first (either the Government in the case of China, or a random Black in the case of Haiti and South Africa) before you can kill yourself.

 

[SwiftBucks]

It doesn't explain why their suicide rates are still one of the higher countries,

I think the incessant positivity is a direct response to the high suicide rates. Japan, as a whole, cannot discuss serious topics openly. They prefer to just act like the things don't exist. When the numbers on work stress related deaths became troublesome, they simply stopped reporting them. Work stress related deaths are now ZERO

It's a very unforgiving country. If you have a good job you can neither quit nor get fired, so if you mess up or if things are not working out, or even if it's just a bad fit for you, you're stuck. Because they cant fire you they will send you to shitty postings at the furthest branches for big mistakes. You may not see your family more than a few times a year if this happens. It can very easily lead to your entire family life falling apart and, well, suicide.

Same with the stories of people who had poor health or mental issues before big exams. Flunk the entrance exam to a good school and that's it, a whole sector of jobs is out of reach. All that youve worked for your entire youth, down the shitter, not to mention disappointing your family.

In less extreme cases I bet it's just the feeling of being trapped. Raises are rare, upward mobility practically nil. Lots of jobs gets you subsistence level existence. I can totally imagine it feeling like being doomed to an endless cycle. Add to it that incessant false positivity and being unable to just go along with it like everyone else, and you end up stepping in front of a train.

 

[WULULULULU]

Also, actual shitholes like China

Don't they have suicide nets on buildings?

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Can you go more into this? i don't think of south Korea as largely Christian.

It's the most Christian country in East Asia. About 29% to 31% of the country considers themself Christian.

 

[Hypercop]

In less extreme cases I bet it's just the feeling of being trapped. Raises are rare, upward mobility practically nil. Lots of jobs gets you subsistence level existence. I can totally imagine it feeling like being doomed to an endless cycle.

From lurking Japanese 4chan, I learned that they have an insult directed towards people who take a gap year before entering college. They call it "ronin" or "wandering samurai". In most countries this insult doesn't make sense, because gap years are considered a good option for people figuring out what they want from life. But in Japan you're supposed to go straight from high school to college, and any alternative is frowned upon. Hell, even careers like drawing manga or working in video games are frowned upon in Japan (with some exceptions). They're seen as not real careers, so people who end up in these industries have to work extra hard to prove themselves, which dogen talks about in this video.

The classic example is also the ending of Welcome to the NHK, where any Americans watching it were probably confused by Sato's decision to become a crossing guard as opposed to joining trade school or starting up an online business or whatever the fuck. Japs don't really view the economy in a flexible way like westerners.

 

[Waffle Iron]

From lurking Japanese 4chan, I learned that they have an insult directed towards people who take a gap year before entering college. They call it "ronin" or "wandering samurai".

Ronin are people that fail entrance exams and therefore are stuck with a gap year waiting for the next exam next year. So they often just horse around waiting for time to pass making them look like a deadbeat. They don't deliberately skip a year to go backpacking or something. Ronin were samurai with no master and were essentially a sword for hire. Just like how a student with no school that took him in is without a master.

 

[White Goy]

Glad I got Japan out of my system in the late 00's to mid 10's. Seems like there isn't much magic left these days but I had a blast back then, and gee I pumped a lot of big black bush. Ah, memories.

 

[Kitty Cat Man]

Japan is cool; they like baseball, rice, and web design that hasn't changed since the 1990s, just like me.

They aren't employing 90's best-practices though. Shit was more convenient in 90s USA than it is in modern Japan. Japan could never invent something like PayPal or any of the .com era banking or payment-processing solutions that basically built the bedrock of what we use today. They are terrible at maintaining complex systems and are raped by their regulatory environment.

Likewise, all the sites like 2ch are raped by pornographic ads which drive away non-coomer audiences, every news site is paywalled or just inaccessible with foreign IP's, the culture of japs creating geocities-style homepages is dead, and cybersec is laughable so everyone prefers to shop in-person or via western platforms like Amazon or eBay(yes, younger otaku and hypebeast types use domestic eBay alternatives but normie consumers looking to buy stuff go in-person or use amazon and actual collectors of shit like watches use eBay)

basically the japanese internet is twitter and yahoo comment sections now, shit's dismal.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

It doesn't explain why their suicide rates are still one of the higher countries, although again Worst Korea outdoes them, because of their lack of positivity in their media and ads, and their said hyper-competitiveness. Also, actual shitholes like China, Venezuela, Haiti, and South Africa have lower (?) suicide rates, although someone would most likely kill your first (either the Government in the case of China, or a random Black in the case of Haiti and South Africa) before you can kill yourself.

Japan (and Korea) is the opposite of the American Dream. There is no upward mobility and there are no second chances, if you fucked up you are going to hold that stigma until you're dead. So people kill themselves because they think they fucked up, the pressure is too much, or they realized that their entire life is set for them just by their parents origins.

Yes there are worse countries, but even those have enough hope for things to get better, and actually get to enjoy being with their families rather than once a week.

 

[SwiftBucks]

basically the japanese internet is twitter and yahoo comment sections now, shit's dismal.

LINE is huge but in traditional Japanese fashion, walled off from foreigners.

Yes there are worse countries, but even those have enough hope for things to get better, and actually get to enjoy being with their families rather than once a week.

Unless you get assigned mandatory weekend overtime!

It's no wonder the birth rate is abysmal

 

[Kitty Cat Man]

walled off from foreigners.

Not entirely, I had an account when I lived in singapore. LINE fucking sucks though. There's literally no social aspect to the app at all (or if there is, nobody outside japan uses it, or it was added after I stopped using it)
It's just a messaging platform with less features than whatsapp that's also somehow more bloated than wechat.

Maybe if you live in japan though there's QoL features or additional social-networking functionality. idk really. I know chinese people use wechat for all kinds of shit that just straight up doesn't work outside China so there's probably something similar with LINE and Japan.

 

[SwiftBucks]

Not entirely, I had an account when I lived in singapore. LINE fucking sucks though.

I tried to sign up but it asked for a nipponese phone number. It looks like it's more like Wechat now, I saw ads for idol live concerts on LINE, storefronts, used marketplaces and it seems theres like personal or landing pages on it. It's all through inference though so idk if it's true.

They tightened LINE access to do scammers apparently

 

[Thiletonomics]

They aren't employing 90's best-practices though. Shit was more convenient in 90s USA than it is in modern Japan. Japan could never invent something like PayPal or any of the .com era banking or payment-processing solutions that basically built the bedrock of what we use today. They are terrible at maintaining complex systems and are raped by their regulatory environment.

Likewise, all the sites like 2ch are raped by pornographic ads which drive away non-coomer audiences, every news site is paywalled or just inaccessible with foreign IP's, the culture of japs creating geocities-style homepages is dead, and cybersec is laughable so everyone prefers to shop in-person or via western platforms like Amazon or eBay(yes, younger otaku and hypebeast types use domestic eBay alternatives but normie consumers looking to buy stuff go in-person or use amazon and actual collectors of shit like watches use eBay)

basically the japanese internet is twitter and yahoo comment sections now, shit's dismal.

So Japanese internet is the opposite of Chinese and Korean internet, where they push for their own sites, and make it harder for Western sites to operate for Koreans. One example is how Twitch was pushed out of Korea, because the Korean government started charging Twitch for their bandwidth usage. Twitch attempted to rectify that by limiting Korean streams to 720p, but the fees were still too much that Twitch had to pull their operations out of Korea. And Korean streamers now use mostly Korean streaming platforms like SOOP, (formerly called AfreecaTV) which heavily limits their audiences outside of Korea.

And China also pushes for their own sites, as most Western sites are blocked by the Great Firewall.

Japan (and Korea) is the opposite of the American Dream. There is no upward mobility and there are no second chances, if you fucked up you are going to hold that stigma until you're dead. So people kill themselves because they think they fucked up, the pressure is too much, or they realized that their entire life is set for them just by their parents origins.

Yes there are worse countries, but even those have enough hope for things to get better, and actually get to enjoy being with their families rather than once a week.

What makes Chinese, Haitians, and South Africans from killing themselves though? At least with Indians, the hope of a Western country opening their immigration taps for you to swarm into gives them hope.

 

[Kitty Cat Man]

What makes Chinese, Haitians, and South Africans from killing themselves though?

if you were paying attention to them during covid, you'd know a lot of them do commit suicide. they're also authoritarian as fuck and can just do shit like putting suicide nets and barriers up at train stations, and probably have all kinds of fucked up laws like your family inheriting your debt if you neck
japan is hesitant to do stuff like that unless they're really motivated to by loss of face(izzat lol, which is also why jeets hide their suicide stats, very common in india too and almost always labeled as "accidents") - like with the bullet train, which does have "anti-fall" barriers, because the trains are expensive and populated by plenty of tourists.