Do you think Japan will ever get over its rigid Confucian work culture and catch up to the west in entrepreneurship (e.g. tech startups) and certain technologies (e.g. scan and email instead of FAX, embracing cashless payment options other than PASMO/Suica)?

Not in the near future. The country is facing a socioeconomic catastrophe that is going to make the Lost Decade, the 1997 Asian crisis, the 2008 crash, the Great Depression, and the Panic of 1819 combined look like the 1980s asset price boom, when American businessmen were learning Japanese out of the assumption that the country was going to take over the rest of the world with its superhuman salarymen.

The elderly population is steadily growing, and birth rates have plummeted. This is in part because the Confucian-style "Juku -> Center Shiken -> Todai/Kyodai/Handai -> Salaryman -> Sleep while sitting on the Utsunomiya Line rapid train to Ueno -> Work all day -> Drink at the izakaya all night life path for men, and the Get a good husband in your 20s life path for women, has had a stranglehold on Japanese society for almost a century.

Nobody has time to make babies, and Japan's corporate and government networks continue to be run by the older generations who follow a social hierarchy that is more appropriate for the time of the Shogunate, rather than a highly-developed, industrialized country in the year 2015.

America's individualistic mentality has allowed the younger generations to believe they can become successful. Young men are immigrating into the country, boning women and raising families. In Japan, social structures and pressures seem to have maintained the same level of rigidity for over 400 years, which stokes the flames of hikokomori and ijime. Young men are obsessing over sex dolls and idols instead of boning women. Some even commit suicide, because the deck is so stacked against them.

But it gets worse. So entrenched is the country's bitter xenophobia that they're making robots to care for elderly people rather than let in more foreigners. Even South Korea, perhaps the most racially proud and xenophobic industrialized country in the world, has relented and is bringing in more foreigners to counteract their growing and costly elderly population.

If you combine that with a debt-to-GDP level that rivals Zimbabwe, Japan is quite truly screwed.

/r/japanlife Thread