haliday

I'm Japanese. Americans who visit my country tend to come home with the same question: how did Japan stay Japan? They watched trains leave on the exact second. They left a phone on a café table, came back an hour later, and found it still sitting there next to the cold coffee. Some of them read that in 2023 people in Tokyo turned in more than 4 billion yen in lost cash to the police, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. There are two halves to the answer. Most people who praise Japan online only know the first one. For America, the second one matters more. THE FIRST HALF: HOW WE KEPT OURSELVES It starts in July 1853, when Commodore Perry brought four black ships to the mouth of Edo Bay and pointed his guns at a country that had been closed for over two hundred years. Across the sea, China had just lost the Opium War and was being forced open by foreign powers. Japan's leaders could see exactly what happened to old civilizations that refused to change. So they changed faster than any nation ever had. But they did it under a rule: wakon yōsai. Japanese spirit, Western technique. Take the railways, the steel, the constitution, the navy. Leave the self-contempt at the dock. That rule survived everything that came after. War, defeat, two atomic bombs, nearly seven years of American occupation. We copied your factories and then beat you at cars. I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945 a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege. Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work. For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping. So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof. THE SECOND HALF: HOW WE ARE DISAPPEARING In 1949, about 2.7 million babies were born in Japan. In 2024 it was 686,061. The first time I saw that number I assumed I was reading the wrong column. I wasn't. Our fertility rate is 1.15. The population peaked around 2008 and has shrunk every year since. There are mountain villages now where the only new things are the vending machines. And this didn't happen under the left. One conservative party, the LDP, has governed Japan for almost all of the last seventy years. No woke revolution, no open borders, no defund the police. The right won the culture war here before it started. The country is shrinking anyway. What went wrong is economic, and it's very old. On the last trading day of 1989 the Nikkei closed at 38,915. Then the bubble burst. The banks were sitting on mountains of bad loans, and instead of letting failed companies fail, they kept lending them fresh money so nobody had to admit the losses. Economists later called them zombie firms; Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap documented the whole thing in 2008. The Nikkei didn't get back to its 1989 high until February 2024. Thirty-four years. The zombies were kept alive at someone's expense, and it was the young. To hold the old structure up, the system protected the people already inside: lifetime jobs for the men hired before the crash, pay by seniority, pensions no politician dared touch because old people vote. Whoever arrived after 1990 got what was left. Today close to four in ten workers are non-regular, on short contracts or part-time or sent in by agencies, and men in those jobs marry far less often than men with permanent ones. Nobody plans a family on a contract that ends in March. Real wages are still lower than in 1996. Government debt is well over 200 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world. When the government finally admitted the birth crisis, it did what governments do and announced a program: about 3.6 trillion yen a year for children. Births kept falling. Have you ever seen a bonsai up close? You take a tree that wants to grow thirty meters tall, and every year you cut back its roots and wire its branches so it keeps exactly the same shape. Some live for centuries. They're beautiful. They never get any bigger. That's what conservatism becomes when it only preserves and never builds. We protected everything, including the things that should have been allowed to die. In 2022 Elon wrote that unless something changes, Japan will eventually cease to exist. A lot of people here called it rude. I was annoyed too, for about a day. Then I looked at the census again. WHAT AMERICA SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem. Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time. You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us. If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves. A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.