Kionon wrote:trythil wrote:Also, for an example of the troubles that an aging, closed society can get into, look at Japan.
Oh, yeah. Japan sucks. I mean who the hell would want to live there?
I never said Japan "sucked". Japan's still a great place to go, and I bet it's a very nice place to live right now. I haven't lived there as long as you have, but I was there for three months in 2004, went back for a week in 2008, and enjoyed every day of both visits.
However, there are a lot of questions about whether that standard of living can be maintained with Japan's aging population and relatively low influx of foreign workers. I'm sure you're familiar with the many articles and papers published about the growing financial problems caused by more and more people going on pension, about where Japan's GDP is going to go in the next 10 to 20 years (most estimates I've read say "way down"), and so forth.
So the trouble I refer to is the near-term (i.e. decade or two) uncertainty of whether Japanese society can sustain itself at its present level or whether it will deteriorate. There don't seem to be that many projections (if any at all) stating that the standard of living in Japanese society will be going
up in the aforementioned timeframe.
A similar idea applies to the AMV subculture.