Aging Japanese town faces challenge as foreign population grows 20 times larger in 20 yrs – The Mainichi

8 comments

1. [removed]

2. That welder dude earns 150,000 yen per month.

   Why are the locals surprised that everyone else has buggered off? Surely that is plenty for a fully grown man to get married, buy a home, and produce two or three children on?

   There are some other slightly off things in this article too.

3. They could only require them to work five days a week. They’d be less tired and be able to take advantage of Japanese language classes on Sunday. But the reality is they want to pay as little as they can while getting as much work from them as possible. But as mentioned, if there is a strong foreign community to support one another, there is little reason to learn Japanese, especially if the intent is to return to their native countries. And lastly, it’s the foreign community’s taxes that are supporting the town. There’s not much you can complain about when you are living off of others.

4. There will be more and more towns like this in future Japan.

5. Vietnamese style karaoke is certainly a culture shock

6. Yea issue is the Japanese young people don’t wanna hang with someone making 150,000 either

7. It’s cool

8. I feel like half these “problems” are just old people who got used to having zero youth around and then their town gets rescued from geriatric death and they are finding a way to grump about it instead of being happy.

   If you imported 1000 japanese 20 somethings to the countryside there’s gonna be beach fires and karaoke too.

   Aside from language of course. Language is going to be a critical issue across the entire country as they try to import population. Is there a proper national quick-japanese curriculum to answer that need? Not that I know of. Too bad japan’s approach to language is “here, memorize this entire book.” France teaches basic french to every member of the foreign legion in about a month, maybe they can take some ideas from that. You start with a small but critical vocabulary, and you immerse people in it.

   https://storylearning.com/blog/how-the-french-foreign-legion-learns-french-fast