They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.
>But a strict zero-immigration policy collides with one terrifying reality: No country in history has successfully reversed a falling fertility rate, and Japan shows zero signs of breaking that trend.
Wrong! Korea has successfully reversed theirs starting this year due to some extreme policies benefiting families with children
> The industry is shifting from rigid industrial arms to general-purpose robots powered by advanced AI
It is not, if by "general-purpose robots" we mean humanoid robots, and by "AI" we mean LLMs. Factories will continue to be designed around robots that are designed for specific purposes and controlled by normal, predictable software.
I am really shocked at the tone of so many of the comments here. Did HN become a breeding ground for xenophobia at some point? Has it always been that and is it just way more mask off now?
A few of the comments in question have a bad tone - but most of them are reasonable opinions about valuing one's people, culturally or socially, or about the effectiveness of immigration.
The article paints immigration as something undoubtedly negative:
> They are willing to accept a smaller economy, strained pensions, and dead rural towns as the price for keeping their core cities safe, clean, and culturally familiar.
I'll not pretend that immigration is an easy, uncontroversial and solved topic. But can we maybe not equate immigration with dirty and dangerous cities? Yes that has been the rhetoric for thousands of years, but it's most often the rhetoric of those with a dubious track record of saying true things. Trump is famously anti-immigration, why trust what he says? Since 9/11 the stereotype of a terrorist in the USA has been a brown Muslim. The facts tell us the majority of domestic terrorism is done by white christian dudes. I get that xenophobia is an emotional topic for many, but that doesn't excuse racism.
You know, many eastern countries apparently intuitively think in cycles. The west tends to think linearly: "We're trending upwards, argh argh overpopulation, famine, death. We're trending downwards, argh argh population collapse, famine, death".
Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
Neither immigrants nor robots will prevent them from becoming essentially extinct as an ethno-national group if they don't do something serious to stimulate the fertility rate. They need to find the root of why Japanese aren't having kids and resolve it.
I'd say it's due primarily to the collision of their values with Western values, particularly concerning family and workplace roles. The core issue is actually being faced by all developed nations, but it hits Japan really hard due to their immigration stance as well as lack of natural resources (they need to excel in providing globally scoped services).
I am not at all concerned about this problem. At this point, society mostly need people as consumers, so quality is not as important as it used to be (in democratic countries it's a bit more complicated because people vote - but this is solvable too).
Because there are no resource or technology constraints that prevent solving it, just regulatory concerns, and because regulatory concerns are easy to solve in unfree countries almost by definition, and because unfree countries face this problem to a larger degree than free ones so will be also forced to act sooner, and because once they figure the solution it will become imperative for all other countries to do the same or quickly cease to exist so regulatory concerns will be quickly overcome - there is really no way this won't be satisfactorily solved.
It's perfectly natural for a country to experience periods of growth and decline. Demographic and economic cycles rise and fall over time, and a period of contraction does not mean growth won't return in the future.
What isn't reversible is losing a country's identity. As a foreigner, I'd rather see Japan remain Japan than become a messy cultural mix, like Europe.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadNot a bet I would be willing to take though lol.
Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.
Japan's population around 1900 was mere 43 million people - when most of them were required to work the fields.
Japan will be fine. Europe, on the other hand...
Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
but if you want to keep the economy functioning, you need to do something. immigration is something.
Wrong! Korea has successfully reversed theirs starting this year due to some extreme policies benefiting families with children
[1] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-05-27/nationa... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-bi...
It is not, if by "general-purpose robots" we mean humanoid robots, and by "AI" we mean LLMs. Factories will continue to be designed around robots that are designed for specific purposes and controlled by normal, predictable software.
> They are willing to accept a smaller economy, strained pensions, and dead rural towns as the price for keeping their core cities safe, clean, and culturally familiar.
I'll not pretend that immigration is an easy, uncontroversial and solved topic. But can we maybe not equate immigration with dirty and dangerous cities? Yes that has been the rhetoric for thousands of years, but it's most often the rhetoric of those with a dubious track record of saying true things. Trump is famously anti-immigration, why trust what he says? Since 9/11 the stereotype of a terrorist in the USA has been a brown Muslim. The facts tell us the majority of domestic terrorism is done by white christian dudes. I get that xenophobia is an emotional topic for many, but that doesn't excuse racism.
Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
"a turtle that retracts its head will later extend it"
I'd say it's due primarily to the collision of their values with Western values, particularly concerning family and workplace roles. The core issue is actually being faced by all developed nations, but it hits Japan really hard due to their immigration stance as well as lack of natural resources (they need to excel in providing globally scoped services).
Because there are no resource or technology constraints that prevent solving it, just regulatory concerns, and because regulatory concerns are easy to solve in unfree countries almost by definition, and because unfree countries face this problem to a larger degree than free ones so will be also forced to act sooner, and because once they figure the solution it will become imperative for all other countries to do the same or quickly cease to exist so regulatory concerns will be quickly overcome - there is really no way this won't be satisfactorily solved.
What isn't reversible is losing a country's identity. As a foreigner, I'd rather see Japan remain Japan than become a messy cultural mix, like Europe.