Note: This article is also available in Romanian.
Your house is on fire and you have 3 options before calling the firemen:
- Throw water at the flames
- Run inside the house and wait
- Not calling the firemen because you need time to make up your mind
It is not a tough choice, yet Japan’s birth rate is on fire and they are choosing a mix of options 2 and 3.
One of the nations with the brightest minds on earth is facing its self inflicted extinction by making the dimmest of choices. The main reasons for Japan to commit this paradox of slow economic-seppuku-by-
1. National Racism in the guise of Cultural Pride
Japan will not accept immigrants, not in the past, not now, not in the future. Simply because they either stay Japanese or nothing. No way around it, it is part of their culture to segregate the non Japanese. Today, even if born and raised in Japan, the children of Korean parents are not always issued Japanese citizenship and usually referred as Zainichi, not as Japanese. Japan has a long history of repatriating Zainichi Koreans found to be “Incompatible with Japanese culture.”. Logic does not matter as much as the pride of being one of the very few genetically and culturally pure Japanese parents because Japan would rather isolate itself than accepting reproductive defeat. This collective denial reached sci-fi levels in recent years when Tsukuba University showed the media their powered exo-suits for caretakers, who are expected to be overwhelmed in the near future with the needs of the disproportionately elderly population. In other words, instead of even thinking of the possibility of immigration, the Japanese would rather brace themselves to take care of the geriatric tsunami they themselves are creating.
2. Children of Karoshi
Japan has long had a tradition called Karoshi: males working themselves to death to serve a master. Things did not improve after Japan’s acceptance of defeat after WW2. It was either suicide to avoid shame or accepting defeat and a lifetime of shame. Japan chose the admission of defeat and national shame simply because the delusional tradition of the disposable warrior does not extend to the untrained, unbrainwashed population. The masterless Japanese nation and its admission of defeat was a collective cross-generational searing trauma inflicted upon an already post-apocalyptic culture. This national psychological defeat created an unbearable void to be filled desperately with something else, something where the lost pride could be found, something else but suicide which, paradoxically, ended up being re-purposed slower suicide in the form of overwork. In a stark demonstration of overcompensation mixed with a misplaced need for a sense of worth, the post war generations of men in their early 30’s and 40’s, rebuilding their atomized national pride, would work shifts of 12, 14 or even 16 hours for weeks, months or even years, slowly building the tradition of using as few vacation days or none at all to give their co-workers and superiors the clear message of compulsory collective sacrifice-dedication.
The result a few decades later?
A widespread social anomaly affecting multitudes of otherwise healthy men without a family history of disease, dying of stroke, heart attack, chronic fatigue or a combination of the 3. The phenomenon was fittingly baptized “Karoshi”.
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has been tracking this phenomenon since 1969 and over the years things are not improving: in 2007: 189 workers died, many from strokes or heart attacks, and about 208 became ill due to overwork. Those who die are not surprisingly, mostly male. Karoshi in and of itself may seem trivial as more than 189 people die on road accidents every year but if we consider the impact of those who commit suicide during formative years, the overall heavily reduced lifespan of males in management, the absent fathers due to either work or work related death, the problem is clearly not trivial at all for those affected by it from birth and the resulting incomplete and dysfunctional social structures with missing family members. This has created a social phenomenon with the more recent generations of males who tend to despise the traditional obligation of males slowly working themselves to death and have instead, embraced more herbivore lifestyles that not surprisingly, those lifestyles go directly against the fundamentals of the older generations: older gen chose academic excellence and sacrifice? then newer gen chooses little or no school. Older gen chose competitive high stress high karoshi-risk management jobs? Then newer gen chooses low wage unambitious low stress jobs. Older gen chose family and multiple responsibilities? Then newer gen chooses as few responsibilities and no family. That last choice is crucial to Japan’s future demographics: No family.
Many of those now young “herbivore” (or “grasseater”) men may or may not realize they are the byproduct of growing up in a fatherless household-culture, yet, the crucial point is that the new generation is unlikely to marry and reproduce. Despite the herbivore movement, Karoshi is still alive and actively killing men to this day, conveniently, it is never a surprise that the male aspect of Karoshi is never brought up by feminists. Why would they even mention the male primary victims of their own death if they want to take that credit without dying at all? Dead disposable men are a banality when compared with the injustice of not “empowering” women for “progress” in the workplace.
3. Feminism by western proxy
The analogy of the house on fire is perfect to describe what is happening to Japan, while the house is burning, the feminists want to sit down and “empower” women at the work place which is akin to sitting down and voting to decide what to do with the fire instead of just throwing water at it. At least that is what Lillian Cunningham at the Washington post blindly and unapologetically proposes. The nuggets of fools’ gold in said article do not come from Cunningham only but also from Japanese feminists such as Kuniko Inoguchi (Japan’s former gender minister) who is quoted as saying the following,
“In this country [Japan], we have never had a real radical feminist movement like many countries have, lacking that, I think we have not been able to make a dramatic change in mindset.”
Inoguchi not only proposes radicalism but also developed a gender target to be imposed upon Japanese corporations to place women in 30% of their senior manager positions (not unlike the gender quotas to be imposed in the European Union). Let that sink in: the best solution for a looming demographic collapse is to radicalize and “empower” women for “gender progress” instead of asking them to get pregnant. Statistics show the higher the level of education the woman has, the fewer the children she will have. Consequently, enforcing gender quotas and using feminist pseudo-logic will only keep women at school then work and lower the birth rate. No need to sugar coat it: Cunningham and Inoguchi are just playing stupid because if they plan on keeping women mostly at school and work, the result will be they just won’t become mothers. Cunningham even defeats her own argument in her own article with the following quote:
“Right now, however, [Japanese] women don’t seem to be very empowered in the bedroom or the boardroom. The average Japanese woman has 1.3 children, one of the lowest numbers across the globe. She is also far less likely than her male counterparts to work full time. According to Goldman Sachs’s research, 70 percent of Japanese women quit their jobs after having a child.”
Women lack “empowerment” but quit 70 percent of the time? That is cartoon-like feminist pseudo-logic trying to ask for both having the cake and eating it (or rather have the cake of children and eat the cake of work in a state of desperate demographic emergency) which makes no sense. Cunningham conveniently, as most feminists do, cherry picks a favorable number to whine about (70% pregnant women leaving their jobs for not being “empowered enough”) and downplays the inconvenient ones (1.3 children per woman) the number of pregnant women is abysmally low but she conveniently focuses on the whining aspects of lacking empowerment by that magical 70%. Unlike Cunningham, let’s focus on the inconvenient productive aspects of that number. 70% is a gigantic majority to accommodate. How about the lost productivity every time a woman takes a job away from a productive male or female just to get pregnant the first or second year on the job? How about the places that woman took away from higher education for a degree she will not use? No, Cunningham knows the cartoon-like lie she is trying to sell, she is an excellent hypocrite and is just playing the part, Cunningham understands that women taxing the system with fake childish ambitions for a degree they will discard as soon as they have their first child is not too different from the scene in Disney’s “Lilo and Stitch” where a little girl forces an adult ready to pay at the counter to give her the money only to put it back on the counter and take credit for “paying”. Their demands make as much sense as a fairy tale where the castle is on fire and the princess in the tower but wants a new dress or she won’t come down and marry. Is it so difficult for the princess to realize that if she does not save herself no one will marry her corpse? Even a fairy tale princess would realize, no one is that stupid.
Why then, does Cunningham keep talking if she is aware of her verbal string of absurdities?
That is why it is so important to read in between their lines: Gender ideologues like Cunningham and Inoguchi are not as asinine as they seem, rather, as Mykeru defines them in his “Creepy Clowns” video analysis: “They are like jackals that roll on carrion for camouflage. In reality, they are predators that want to roll on a real victim to pass as something else.” Cunningham and Inoguchi clearly understand the issue at hand but as opportunistic predators, they really do not care about helping the authentic victim, that is, the comatose Japanese birth rate. Not at all. What they see is an opportunity to hold a victim ransom and make self aggrandizing demands.
Think about it: they understand Japan needs women to get pregnant but since they do not control Japanese women and their reproduction, they declare themselves glorified self-appointed imaginary representatives of all females and ask for a gender quota ransom. Is akin them wearing white t-shirts with a bright pink message saying “We can reproduce but you can’t. Pay us or we will kill Japan’s future. Note: We offer no guarantee. Donate now.” They claim they may have the solution but first you have to pay the ransom but even if you do, it may be too late because the patriarchy will get in the way of all the things they do not intend to do anyways. It is dishonesty and plausible deniability at an international level through the sponsorship of feminist intellectual dishonesty, it is all about not promising anything but asking for as much as possible. When the Japanese demographic-economic collapse takes place, they will just blame something the evil men did that prevented the poor women from achieving full potential, while feminists like Cunningham et. al. laugh from their retirement mansions in the Bahamas (bought with all the money they made out of glorified feminist hypocrisy).
Feminists like Cunningham and Inoguchi tend to find a movement, pretend they want to fix a problem by demanding the moon & the stars, make the problem worse, and then get a great deal of personal gain along the way. Their approach is dishonest but effective; it is like knowing a toddler has gone missing, and you already saw the body floating in the water but instead of telling the rescue team what you saw, you join them, lead them away from the corpse and portray yourself as a heroine for the cause for maximum camera time quite “luckily.”
In this case, it is Japanese demographic carrion offered to feathered feminists.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K
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