combined with ridiculous cost of living, terrible work/life balance and incredibly xenophobic immigration policies.
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?
Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?
Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?
There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't.
As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd.
But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
Edit: can't reply
> I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan
Chinese are the 2nd largest nationality of foreign agricultural and food workers in Japan [0].
As long as the median household income in China [1] remains below the minimum wage in Japan [2], members of the bottom half of Chinese society will continue to emigrate there, Korea, and other countries to work, that said not at the same rate as was seen a decade ago.
[0] - https://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/opac_download_md/4738336/...
[1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202507/t202507...
[2] - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E4%BD%8E%E8%B3%83%E9...
This is what I did to reply to you.
You don’t have to say ‘ can’t reply’ then quote someone like that.
Context is preserved better the proper way but it’s not very discoverable.
As evidenced by the non arrival of across the board 10% rises in meal costs when tipping is banned.
TL;DR cost and price linkage is not amenable to simplistic claims about the impact on pricing.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a 旧帝一工 or Ivy, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters. There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...
[1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf
[2] - https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/04/10/the-socioeconomic...
I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_...
People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.
All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.
If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.
But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.
So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...
This is basically the best in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.
This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.
Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)
> ~18% of their working age people *do not have jobs*
Which is a correct interpretation of participation rate. His theory on the causes may be off, but his numbers weren't
> … the most effective way to distribute wealth?
Nobody said this is a template for every problem, opportunity or other situation in economics.
This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.
Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.
Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?
Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.
> Tax the robot’s income
Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
> Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
Additonally, Japan has spent decades thinking about this eventuality (at least since the 1970s), which is why Japan worked on the "Flying Geese" paradigm where Japanese public-private ventures would end up become major capital stake holders across Asia, the US, and Europe.
After entire generations are subsidized by ubi, the system will collapse on itself.
In the US, native tribes get ubi when they turn 18. The end result isn't happiness or prosperity.
I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
China is a deeper decline than Japan too, which will make their geopolitics volatile
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