Why This Topic Landed in Japan

Youth unemployment and exam competition in China are long-running subjects in Japan, but this time both arrived as something concrete: a number and a first-person sentence. The video put a figure of 24.1 million homeless people on the screen, though no source, definition or method of estimating it is given anywhere, and nothing outside videos carrying the same number backs it up. The school post came from a Chinese student writing about their own schooling and calling it a prison, with a Japanese translation attached — a person describing their own country rather than an outside commentary, which is part of why it travelled. Both subjects also map directly onto arguments Japan has about its own schools and its own welfare spending, which is where the replies went.

Key Reaction Themes

  • Most of the responses were comparisons with Japan, and they ran self-deprecating — In the school thread the dominant move was not to criticise China but to look down on Japan: there is no way a lazier country beats people who study this much, and Japan's own academic standards have already collapsed.
  • A large group read it as education without ethics — Everything poured into test scores and nothing into morals, manners or public order, with the results visible in behaviour. In its harshest form the argument was written as a generalisation about Chinese people as a whole.
  • On the poverty video, the argument became one about welfare design — One side held that being able to abandon the poor is precisely what lets China grow and that Japan's generous safety net is a drag; the other held that thin social security is why Chinese households over-save and why deflation will not lift.
  • A smaller group placed it alongside Japan's own — Comparisons to places in Tokyo where struggling young people gather, rather than to a foreign crisis.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

A video claims 24.1 million homeless in China

Footage of young people collapsed or sleeping rough in several cities spread together with a figure of 24.1 million.

Sources: 2ch

Comments:

  • "They could just go back to the countryside."
  • "Once you're blacklisted on credit, your family cuts ties with you. If they don't, their own credit rating drops."
  • "More than that, the share of old people is too big, so the hit from a falling birthrate and an ageing population looks brutal."
  • "That's no different from To-yoko lol" [Translator's note: "To-yoko" is an area beside a Kabukicho cinema in Tokyo where runaway and struggling young people gather.]
  • "The biggest bubble in human history burst, after all. And on top of that the bad loans probably haven't been cleaned up at all."
  • "Being able to let the poor die is China's strength. Watching the US and China makes it obvious that generous social security like Japan's is nothing but a shackle on a country's growth."
  • "In China social security is weak and the future is uncertain, so people save more than they need to. The deflation hell won't clear up. The US has welfare to make up for having no social insurance. Though apparently there are also a lot of poor people who live off welfare and don't work."
  • "The scale is just too big."

A Chinese student calls six-day, fifteen-hour school weeks a prison

A post in which a Chinese student described their own schooling as a prison was translated and circulated in Japanese.

最强の男liehf
最强の男liehf
@TwT_liehf
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Replying to @7eaFwi

是的，大部分中国的家长依旧认为孩子如果不能考上一个好大学，这辈子就废了，所以会变本加厉地逼着孩子们学习，无论他们愿不愿意。高中大部分学校早上六点到校晚上八点或者九点回家，一周上六天甚至六天半是常态，再加上课后作业和补习班，高中生一周除去吃饭睡觉基本没有超过六个小时的休息时间。

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Comments:

  • "Dumping everything into academics and learning nothing about morals, ethics or order — that's a bit incomprehensible."
  • "For a start there are no human rights in China. People belong to the state."
  • "Because face comes above everything there."
  • "There's no way lazy Japanese can beat Chinese who study this much. I surrender, I surrender. The gap in robotics has gotten too wide as well."
  • "Of course Japanese can't win. We're idiots."
  • "Meanwhile Japan has yutori education and free schools for kids who won't attend, and academic ability has collapsed." [Translator's note: "yutori" education was a national policy of reduced curriculum hours.]
  • "No matter how much more developed than Japan it gets, I wouldn't want to go to a country like that. Sure it produces some seriously brilliant people, but it also churns out dropouts by the ton."
  • "T h a t ' s w h y w e l o s t t o C h i n a"
  • "They have grade retention from primary school, after all."