I’ve come to believe that a homogeneous society, like that in Japan, is much healthier than a society consisting of many different value systems and behavior. I see the components of our society pulling against one another to the point where we don’t have an identity anymore that we can actually point to and say, “THAT represents America.” I see nothing good coming from this, and every group wants to blame every other group for being the problem.
This is an interesting take given the current state of Japanese society. They don’t seem to be doing all that well in many respects.
I know that they have a much more orderly and law abiding society than ours. They have a strong work ethic, and that includes the students in school. Their public transportation is clean and prompt, and even children take it without worrying about getting mugged or raped. Yes, they have problems, but they are not problems born out of social disarray.
You should know that this is not always a value-neutral observation.
It’s true that heterogenous societies struggle to find the consensus that allows them to have good things. Yes, a good example is how easy it is to get things done in a country like Japan. It has next to no diversity. So when a given policy is considered, Japanese don’t need to worry that non-Japanese will be free-riding off them. The numbers are so small that the free-rider problem typically isn’t that concerning, and if it is, then their rights can (and are) steamrolled as needed.
Very often, right-wingers are deploying this observation in the US to say, only homogenous countries possess the unity and the social trust to have nice socialist things. The US is too heterogenous, so we shouldn’t even try. Or if we do try, we need to be hypervigilant about detecting and punishing free riders, because I’m not trying to give free money to (insert hated minority group)
Of course this is an obstacle we have to consider in a clear-eyed way, but no, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. (which is not what you were saying, it’s just something to be aware of).
This is unfortunately indeed one of the downsides of a lot of diversity, that it leads to a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen situation where so many viewpoints are jostling for attention that consensus becomes highly difficult, and also, the much greater loss of trust when, as you mentioned, some people worry that “the folks who look like that or are different from us” may be freeloaders or taking advantage.
That’s what America is: the country where a whole lot of different people can live together and interact without (mostly) killing each other . We’re in danger of losing that — we’ve always been in danger of losing that. — but if America is anything, that’s who we are: exactly that diversity.
Which of us do you want to evict?
They have one of the highest suicide rates on the planet; including among those children.
Getting the trains to run on time doesn’t mean that everything is hunkydory.
Ironically, if there are two groups of Americans that, rationally speaking, should by now have about ZERO diversity in their “viewpoints”, it’s white and Black Americans descended from the pre-Civil War US population.
These are demographics that are both overwhelmingly Anglophone, both overwhelmingly Christian, with shared geographic environment and national history, shared traditions in sports, performing arts, etc.
The only real reason that they’re considered significantly “diverse” with respect to each other is because of the traditional racial hierarchy imposed by white Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century after the initial egalitarian impulses of the Reconstruction era.
I think it ill behooves white Americans in particular to complain about “a society consisting of many different value systems and behavior” as if it were somehow a new phenomenon dividing us “to the point where we don’t have an identity anymore that we can actually point to and say, ‘THAT represents America.’” Ultimately, most of the toxic expression of “diversity” and cultural strife in today’s America has been self-inflicted, via hierarchical systems and social stratification that worked to benefit the groups in power, who assumed that they were the only ones entitled to determine what “represents America”.
If white (not to mention straight and cis) Americans of Anglophone Christian ancestry don’t like fellow-countrymen being so conscious of their identity differences, maybe we shouldn’t have spent so fucking many centuries loudly telling them how different they were from “real Americans” and how that made them unfit to represent us as a nation. Just a thought.
Langston Hughes concurs:
(That last line sure does hit different today…)
I am not sure what you are getting at , and I really can not figure out what it has to do with the OP?
The short answer is that diversity is obviously a strength. The US is hurting itself badly right now excluding immigrants that are some of the most brilliant and talented people in the world. Half of the US’s Nobel prize winners are immigrants. We get so many doctors, researchers, scientists, and of course geniuses in music, literature, and all other disciplines of merit. It’s tough because multiracial democracy means constantly having to fight the backlash from racist half-wits. But the benefits far outweigh the consequences.
The mods agree with you, evidently. 
Strong disagree. Look at what Japan did when it was even more homogenous than it is now. Unit 731 was not the product of a healthy society.
Japan was overwhelmingly homogeneous back in World War II as a warmongering aggressor and is overwhelmingly homogeneous today as a liberal peaceful democracy. I don’t think diversity or immigration is what changed the culture.
Nitpicks for the posters who got it wrong:
Homogeneous
Heterogeneous
That is all.
Japan’s peaceful, but it’s hardly overall what I’d call liberal. Unless you just mean in the “liberal democracy” sense, but it’s a category error to equate that with a liberal society.
No, forceful occupation and cultural exposure did.
Nobody got it wrong.
It is hard to find perfectly homogeneous societies (not impossible, but really hard). When Plato dreamed of creating a perfect city, I think he wanted its society to be perfectly homogeneous. It could become a highly effective group, but was it a healthy society? Probably not.
I will consider a less utopian example: the comparison between the Roman Empire at its height and Sparta at its height. Rome was more diverse and heterogeneous, while Sparta was more homogeneous. But was the latter a healthier society than the former one? I’m not sure.
Japan’s peaceful posture is less in response to diversity and more in response to nuclear bombardment. It tends to put the case for war in a very different (very bright) light.
Though again, Japan’s rapidity in turning on a dime as a society can be partly attributed to their homogeneity. Overnight their wartime unity slogan changed from “100 million sacrificies” (i.e. we’ll all die to oppose the invaders) to “100 million apologies” (i.e. sorry about that whole war thing).
Though it must be said, some of the “unity” is a superficial cultural artifact. Japan’s right-wing fringe never disappeared at all, and can be heard advocating for Japan to get its own nuclear deterrent. Difference of opinion exists in Japan, it’s just not easily expressed, which I think is a negative side effect of homogeneity.
It’s true what you’re saying, but missed one of the critical points.
WWII Japan was culturally homogeneous and committed some of the most horrific war crimes the world has seen. If you think the Nazis were trivially worse, you probably haven’t looked into the rape of nanjing (and if you haven’t, I recommend you don’t 
).
In terms of the OP, I reject the premises.
We can cherry-pick safe and unsafe countries that are more or less diverse.
But the US has always been diverse, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than US-born citizens and the major terror threat now is white supremacists.
And we have the highest murder rate among first world nations. Ours is 6 per 100,000, but Japan’s is under 1. Hey, if you are truly screwed up, it is much more honorable to kill yourself than some innocent person. Look, we could go back and forth on this all day long, but individual isolated statistics don’t prove anything. Time will tell the story, but I doubt any of us will be around to see how the final chapter is written.
Canada is, or should be, a pretty close analog to the US, extremely diverse, probably moreso than the US is, with nowhere near the murder rate of the US, or (as far as I can tell) the fractious politics.
Most of the US isn’t all that diverse, but the diverse parts are doing great. NYC has a very low crime and murder rate, is quite prosperous, a driving force for the US economy, and extremely heterogeneous.
I just looked it up – Canada is the most diverse Western country!