The cost of living in Japan is staggeringly high, and the overall economy has been stagnant for well over a decade – even before the current meltdown. On the other hand, healthcare and solid dietary habits have extended the average Japanese life expectancy to 81.6 years. But since the cost of living is so high and the economy so bad, couples are foregoing having children (or more than one child) because of the concomitant cost of raising a child (including having to have a larger home, where living space in densely populated areas is prohibitively expensive). The birth rate is plummeting.
Thus, Japan is both a rapidly aging and contracting population. 2005 was the peak year for population (about 128 million); every year since (projected into the future) reflects a reduction. “Japan’s demographic time clock is ticking: its population will fall by almost a third to 90 million within 50 years, according to government forecasts. By 2055, more than one in three Japanese will be over 65, as the working-age population falls by over a third to 52 million.” New York Times, January 2nd. “The average age of the Japanese population is 39.6…The population fell by 75,000 in 2009, the steepest decline since the end of World War II.”
And old folks generally stop working at some point, hopefully carried by the earnings of the younger workers who are contributing to governmental and private pension funds. But if you stop and look at the numbers, the problem becomes crystal clear: “Coupled with the aforementioned low birth rate, the problems Japan faces in the immediate future are acute. With Japan’s labour force expected to decrease by 10% in the next 25 years, the economic outlook is far from bright. In all likelihood the domestic market will shrink, production will fall, the government’s revenue base will contract inexorably and it will struggle to meet welfare and medical payments for an increasing number of elderly as the dependency ratio (the number of workers supporting the elderly) will shift dramatically. In 1950 one elderly person was supported by 12 members of the working population, by 1990 it was 5.5 workers, and by 2020 it is estimated to be 2.3 workers.” Japanesestudies.org.uk
So you’d think that the Japanese government would be bending over backwards to encourage immigration, but for an island nation that was substantially cut off for almost half a millennium until Commodore Matthew Perry brought four black naval vessels into Tokyo bay in July of 1853… and prompted Japan to begin an accelerated race toward modernity… the thought of lots of non-ethnic Japanese living in Japan is culturally intolerable. Indeed, engineers are busy devising sophisticated robots to tend to limited-agility senior citizens just to make sure that immigrants won’t be needed to fulfill that need.
Immigrating into Japan, even for the most skilled workers, often runs into insurmountable testing and other rigorous barriers designed to keep foreigners out. If anything, the rules are just getting tighter: “In 2009, the number of registered foreigners here fell for the first time since the government started to track annual records almost a half-century ago, shrinking 1.4 percent from a year earlier to 2.19 million people — or just 1.71 percent of Japan’s overall population of 127.5 million.” NY Times.
For example, the nursing shortage in the United States has generated an influx of qualified candidates from the Philippines and Indonesia. The same quality of nurses who made their way to Japan, where they are desperately needed, has hit a wall of a complex character driven language (with an alphabet too!), severe testing and a bias against foreigners: “To extend her three-year stint at a hospital outside Tokyo, [one such nurse] must pass a standardized nursing exam administered in Japanese, a test so difficult that only 3 of the 600 nurses brought here from Indonesia and the Philippines since 2007 have passed… ‘If you’re in the medical field, it’s obvious that Japan needs workers from overseas to survive. But there’s still resistance,’ said Yukiyoshi Shintani, chairman of the Aoikai Group, the medical services company that is sponsoring [the above-referenced nurse] and three other nurses to work at a hospital outside Tokyo. ‘The exam,’ he said, ‘is to make sure the foreigners will fail.’” NY Times.
The long-term repercussions of such policies will accelerate further economic decline, both in terms of fewer able workers (needed to support the growing elderly) and a severe contraction of consumers able to sustain demand to support the local economy. Even foreigners who graduate from Japanese universities are encouraged to return to their home countries, and foreign entrepreneurs (even with significant investment capital) also find themselves unwelcome, facing legal barriers against them and their proposed businesses. Politicians who try and address these issues find themselves slammed into walls of defeat by xenophobic locals who would rather sink into poverty than live in a land with lots of non-ethnic Japanese: “[W]hen a heavyweight of the defeated Liberal Democratic Party unveiled a plan in 2008 calling for Japan to accept at least 10 million immigrants, opinion polls showed that a majority of Japanese were opposed. A survey of roughly 2,400 voters earlier this year by the daily Asahi Shimbun showed that 65 percent of respondents opposed a more open immigration policy.” NY Times.
It is both fascinating and terrifying seeing how emotional bias can so lead an entire population to refuse to make the necessary corrections to insure their economic survival and longer-term prosperity. Could the same kind of short-sightedness happen here? Would Americans really be willing to cut their economic prospects to advance cultural goals instead? Look around you and ask yourself that question… really ask yourself that question.
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