Japan as we know it is doomed.
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Face of change: Hidenori Sakanaka, the former Justice Ministry bureaucrat and Tokyo Immigration Bureau chief fears the nation is on the brink of collapse, and says "we must welcome 10 million immigrants between now and 2050." COURTESY OF HIDENORI SAKANAKA
Only a revolution can save it. What kind of revolution? Japan must
become "a nation of immigrants."
That's a hard sell in this notoriously closed country. Salesman-in-chief
— surprisingly enough — is a retired Justice Ministry bureaucrat named Hidenori
Sakanaka, former head of the ministry's Tokyo Immigration Bureau and current
executive director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, a private think
tank he founded in 2007. It's an unlikely resume for a sower of revolution.
Sakanaka clearly sees himself as such. His frequent use of the word
"revolution" suggests a clear sense of swimming against the current.
Other words he favors — "utopia," "panacea" —
suggest the visionary. "Japan as we know it" is in trouble on many
fronts. The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the subsequent
tsunami and nuclear disasters, struck a nation whose economy had been stagnant
for 20 years while politicians fiddled and government floundered. But that's
not Sakanaka's point. He is focused on demographics. "Japan," he said
in a recent telephone interview, "is on the brink of collapse."
The nation's population peaked at 128 million in 2004 and has been in
accelerating decline since. By 2050, the government's National Institute of
Population and Social Policy Research estimates, 40 percent of Japanese people
will be 65 or over. Twenty-three percent already are, as against a mere 13
percent aged 15 and under. The birthrate is 1.3 children per woman, one of the
world's lowest. The population is set to drop to 90 million within 50 years; to
40 million within a century.
No nation, barring war or plague, has ever shrunk at such a pace, and as
for aging, there are no historical precedents of any kind. The nation needs a
fountain of youth. Sakanaka claims to have found one. Japan, he said,
"must welcome 10 million immigrants between now and 2050." "A
nation of immigrants" is not something Japan has ever aspired to be. For
250 years from the early 17th century it was quite literally a "closed
country" (sakoku). Entering or leaving without special and rare authority
were capital offenses. Then came the armed incursion of U.S. Navy "Black
Ships" in 1853 — which led, within 15 years, to the pell-mell pursuit of
Westernization.
Japan's foreign-born population today, higher than ever before at 1.7
percent of the total, compares with an average 10 percent in other developed
nations — 12 percent in the United States. Refugees have been cold-shouldered
to an extent widely regarded as disgraceful. Yet this is the country of which
Sakanaka wrote (in an essay last year titled "Paths to a Japanese-style
Immigrant Nation"): "A new Japanese civilization will realize a
multi-ethnic community, which no nation has ever achieved, and, in due course,
it will stand out as one of the main pillars of world civilization."
He is right that no nation has ever achieved it. Even the U.S., which is
proud to call itself a "nation of immigrants," has never been free
from racial and cultural frictions. He is right, too, to maintain that a Japan
that does achieve it will be "new" — so new, in fact, that a reader
might reasonably wonder:
Will it still
be Japan?
Here is where talk of revolution comes in. "In Japan in the age of
population decline," Sakanaka writes, "there is a need for a social
revolution equal to that of the Meiji Restoration" — the modernizing and
Westernizing revolution that began in 1868. "The very fundamentals of our
way of life, the ethnic composition of our country and our socio-economic
system will have to be reconsidered and a new country constructed."To
those Japanese — the vast majority — who desire no such national
reconstruction, Sakanaka pleads, "I believe the (re-creation) of Japan as
an immigrant nation is the ultimate reform, which will serve as a panacea for
the challenges facing the country."
Changing tone, he delivers a quasi-ultimatum: "The Japanese should
become aware that they live in an era of a severe population crisis and that it
is no longer possible to live in peace in a closed world only among Japanese
nationals. There is no way for Japan to survive but to build a society of
living with immigrants and hoisting a new flag: 'Immigrants Welcome.' "
Other thinkers hoist other flags. In 2008, Saitama University economist
Goro Ono published a book titled "Accepting Foreign Workers Spoils
Japan." The findings of an Asahi Shimbun newspaper poll of 3,000 readers
in 2010 suggest Ono is closer to the popular mood than Sakanaka. Asked if they
would accept large-scale immigration in the interests of reviving Japan, 65
percent of respondents said no; 26 percent yes. ("More in the yes camp
than I would have expected," Sakanaka quipped during our interview.)
Once Japan actually did set off down Sakanaka's road — only to hastily
double back via Ono's. That was in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the
bubble economy was expanding to its imminent bursting point and Japan's
labor-hungry factories were working full tilt. The nation's first-ever
mass-immigration program welcomed some 300,000 Japanese-Brazilians to plug the
gap.
Officials who had had assumed the Brazilians' Japanese ancestry would
smooth the transition were soon disillusioned. The Brazilian culture of
exuberance clashed with the native culture of restraint. The language barrier
proved hard to breach. Kids with minimal Japanese dropped out of school; some
turned to crime. A salsa boom in Japan became a symbol of the cultural
cross-fertilization some had hoped would come more naturally, but by 2009 the
experiment was over. The government offered to pay migrants' air fares back to
Brazil — if they agreed in writing not to try to return to Japan to work.
Ono's solution to the challenges posed by depopulation and the aging
society is to adapt to them — by fitting the able-bodied old into the labor
force, and by developing robots and other labor-saving technology. Sakanaka,
too, in his 2005 book "Nyukan Senki" ("Immigration Battle
Diary"), had envisaged something similar. He called it the "small
Japan" option. It would turn Japan into a sort of 21st-century pre-Meiji
backwater. Life would be less frenetic but possibly deeper and more meaningful.
He's changed his mind. In his April 2012 book, Jinko Hokai to Imin
Kaikaku" ("Population Breakdown and the Immigrant Revolution")
he compares the sluggish pace of reconstruction since March 2011 with the rapid
recovery from much greater destruction after World War II. "Even before
3/11," he writes, "it was apparent in numerous regions that the
Japanese on their own could not manage the economy and society. So much the
more so now. There is no way the Japanese alone can rebuild regional industries
destroyed in the disaster."
Hence his plan for an "immigration society" involving an
organized evolution — or revolution — in which the newcomers would not be mere
guest workers or guest students. "A country undergoing population decline
does not need temporary foreign workers," he writes. "It needs
immigrants."
They would come to stay — as Japanese-resident, Japanese-educated,
Japanese-employed Japanese citizens, no different in their rights,
opportunities and responsibilities from the native-born. And they would come
from all over the world not just a handful of countries, Sakanaka stresses. "This
is a grandiose project that will transform the Japanese archipelago into a
miniature of the world community," he declares, "a utopia to which
people from all around the world dream of migrating."
It sounds fantastic, and in fact, Sakanaka acknowledges, would require
legislation now lacking — anti-discrimination laws above all. Ultimately, he
believes, an influx of highly skilled foreign nationals trained in Japan will
be the salvation of several tottering industries. Agriculture, for example.
Does agriculture have a viable future otherwise? He thinks not and offers
figures to prove it: Japan's farming population declined by 750,000 to 2.6
million in the five years to 2010; their average age is 65.8. Fisheries and
manufacturing, he says, face similar attrition. "People are starting to
understand," he told The Japan Times, "that this can't
continue." He added, a little ruefully, "I can't exactly say that the
plan I've been advocating over the past three years has generated much
enthusiasm." In fact, "Intellectuals and politicians basically ignore
me."
Revolutionaries learn to live with that, firm in the conviction that their
time will come.
Japan Times
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