That’s huge. I approve.

It’s certainly one way to address Japan’s coming demographical hard times. Though I’d add it’s been a rather rocky road for America.
Maybe Japan needs something of a reverse negative of China’s one child law. Offer tax incentives that encourage families to be bigger?

The biggest issue is that the immigrants aren’t going to be the ones they want. They aren’t going to get their preferred Caucasians. They are going to get just, oodles of Filipinos, Chinese and Korean immigrants. Then they have to deal with all the nasty little racist issues that Japanese people have. But still it’s a step, I’m looking forward to what can happen. Cheers.
Also, Soob, they do have that. Tax bonuses for parents with children.

In 21st century Japan,there are no “peasants”.Just those who works in agricultural sectors.
And they are the one who are more keen to have brides coming from The Phillipines and China,workers from Iran and Mongolia,hence population decrease hits harder in the rural areas.It is the labor unions in the city that worry more about the cheap foreign labors.

Currently we have about 60,000 influx of foreign workers coming in per year.The government plan is triple this a year,which is not that unrealistic to my eyes.

Kurt 9:

Japan always have about 700,000 zainichi Koreans.
But they are not exactly the descendent of wartime labor mobilization that started in 1940 as some of them proclaim to be.Mindan(the South Korean resident organization)had sensus in the 70’s and less than 10% of them are here because of WLM
Those who remained in Japan came in the 30’s and already had some establishment in Japan,thus remained.There were also influx of Koreans after liberation because of the political confusions there(Mostly from Cheju island,who participated in the left wing guerrila movement.They eventually joined Chingryon,the organization that has faith to Pyongyang)

And about the nationality.Many Koreans chose to remain Korean national despite born and raised in Japan.
While the door to become Japanese citizen is wide open and they can get Japanese passport within six month and about 10,000 of them do get it every year,there are various reasons why majority of them won’t.And Government of Japan is not to be blamed for that.

And about 600.000 chinese.Like Koreans,many of them(80%) are not “ethnic” Chinese,but Chinese nationals coming from Mainland after mid 80’s.

In addition to the above, I would also note that, ethnic ghettos notwithstanding, most Zainichi I have met at school, professionally, or casual meetings were generally small or medium-sized business owners. I note that Roy recently had a similar experience:
http://www.mutantfrog.com/2008/06/15/mr-chang-mr-oyama/

I was hoping to see Japan try to get by with robots instead of foreigners. I predicted that in the future the last Japanese person would be running the country with just a laptop.

Non-rhetorical question: How many South Koreans actually want to move to Japan? Between an improving SK economy and historic animosities between the two countries, I would guess the number would be low.

Actually they do.At least the comsumption tax.

And don’t you start with me on immigrant issue,Yago.
I’ve got two in my house already.

Micahel says:
“How many Koreans actually want to move to Japan?”

The “historic animosities” is one sided.We have no historical grudge to Koreans.And I would say Chinese have more animosities to Japanese for we did far worse things to them,yet last year alone,there were 46,000 of them came to Japan to live and work.

South Korea has always been either second or top nation to learn Japanese as foreign language at school and recent Korean economy doesn’t work well for young people for the companies cut down full employee and only hires temporary labor.So naturally coming to Japan has becoming an option for the Korean youth.
Yes,Koreans are highly anti-Japanese,but they never hesitate to become friend with Japanese when they need us.

Apart from zainichi,there’s always about 100,000 Koreans staying in Japan both legally and illegally.Not all of them are here to stay,but usually Koreans tends to stay in Japan far more longer than other foreign workers.It’s safe to say about 10,000 of them gets parmanent residency a year.

Yago:

What I’ve tried to say is my wife and my son are Mongolian national and will be getting citizenship in the near future.
Having 18 more spouses in the household is mission impossible,even for a patriot like myself.

And I answer for VKT.
1)Vacuum means loss of population due to the aging in demography.

2)Immigration control is inevitable,since we already have immigrants in the form of ethnic Japanese Latin Americans “visiting their families”and various “trainee” and illegal aliens.

And answering your concern about potential Chinese immigrants invasion,I’m sure the authority wants immigrants coming from different baskets,thus your worry won’t materialize.

Anyway 200,000 immigrants a year for half century is hardly an ambitious objective for today’s Japan.

Is the Japanese government REALLY going to open up Japan to immigration? Or is this just rhetoric in the news?

Having lived in Japan during the 90’s, I find it difficult to believe that the Japanese would actually do such a thing. Personally, I think they’re way better off going the robotics and automation route instead. Also, despite recent liberalization, many industries are overly regulated and cartelized. Liberalizing these industries while the workforce is reduced through natural attrition would create more economic growth (and corresponding growth in tax revenues) in a far more efficient manner than bringing in lots and lots of immigrants, particularly low-skill uneducated ones.

I think immigrants are OK if they are other “toyojin” (Chinese, Korean, and maybe Vietnamese). However, I think non-toyojin immigrants from “southern” countries would be a complete disaster for Japan.

I find it difficult to believe that Japan would pursue such an approach.

Kurt9:

“Having lived in Japan in the 90’s,I find it difficult to believe that Japanese would actually do such a thing”

I hate to tell you this,but you were looking at the trees and not the woods then,Kurt 9.The 90’s were the times when Tokyo actually started immigration from Latin America and international marriages had rapid growth.Even if it’s just a rhetoric,it is still siginificant for it is the proof that GoJ has finally admitted the reality and the need and can be the basis of the argument.

You are right about many things Japan should do to restart the economy.I also think liberalize some of the industry and liquidize the workforce and flow them into labor market should be of higher priority.Without that,immigrant would only be underclass workers lacking social mobility.

“However,I think non-toyojin immigrants from “southern” countiries would be a complete disaster for Japan.”

I don’t know how much you are aware about the argument coming from Zainichi Koreans.But they are far more destructive in a sense of damaging the trust between Japanese and non-japanese and balancing the loyality to the home country and host country.

“Why does everyone here think population decline is a bad thing?”

Because we are aging society and need more taxpayer of next generation so that we can sustain national pensions.

And about “Souther orign people”.
Maybe you could tell your wife about lots of American had thought the same about Irish and Italians about a century ago.

Hey,I’m the Japanese and the one living in the country,remember?

What the government is thinking about is 200,000,a year and this is not even a concrete plan.

And yes,I’m sure government will be reluctant to have immigrant without any education nor Japanese ability.They probably won’t even issue any visas.And yes,the robot technology will be doing many factory works in the future.

But we still need some immigrants and it’s not a bad thing for the government to organize plans and establish some institutions for accepting immigrants before their arrival,which I believe is following the concept of risk management.And perhaps we may need to be educated more to deal with foreigners in the spirit of “First do no harm”as you’ve said.

“Low-skill and uneducated immigrants have their role to play in highly educated, declining population Japan, just as they have an important role to play in the US.”

Are you insane? I cannot believe that anyone right in the head would make this kind of statement!

I can think of two possibilities here. Either you are serious and I am wasting my time in this blog. Perhaps you and Aceface simply have a sardonic sense of humor.

I honestly hope the second is the case.

A fundamental metric of a society is the ratio of tax eaters to tax payers. Low skill, uneducated persons tend to be tax eaters. They also tend to favor and demand “populist” (aka socialist) economic policies. Obviously, this is not a good thing, not for economic productivity and prosperity of a society, not to mention the reductions of both economic as well as personal freedoms. Then, of course, there are the social problems resulting from such people. Just a few minutes ago I read the following article over on the Drudgereport:

http://wbztv.com/local/gloucester.high.school.2.751873.html

I cannot believe that you guys actually think that the importation of this kind of crap could in anyway benefit Japanese society. One of the reasons why I liked living in Japan in the 90’s was the complete absence of this kind of crap.

You are talking about the importation of a cultural and cognitive underclass into Japan’s society. This is simply nuts. It is simply insane to think that this is a rational course of action.

If you really believe that this is rational, it is unlikely that I will be spending any more time in this blog.

I will leave you with two things:

First, my wife (who is Japanese) thinks that this mentality is absolutely insane. So do many of our friends, who are also Japanese. This is also the case with all of the people I do business with in Japan. “Aceface” is the first Japanese person I have encountered who thinks this to be a rational choice.

Secondly, technology improves at a Moore’s Law rate. Human beings do not.

Unless you expect the transhumanism revolution in the next few decades (and I have never seen any comments about such in this blog), it is unlikely that this reality will change.

You guys are unbelievable.

I think what kurt9 might be missing is that low skill uneducated workers produce offspring and that offspring is, if not ethnically, virtually Japanese raised in Japan educated in Japanese schools and so a step above their parents in terms of demographic “value.”

You know, there is another solution to the problem of depopulation. It is called the biotechnological curing of aging. One such approach, which has reasonable chance of success by 2030, is called Strategically Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS – http://www.sens.org). There is actually quite a lot of private money going into anti-aging research lately.

For some reason (probably because its considered politically incorrect), the people who rant and rave about the coming depopulation problem have not tripped to this possibility.

I sent an email to one of these guys (Phil Longmann) describing the SENS efforts, with links, with an invitation for him to join “the 300”.

I never received a response from him.

Amy Chua’s book is indeed available in Japanese”富の独裁者”ｊ光文社,2003.
But to my knowledge her argument on “market people” and “Soil People” didn’t simply came from the ethnic characteristics,but how(and when) these groups were inserted into the other country.
What Chua had reffered were Chinese immigrants in South East Asia and Indian in East Africa and Carribeans.And they were brought to these regions by the European colonial overlords as the labor force for managing every day job to maintain the colony(i.g dock workers,small scale merchants,tax collecters,plantation and mine workers,police officers),thus these immigrant groups became agents of colonialism,which was 19th century driving force of economic globalism.
While “Son of Soil”were local natives who work in the rural area who only pay taxes to colonial authority while maintaining their own agralian communities.
So there are histrical backgrounds between the diversion of “market people” and “Sons of Soils”,but that’s not necessarily for the cultural reasons.

You can also tell your wife that “Aceface” is not a radical original thinker in immigration,but his idea came from reading the editorials and reports from nation’s major medias,Asahi,Nikkei,Mainichi,Yomiuri,Sankei and NHK.And also from the statement came out from establishment like Keidanren,Toyota,Sony and Liberal Democratic Party.

I think you are too preoccupied with the worst case senario.
And you might want read what I/and Curzon wrote before jump into your own paranoid fantasy.

“So you are going t sacrifice the nation to pay for your pensions.Just right.”

Well,I’d rather get my pension for my post-employment life instead of being sacrificed by the increasing national debt.

“They have nothing to lose.But the middle-class I presume you belong to will”

Like I said,I need some pension money because I ain’t no rich man.And if you ever took any economics class,middle class life standard is dependent on cheap blue collar labor.

“In the long run immigrants they consume more tax than they pay, stain the countries resources who then resort to importing more immigrants which of course just worsens the situation.”

Amongst the G8 countries,two nations have soaked in the national debt.Italy and Japan.And neither of them are known for open immigrant policy.You may want to back your argument with facts,Yago.

“Europe always had a class-society with an underclass paying for the elites life-style, but Japan doesn’t work that way, how is Japan’s culture going to stand such a change? It will die out in 10 years.”

That’s not the way “Japanese culture” worked back in the good ol’ Tokugawa days!

But putting the jokes aside,what you are saying is a fantasy based on what Noguchi Yukio had called “1940 System”.”Everyone of us belong to the middle class” illusion was required to prevent class war to maintain the war-time economy and it’s been inheritated after 1945 by GoJ until the end of the bubble in 1992.I can understand why this state of economy is considered as normal state of “Japanese culture”,but it’s pretty recent phenomenon.

“Hell, speaking plainly, assimilation is NOT working in ANY country around the world”

It works to some,not everyone,ofcourse.But then again,democratic society is not baed on individuals who think the same way as everybody else.

”大東亜共栄圏 didn’t work in Manchukuo and ain’t gonna work in the 内地 either”

I presume you were meant to say “八紘一宇”instead of Great East Asian Proliferation Sphere…

Yeah, but Manchukuo wasn’t practicing democracy either.

“I was never taught that. My professors weren’t Marxist, though, that may be the reason why”

Or may be you just never had a chance to learn how the society work outside of the classroom.
Cheap wages for the employee means higher profit for the employer.Elementary economy.

“If you don’t give them opportunities, they’ll riot; if you do, they cease being a blue-collar class supposedly needed to sustain the middle classThere’s a contradiction here, right?”

Well,I think the contradiction is on yourside,Yago.For it is you are the one saying “Low-skill uneducated immigrants will just bear children who resent their underclass status and wreak havoc”,not me.

“Pakistanis in England ar planting bombs,Africans in France are rioting”.
They build bombs and turn the street into battlefield not because they are immigrant,but they are misfits.The dude who stubbed seven under broad daylight was no immigrant.
Yeah,they are concern.There are odd and even in anything.Let me just say the merit of immigrant are greater than the demerit and the demerit of not having them are crucial.For we can contain crime and terrorism in the society,but not the decline of nation without immigrant.

“But to my knowledge her argument on “market people” and “Soil People” didn’t simply came from the ethnic characteristics,but how(and when) these groups were inserted into the other country.”

If you read the book, she makes it clear that this is not the case and that the differences between “market people” and “Soil people” are clearly intrinsic to the peoples themselves. One example she cites is that when the Portuguese first came to Indonesia, the only traders that could be found were Chinese. Another example is the rise of Lebanese and Jewish entrepreneurs who immigrated to Latin America almost pennyless and, yet, became a successful business class whereas the indigenous did not. There are many examples through out her book.

Much more telling, she states straight out that she does not believe that Hernando de Soto’s ideas of market liberalization and the legitimization of the informal economy will not help out the indigenous people because she feels that they are intrinsically incapable of competing with the “market minority” types.

Like I mentioned previously, I am not against all immigration in principle. Much of America’s silicon valley phenomenon is the result of immigrant entrepreneurs and many ethnics groups (e.g. Chinese, indians, etc.) have mean incomes higher than that of the “white” people.

My point is that some immigrant groups tend to create silicon valleys whereas others create the current version of L.A. County. There are obvious qualitative differences between these peoples. If Japan can bring in more people who will create the future silicon valleys in Japan, I think this can be very good for Japan. However, it is socially and economically suicidal for Japan to bring in the kinds of immigrants that will end up creating the equivalent of L.A. County in Japan.

Such people will never carry their weight, economically and socially speaking, and will only create endless additional problems and burden for Japan and the Japanese people.

Aceface,

You said so yourself. Japan needs more tax payers, not more tax eaters.

Kurt9:
1. You’re right that an immigrant who’s contribution to his new society is less than his extraction wouldn’t be worth taking on. The challenge (and the difference of opinion) seems to be how to measure a person’s worth to society.
2. Moore’s law or not, progress takes time. Some problems can wait for a technological solution, others cannot.
3. You’re overlooking a key factor—bureaucracy. Curzon and company could start several new blogs just looking at situations where bureaucrats have taken good ideas and turned them into The Way Things Shall Be at the expense of better ideas.

Oh, you didn’t say anything about floating cities either pout.

Curzon and Joe,

I stand by my points. The immigrants that you cite are not much of an issue because they are a small percentage of the total population (1-2%). I will bet you donuts to dollars that if the percentage of population in Japan consists of low-skill, uneducated immigrants, that the demand more more social services from the government will increase. Case in point, the Latinos in the U.S. tend to favor economic populism far more than the Chinese or Indians. People who become successful, either as business owners or educated professionals are less likely to seek social services from the government by virtue of their success.

This is nature’s way of saying that low-skill, low-educated immigration into an advanced economy is bad.

Technological innovation increases economic productivity per person. Adding more people (especially low-skill ones) does not. My friends in Japan tell me that the economy is actually not so bad. The job market is much better than it was during the 90’s and that there is more opportunity for young people as well. This does not sound like an economic crises to me.

I don’t know what to tell you guys.

I think the idea of bringing in lots of low-skill, uneducated immigrants into an advanced economy like Japan is simply lunacy. I think its a recipe for increased economic populism and social problems. The examples of the U.S. and Europe are evidence that this is a bad idea.

Above comment is also projected to Kurt9(and his Japanese wife)

“I will bet you donuts to dollars that if the percentage of population in Japan consists of low-skill, uneducated immigrants, that the demand more more social services from the government will increase. Case in point, the Latinos in the U.S. tend to favor economic populism far more than the Chinese or Indians.”
These two sentences together don’t make much sense to me. Are you talking about political demand for social services? Or are you talking about economic demand?
If it’s the former, then you must have missed the fact that Japan has a highly socialized system already, and that there is great pressure from Japanese people (particularly older people) to make the system even more socialized than it already is. I work next to the government complex in Kasumigaseki and there are folks marching down the street around there practically every day, trumpeting these very issues (completely free health care, etc.)
If you’re talking about economic demand, then you must be forgetting that Japan is going to have a massive deadweight loss in the form of tens of millions of really old people. The whole economic point of bringing in immigrants is to enlarge the tax base so as to support all the old Japanese people who can’t work any more.
Frankly, so long as there is legitimate opportunity, immigrants are not going to get into much trouble. The problematic communities in any country are those where there are many unemployed, uneducated and marginalized young people. It doesn’t matter whether they’re immigrants—the horrific inner-city communities in many US cities are mainly populated by people born in America to American parents. If Japan avoids this phenomenon then it really has very little to worry about.
(By the way, you need to take a look at the Cuban and South American communities in Miami, as they are a multi-million-strong exception to your blanket statements about “Latinos,” and also serve to debunk many of the bizarre ethnic-centered statements you’ve been making.)

“you say you need an underclass. But immigrants will eventually (quite quickly actually) stop being underclass.
So then what? Do you need an underclass or not? ”

Plain and simple.I’ve never said I neen an underclass.I said I need immigrants.Big difference.End of question.

“But a 10% immigrants population are not going, not needing to integrate. Chinese people, blue collar or white collar, are going to lobby for policies likable to China, voting themselves for further immigration, and simply changing the culture. ”

First off,”10%” is the number brought up by LDP politician Nakagawa for the National Strategy Study Group and according to them,it takes 50 years to be get that number.
Secondly,I don’t think all of the immigrants entering Japan would be Chinese.
Thirdly,Beijing is very carful to interconnect their foreign policy to ethnic Chinese population group demanding issues to the host nation,because of the diplomatic upheaval with South East Asian nation in the 60’s.And even if they lobbied for pro-Chinese policy,So what? There were always Pro-Beijing lobby in Japan,if we have powerful Chinese group interferring our domestic politics,it would only backfires.

“And the point about Pakistanis and Bangladeshi owning business is just laughable”
Why? Many used-car export dealers don’t think they are laughing stock.They are the real players in that industry.
Your argument on “five kids with mushroom of madrassas are laughable,for most of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi in Japan prefer their kids to go to Interntional schools instead.

“Not even the Nigerian pimps in Roppongi are able to do much evil.because they are few”

So should they be,since pimps aren’t nothing new in Japan anyway.But if I were to run some joint of such interest,I would most certainly hire a Nigerian as a bouncer for they are taller,tougher and able to speak English better than average Japanese.

I second to Curzon about the quality of “debate” here….

I dunno Michael… There are little munchkins running around all over Japan (Lord Curzon’s being one of the latest additions). The problem is really that people are waiting longer to have children (and having fewer children) throughout the developed world, and the only reason the problem is so acute in Japan is because there’s no immigration or big lower-class population to offset it.
In the US, for instance, fertility rates among whites and Asians are already at or below replacement levels: today’s population growth is being driven by immigration and by higher birth rates among marginalized blacks and Latinos. I believe most of the big European countries are in a similar situation, where the more economically established cultural groups are no longer reproducing at a sustainable level and are relying on immigrant groups to keep the population growing, although I haven’t seen statistics on that.
Anyway, point is: Lower birth rates are a normal feature of modernization, as shown by examples across the globe. While it may be worth fixing, it’s really hard to do that without sacrificing the benefits we’ve reaped from having things this way (e.g. the productivity bonus of having educated women in the workforce).

I suppose that very large scale child care would be one plausible solution, although not optimal—the developing world has enough kids without attentive parents already.

I’m referring to Wikipedia, which may have it wrong, but says “The replacement fertility rate is roughly 2.1 births per woman for most industrialized countries but ranges from 2.5 to 3.3 in developing countries because of higher mortality rates.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate) So we’re all in the future demographic toilet, some countries more than others.
As far as employer-provided child care and subsidies go, that’s really a band-aid which doesn’t get around the fundamental problem that it’s difficult to raise children properly in an institutional setting. Smart companies provide these benefits to keep employees productive after they start a family. It isn’t an incentive to have kids as much as it is an incentive to keep working despite your kids. And it certainly isn’t optimal for a child’s intellectual and social development, at least from what I’ve seen. (Your mileage may vary…)