Despite those counter-arguments, 70% of unmarried Japanese men and women still claim that they want to get married. Why, then, don’t they succeed in finding a suitable mate? Traditionally, that didn’t require effort on their part, because Japanese marriages were arranged by go-betweens (called nakoudo) who scheduled formal interviews by which young unmarried people could meet potential marriage partners. As recently as 1960, that was still the predominant form of marriage in Japan. Since then, the declining number of nakoudo, and the rise of the Western idea of romantic marriage, have caused such arranged marriages to drop to only 5% of all marriages. But many modern young Japanese are too busy working, too inexperienced at dating, or too awkward to develop a romantic relationship.
In particular, the phasing-out of arranged marriages in Japan in recent decades has coincided with the rise of electronic non-face-to-face communication by e-mail, texting, and cell phones, and with the consequent decline of social skills. One poignant example was related to me by a Japanese friend who, while eating out in a restaurant, was struck by a young, well-dressed couple sitting awkwardly and silently opposite each other at a nearby table. Both were holding their heads bowed and were staring in their laps rather than at each other. My friend noticed that each was holding a cell phone in his or her lap, and that each was tapping his or her cell phone in alternation. Eventually it dawned on my friend: both the boy and the girl felt too awkward to speak directly to each other, and so they were resorting to texting back and forth across the table. Not a good way to develop and finalize the parameters of a romantic relationship! Of course, young Americans are also addicted to electronic communication, but they (unlike their Japanese contemporaries) are heirs to a cultural tradition of dating.
Japan’s low and still declining birth and marriage rates are directly responsible for two remaining big problems widely recognized in Japan: the declining population, and the aging population.
Because Japan’s birth rate has for many years been below the replacement level, it was clear that Japan’s population would eventually cease rising and begin to fall. Still, it was a shock when census figures confirmed that that dreaded moment had actually arrived. After the five-year 2010 census had shown a population of 128,057,352, the 2015 census yielded 127,110,000, a decline of nearly 1 million. From the current trends and age distribution of Japan’s population, it’s predicted that there will be a further drop by about 40 million by the year 2060, to a population of only 80 million.
The consequences of Japan’s falling population and its shift from rural to urban are already visible. Japan is closing schools at a rate of about 500 per year. Rural depopulation is causing villages and small towns to be abandoned. It’s feared that, without population growth as the supposed driver of economic growth, a less populous Japan will be poorer and less powerful on the world stage. In 1948 Japan was the world’s fifth most populous country; by 2007 it had only the 10th-largest population, behind Nigeria and Bangladesh; and current projections are that within a few decades it will fall behind even such non-powerhouses as the Congo and Ethiopia. That’s considered humiliating, on the tacit assumption that a country with a smaller population than the Congo will be weaker and less important than the Congo.
Hence in 2015 Prime Minister Abe declared that his administration would aim to maintain Japan’s population at least at 100 million, by trying to boost the average total fertility rate from 1.4 to 1.8 children per woman. But boosting the output of babies will depend on the choices of young Japanese people rather than of Abe. I already discussed the reasons why young Japanese, regardless of whether they think that Japan as a nation would be better off with more babies, are choosing not to produce those extra babies themselves.
Is Japan’s declining population a “problem” for Japan? There are many countries that have much smaller populations than Japan’s, and that are nevertheless rich and important players on the world stage, including Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan. Of course those countries aren’t world military leaders, but neither is Japan today because of its constitution and widespread Japanese pacifism. To me, it seems that Japan wouldn’t be worse off but instead much better off with a smaller population, because that would mean less need for domestic and imported resources. We’ll see later that resource pressure has been one of the curses of modern Japanese history, that it remains so today, and that Japanese themselves think of their country as resource-starved. Hence I see Japan’s declining population as one of its great advantages, not as a problem.
Even those Japanese concerned about their country’s declining population agree that a much bigger problem is that Japan’s population is aging. Japan is already the country with the world’s highest life expectancy (84, compared to 77 for the U.S. and just 40–45 for many African countries), and with the highest percentage of old people. Already now, 23% of Japan’s population is over 65, and 6% is over 80. By the year 2050 those numbers are projected to be nearly 40% and 16%, respectively. (The corresponding numbers for the African country of Mali are only 3% and 0.1%.) At that point, Japanese people over the age of 80 will outnumber kids under 14, and people over 65 will outnumber those kids by more than 3 to 1.
Mind you, I personally have nothing against people over the age of 80. (That would constitute self-hatred, because I’m now 82.) But there can be too much of a good thing, and that’s true for older people. A large number of old people creates a burden on the national health-care system, because older people are much more subject to illnesses than are younger people: especially to chronic, incurable, hard-to-cure or expensive-to-treat illnesses such as heart diseases and dementia. As the percentage of the population over age 65 increases, the population’s percentage of retirees also increases, and its percentage of workers decreases. That means fewer young workers to serve as the ultimate sources of support for growing numbers of older retirees: either supporting them directly through financial support and personal care within families, or else supporting them indirectly through government pensions and senior health-care systems funded by the taxed earnings of young workers. Japan’s ratio of workers to retirees has been falling catastrophically: from 9 workers per retiree in 1965, to 2.4 today, to a projected 1.3 in 2050.
But you may be objecting that Japan isn’t the only country with a falling birth rate, aging population, and rising burden on its pension and social security systems. Those same problems also occur throughout the developed world; Japan just has those problems to an extreme degree. We Americans are also concerned about the future underfunding of our social security system. All Western European countries also have birth rates below the replacement value, two of them even lower than Japan’s. But the U.S. and Europe aren’t as concerned about those problems as is Japan, because they haven’t fallen into the bind of a shrinking population and an increasingly top-heavy old population. Why not? How have they escaped those traps?
The answer involves the first of what I see as Japan’s remaining three major problems: the ones that aren’t widely acknowledged as problems in Japan itself. That first remaining problem is Japan’s lack of immigration.
Japan is, and prides itself on being, the most ethnically homogenous affluent or populous country in the world. It doesn’t welcome immigrants, makes it difficult for anyone who wants to immigrate to do so, and makes it even more difficult for anyone who has succeeded in immigrating to receive Japanese citizenship. As a percentage of a country’s total population, immigrants and their children constitute 28% of Australia’s population, 21% of Canada’s, 16% of Sweden’s, and 14% of the U.S.’s, but only 1.9% of Japan’s. Among refugees seeking asylum, Sweden accepts 92%, Germany 70%, Canada 48%, but Japan only 0.2%. (For instance, Japan accepted only six and eleven refugees in the years 2013 and 2014, respectively.) Foreign workers constitute 15% of the workforce in the U.S. and 9% in Germany, but only 1.3% in Japan. Japan does admit temporary foreign workers (so-called guest workers) who receive work visas of one to thre
e years because of their high professional skills (e.g., as ship-builders, or as construction workers for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics). But such foreigners in Japan find it difficult to obtain permanent residency or citizenship.
The only significant immigration to Japan in modern times was of several million Koreans before and during World War Two, when Korea was a Japanese colony. However, many or most of those Koreans were involuntary immigrants imported as slave labor. For instance, it is not widely known that 10% of the victims killed at Hiroshima by the first atomic bomb were Korean laborers working there.
A couple of Japanese cabinet ministers have recently called for more immigration. For instance, Shigeru Ishiba, minister for local regions, said, “At one time, people from Japan migrated to South and North America and managed to fit in with the locals while maintaining their pride as Japanese.… It doesn’t make sense to say no to foreigners who come to Japan when our people did the same thing overseas.” For instance, Peru has had a Japanese president, while the U.S. has had Japanese senators, Congress members, and university chancellors. But the Japanese government is currently not reconsidering its opposition to immigration.
That government opposition reflects the negative views of immigration expressed by Japanese citizens in many public opinion polls, in which Japanese opinions fall at one extreme of the opinions held in other affluent countries. The percentage of Japanese opposed to increasing the number of foreign residents is 63%; 72% agree that immigrants increase crime rates; and 80% deny that immigrants improve society by introducing new ideas, unlike the 57%–75% of Americans, Canadians, and Australians who do believe that immigrants improve society. Conversely, vanishingly few Japanese (only 0.5%) consider immigration as the most important issue facing the country, whereas up to 15% of Americans, French, Swedes, and British do so.
Let’s be clear: I’m not saying that Japanese resistance to immigration is “wrong” and should be changed. In every country, immigration creates difficulties while simultaneously bringing benefits. It’s a matter for each country to weigh those benefits against those difficulties, in order to arrive at its own immigration policy. It comes as no surprise that Japan, an ethnically homogenous country with a long history of isolation and no immigration, values highly its ethnic homogeneity, while the U.S., an ethnically heterogeneous country almost all of whose citizens are the descendants of modern immigrants, has no ethnic homogeneity to value. Instead, Japan’s dilemma is that it suffers from widely acknowledged problems that other countries mitigate by means of immigration, but that Japan hasn’t figured out how to solve without resorting to immigration.
The biggest of those problems is the linked problem set discussed above of declining birth rate, aging population, and resulting economic burden of fewer and fewer tax-paying healthy young workers to fund the pensions and health-care expenses of more and more non-working pensioners with the increasing health problems of old age. Despite the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western Europe sharing Japan’s falling birth rate and aging of their native populations, those countries minimize the consequences by admitting large numbers of young immigrant workers. Japan can’t offset that declining workforce by employing more of its non-working educated mothers, because the large pool of immigrant women hired as private child-care workers by so many American working mothers scarcely exists in Japan. The large pool of immigrant men and women who furnish most caretakers of senior citizens and most hospital nurses and other hospital staff in the U.S. also doesn’t exist in Japan. (I write these lines while recovering from the horrible experience of the death of a terminally ill Japanese relative, whose family was expected to provide her meals and do her personal laundry while she was in the hospital.)
While innovation is vigorous in Japan as judged by the large numbers of patents awarded to Japanese inventors, Japanese are concerned about hosting less breakthrough innovation than one would expect from Japan’s large investment in research and development. That’s reflected in the relatively modest number of Nobel Prizes awarded to Japanese scientists. Most U.S. Nobel Prize winners are either first-generation immigrants or else their offspring. But immigrants and their offspring are as rare among Japanese scientists as they are among the Japanese population in general. That relationship between immigration and Nobel Prizes is not surprising when one reflects that the willingness to take risks and to try something drastically new is a prerequisite both for emigrating and for innovating at the highest level.
In the short run, Japan is presently unwilling to solve these problems by immigration. In the long run, it’s unknown whether Japanese people will continue to suffer from these problems, or will instead choose to solve them by changing their immigration policy, or will figure out some yet-unknown solutions other than immigration. If Japan does decide to re-evaluate immigration, a model palatable to Japan might be Canada’s policy, which stresses evaluating applicants for immigration on the basis of their potential value to Canada.
Japan’s next neglected big problem, after immigration, is the effect of Japan’s wartime behavior towards China and Korea on its current relations with those countries. During and before World War Two, Japan did horrible things to people in other Asian countries, especially China and Korea. Long before Japan’s “official” declarations of war on December 7, 1941, Japan was carrying out a full-scale undeclared war on China from 1937 onwards. In that war, the Japanese military killed millions of Chinese, often in barbaric ways such as using tied-up Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice to toughen the attitudes of Japanese soldiers, killing several hundred thousand Chinese civilians at Nanking in December 1937–January 1938, and killing many others in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Although denial of these killings is widespread in Japan today, they were well documented at the time, not only by Chinese but also by foreign observers, and by photographs taken by Japanese soldiers themselves. (You can see more than 400 such photographs in the book by Shi Young and James Yin The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs [1999].) Japan annexed Korea in 1910, mandated that Korean schools use the Japanese language rather than the Korean language for 35 years of Japanese occupation, forced large numbers of Korean women and women of other nationalities to become sex slaves in Japanese military brothels, and forced large numbers of Korean men to become virtual slave laborers for the Japanese army.
As a result, hatred of Japan is widespread today in China and Korea. In the view of Chinese and Koreans, Japan hasn’t adequately acknowledged, apologized for, or expressed regret for its wartime atrocities. China’s population is 11 times Japan’s, while the combined population of South and North Korea is more than half of Japan’s. China and North Korea both have nuclear weapons. China, North Korea, and South Korea all have big, well-equipped armies, while Japan’s armed forces remain minuscule because of the U.S.-imposed Japanese constitution reinforced by widespread pacifism in Japan today. North Korea from time to time fires missiles across Japan, to demonstrate its ability to reach Japan. Yet Japan is locked in territorial disputes with both China and South Korea over uninhabited tiny islands of no intrinsic value themselves but important because of fish, gas, and mineral resources within each island’s marine zone. That combination of facts seems to me to spell big dangers for Japan in the long run.
For an Asian perspective on Japan’s view of World War Two, here is an assessment by Lee Kuan Yew, a keen observer of people who as prime minister of Singapore for several decades became familiar with Japan, China, and Korea and their leaders: “Unlike Germans, the Japanese have not had a catharsis and rid themselves of the poison in their system. They have not educated their young about the wrong they had done. Hashimoto [a Japanese prime minister] expressed his ‘deepest regrets’ on the 52nd anniversary of the end of World War Two (1997) and his ‘profound remorse’ during his visit to Beijing in September 1997. However, he did not apologize, as the Chinese and Koreans wished Japan’s leader to do. I do not understand why the Japanese are so unwilling to admit the past, apologiz
e for it, and move on. For some reason, they do not want to apologize. To apologize is to admit having done a wrong. To express regrets or remorse merely expresses their present subjective feelings. They denied the massacre of Nanking took place; that Korean, Filipino, Dutch, and other women were kidnapped or otherwise forced to be ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers at the war fronts; that they carried out cruel biological experiments on live Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and other prisoners in Manchuria. In each case, only after irrefutable evidence was produced from their own records did they make reluctant admissions. This fed suspicions of Japan’s future intentions. Present Japanese attitudes are an indication of their future conduct. If they are ashamed of their past, they are less likely to repeat it.”
Every year, my undergraduate classes at the University of California in Los Angeles include students from Japan, who talk to me about their schooling there and about their experiences on coming to California. They tell me that their history classes in Japanese schools devoted little time to World War Two (“because that war lasted just a few years in the thousands of years of Japanese history”), said little or nothing about Japan’s role as aggressor, stressed the role of Japanese as victims (of the two atomic bombs that killed about 120,000 Japanese) rather than as responsible for the deaths of millions of other people plus several million Japanese soldiers and civilians, and blamed the U.S. for somehow tricking Japan into launching the war. (In all fairness, Korean, Chinese, and American schoolbooks present their own skewed accounts of World War Two.) My Japanese students are shocked when they join Asian student associations in Los Angeles, meet Korean and Chinese students, and hear for the first time about Japan’s wartime deeds that still arouse hatred of Japan by students from those other countries.
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 30