 Welcome everyone to Looking to the East. I'm your host, this temporary host today for the show. My name is Steve Zercher. I'm a professor at Kansai Gaida University here in Osaka, Japan. Welcome. We'll be discussing an interesting topic today related to Japanese immigration and Japanese demographics. So this is a topic that Jay Fidel, who is with me on this show, suggested that I investigate and this is turned into the show today. So thank you Jay for making that suggestion to me. Before we switch roles here, Jay is going to become the host. Just want to briefly update everyone on some news items coming in on Japan. First of all, Jay, I'm sure you'll be very happy to find out that Roma Manual is now in the country. We have the rominator in Japan and he is officially serving as ambassador of the country. So very excited about that. We have no idea how that's going to turn out, whether his old habits will conflict with Japanese polite culture or maybe he'll do an excellent job. We'll have to see. Second, in terms of what's going on for COVID, Japan is experiencing now what Hawaii went through, I guess, a few weeks ago. We're hitting peak numbers in terms of infections. A few days ago, the total was 50,000, which was double the highest ever during the Tokyo Olympics. We've hit 25,000. As a result today, the Osaka government, where I live, is going to announce a quasi-state of emergency. So I'm not quite sure what that means, but it'll be announced today. Probably drinking will be curtailed after eight o'clock and maybe people will be encouraged to work from home. Now, that kind of leads into the next item. There's still a total ban on any foreigners coming to this country unless you're a citizen. That was started in November after just a two or three week of period of openness. Jay, there are currently 400,000 people that are waiting to get into this country right now. The majority of those are students. This is causing a lot of concern within the economic community here in Japan because a lot of these people are temporary workers, which we'll talk about as we get into the show. It's quite remarkable. Japan is the most severe when it comes to immigration policy and COVID. It's been two years now that we haven't had any international students on our campus. We had over 400 students applied to come this semester and 400 returned away, unfortunately. The last thing is that we do have a new prime minister who met with Biden over the Zoom or over the telephone just recently. There's now been a connection between President Biden and new Prime Minister Kishida. The interesting thing about Kishida is that he, of all the prime ministers in recent history, has a more maybe liberal perspective. The party he comes from is quite conservative, but he's pushing very strongly for wage increases. So, he's expecting Japanese companies to increase wages across the board up to 3%. The income level in Japan has been flat to trending down for almost 30 years now. Excuse me. So, he's attempting to try and defeat that, reinvigorate the economy by encouraging, not forcing, but by encouraging Japanese companies to pay their employees a higher salary than what they had been historically, which has been averaging around 1% at best. Okay, so that's an update on what's going on in Japan. So, at this point, Jay, I'll turn it over to you and we can talk about this immigration dilemma. And I'll become the guest. I'll magically reappear here as a guest for this. So, this reminds me of the old days when I started this show. You were the host and I was the guest and we talk about Japan. So, thank you very much for doing this. Well, thank you, Steve. I've waited for the invitation ever since we started talking about that article in the newspaper. Yes. You know, back a few years ago, we talked about the world getting flat. We talked about globalization. In fact, that was one of ThinkText's, you know, main areas of inquiry, how the world was getting flat, how the borders were coming down, how we were on the way to a world that was completely polyglot in the not-too-distant future. But you know what? That has ended and part of it has ended because of COVID. COVID has changed that, not only for the duration of COVID, but beyond COVID. And Japan never really got on board because Japan has a cultural thing, as you said before the show. Japan is for the Japanese. And so, we saw that. We see it now and we can predict it will be that way in the future. So, can you talk about how that expresses itself? And also, can you talk about why? Yeah, that's a fascinating question that the foreigners like myself who are long-term residents here try and wrap our mind around. I remember reading a book by a foreigner who was part of a missionary family. She was born in Hokkaido and lived her entire life in this country, was fluent in Japanese. And she was talking about her many experiences in Japan. And she concluded, I've lived here my entire life, but I will never be Japanese. It's just not possible even for someone who's born and raised and lived their entire life in this country. I think that's a result of the fact that Japan's a homogeneous society. 98% of the people who are living in Japan about that number are Japanese. There's a myth about the history of Japan, its ancient roots, which go back to religious beliefs that the Japanese people are special people with this long history and this long culture. So I think that's maybe the primary driver why Japanese people think of themselves in this unique sense and that this country is belonging to Japanese. Now, I have to say on the counterbalance that I've lived in Japan a long, long time. I came here as a student. I've been here as a professional working for Hula Packard and other companies. Now I'm a professor and a dean. I have two children and in their lives and in my life, I've never experienced any resistance or any kind of overt racism when it comes to me being non-Japanese. That's been my own personal experience, although there are others that I do know whose children in school systems have been bullied because they're either hafu, which is like hapa. We have the term like that in Japan, or they are just outsiders and treated in that way. So I think it's an outcome of the beliefs that the Japanese people have about themselves, which tie into their history and their religion. And also just pure demographics, Jay. It's 98% of the Japanese. It's for Americans, especially Hawaiians. It's hard to imagine that there's just one group that dominates the culture and dominates the demographics in that way. Hawaii, everybody's in Hawaii. It's just one of the attractions for Hawaii. It's interesting because I think there were a lot of countries that were candidate for the same kind of cultural purity, not to use that word, but in Europe. But then the migrants came from the Middle East and Africa and changed that all around. And now those countries are polyglot, including countries where it creates a certain amount of contention. It does create a certain amount of contention to open your borders. I'll never forget my wife and I were traveling in Europe one time and we were going from France to Germany, or was it Germany to France? And we wanted to see the border, but there was no border. In the EU, you just drive down the road. There wasn't a line on the road. There wasn't a sentry. There wasn't a fence. Nothing. You couldn't tell at all that that was the border between the two countries. And I realized that the EU had created this kind of polyglot and much more the case since the migrant issue began from the Middle East. And Angela Merkel, whose policy it was to let everyone in, and she was a Nobel Prime Minister for that reason. Anyway, Japan hasn't gone that direction. And Japan stays the way it is. And I think one thing about Japan is that, yes, it would appear, the answer to my question is that's not going to change, but there must be somebody in Japan who thinks about this and who says, wait a minute, A, we're not keeping up with other places and B, we're supposed to be an industrialized nation, but we're running out of human resources because the bell curve is upside down in Japan. The birth rate is really, really low for a lot of reasons. We should talk about that. Right. And if you don't allow immigration on top of that, what happens is everybody ages out so that if you were looking for human resources, they're not there. Right. Yeah, you've nailed it. That's a description of what's going on in this country. And there are forces that are continuing to limit immigration into the country, despite the demographic cliff that Japan is falling off of now. So just to illustrate that, as of today, the population of those in Japan that are 65 is 30%. So basically, Jay, in this country, one in three, almost one in three people are over the age of 65. To give some color to that, I looked up Florida, which is the state that has a reputation for where all the retirees go and so forth. There, it's 20%. 20% are at 65. So Japan is 50% higher than even Florida. Another statistic that just is really surprising is the number of people who are over the age of 100 in this country. Jay, what would you hazard a guess? The number of people who are over the age of 100 in Japan? Well, I think what you're getting at is a lot of people are, but let me guess at 5% to 10%. Okay, I don't know the percentage. I was thinking of the raw numbers, and the raw numbers are 86,400. 86,400 people in this country are over the age of 100, which is remarkable. Japan is the world. It's going that way in other places too, but in Japan, you have a serious longevity capability. This is always the case, yeah? It's a very healthy society. Japanese people tend to eat less food than Americans do, and also in general, although this is changing, the balance of the food is healthier, more vegetables, less protein, and so forth. So that's a part of what's going on. Also, Japan's medical system is one of the best in the world. So it's taking care of these people as they grow older. The number of people who are exiting from the workforce every year is 500,000. Every year, the number of workers in Japan is going down by half a million. The population overall, right now it's 125 million. So in 2050, so about 30 years from now, it will be 100 million. And beyond that, in 2065, the population according to demographic forecasts will be 88 million. This country is shrinking dramatically, and the replacement birth rate is around 1.4 or so, so well below sustainability. Families need to have at least two children, actually a little bit more, to keep the population stable. Those numbers are so far in the past, those are decades ago. Anything under something like 1.8 or 1.9 is not sustainable. That's right. So that's what's driving it. Now, everybody knows this. Japan's known this for 20 years. You know, political scientists and demographic experts are saying, this is the direction the country is going in. And now the rubber's hitting the road, because the population is beginning to decline after it had been predicted for many, many years. And that brings us back to the immigration issue. So you mentioned European countries. I would imagine Merkel opened up her borders, because she recognized she didn't have enough German people to fill the jobs that were required, right? She couldn't have a sustainable economy. That might have been a factor. But for her, taking a look at her as an individual, it was on a moral plane. Unfortunately, not everybody in the country agreed with her, and that was a weakness. But she was doing it because she wanted to clean up Germany's issue from the war. Okay. Well, here the push for immigration comes from the business community. If you go to Tokyo and you go into a 7-Eleven, there are no Japanese people working there anymore. The 7-Eleven cannot hire Japanese people into those roles. You find people from Sri Lanka or Malaysia or Thailand or Vietnam. So these companies recognize that in order to run their business, they need to get labor. And the labor in Japan is just not sufficient, especially in the service industry. So Prime Minister Abe, a few years ago, created what was called a backdoor immigration program. Basically, it's special work licenses, allowing people from other parts of Asia to come in. And the numbers that were forecasted were 3,000 to 400,000 to come in to try and backfill this labor shortage that the industry, Japanese business, obviously, is very strong politically in Japan. And the Jiminto, which is the dominant party that Abe belongs to, is very responsive to the business requests. So despite this issue that we talked about at the top of the show, Japan belonging to Japanese only, and many right-wing political people are very vehemently anti-immigrant, especially Koreans. But because the business community was so desperate for labor, he began this backdoor program. But the numbers, even if they had fulfilled it, were still quite small and wouldn't even approach the gap between the jobs required and the number of people available. But then COVID hit, Jay, and all of this stopped. It completely stopped. So the country now is really suffering. As I mentioned, there's 400,000 people that are waiting to get into this country, and many of them are temporary workers on a five-year work plan, and they can't get in because the Japanese government is saying, because of COVID, nobody can come in. So it's a very, very difficult situation. What about the larger political vision of this? Is the prime minister interested, the new one you mentioned? Is he interested in trying to solve this problem? Because this is a life-and-death problem for the economy and thus the country. You're talking specifically about the immigration issue? Well, you have a low birth rate, which is a cultural thing. We hope we have a little time to discuss that. You have this thing about we're not going to allow immigration. You have this thing about aging out, and at the end of the day, you don't have enough people to staff the 7-Elevens or many of the elements of the industrial community. So somebody should be saying, hey, we've got to solve this problem. We've got to be smart and thoughtful and come up with a solution. Is there a political initiative there? This is like the third rail in Japan because of the sense that Japan belongs to the Japanese. So Abe, when he put together this Back to Immigration program, he didn't call it immigration. He can't use that word. That's no go. It was a guest worker program, temporary guest worker program. So it was able to slide through without the pushback from those political segments of the population and the political or among the Gemento, the LDP party that would be against immigration of any sort. So it is being discussed, but it's very, very politicized because the general perception is that immigration is not a good thing. It's not actually, it's not rational to take that position. Well, they'll mention countries in Europe, maybe some of the ones that you're talking about and the disruptions that are occurring there, Germany in particular is called out as an example. Jay, even in our own country, the past president was anti-immigrant. So some of these issues become politicized in various countries across the world. In Japan, it's not overt, but it's definitely there. Steve, I want to ask you some questions that came in while we were talking. This goes back to the beginning of our discussion. What is the Japanese opinion of Rahm Emanuel? Is he getting the welcome matter? Why? I think so far, so good. They recognize that he has a very colorful political history, but the thing for the Japanese, the most important thing is that the ambassador has the ear of the president and it's clear that Emanuel does have a good relationship with Biden. He was the chief of staff under Obama when Biden was vice president there. So I think overall they're happy. It's been a two-and-a-half year gap. We haven't had an ambassador here. Hagerty left the previous ambassador two-and-a-half years ago to run for Senate in Tennessee, which was successful. So they're happy to have him in place. There is a little bit, among my colleagues when we talk about this, we're not quite sure if Rahm's tendency to speak off the top of his head will get himself into trouble in Japan, because Japan is a very measured society and comments are scrutinized very carefully. But I think overall people are happy to have an ambassador back. Yeah, it's a strange thing where we cannot have a robust foreign policy, foreign relations with a country if we don't appoint the ambassador. The same thing happened in Ukraine for years. No ambassador. I don't understand that. You think that out of 330 million people, we couldn't find anybody? It's challenging. Okay, there's some questions about Hawaii here too. The Japanese love to come to Hawaii. Are they seeking diversity? Do they enjoy seeing the diversity of Hawaii? Because that's one of our big sales points indeed for the world. Then related questions, what explains the close friendship between Hawaii and Japan? It goes back to King Kalakaua, when he met the Meiji Emperor years ago in the 19th century. We have had a connection. And of course, we had a connection in populating the sugar companies with labor, back in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. So we have been in touch with Japan for a long time. And they seem to like us. Go ahead. Without question, Jay. Japanese people love Hawaii. But who doesn't love Hawaii? We all love Hawaii. It's such a beautiful place and the Hawaiian people are so special. I've certainly experienced that. I love Hawaii. In terms of diversity, if the Japanese go to Waikiki, it's not very diverse there. It's mostly the Japanese community. But my students talk about that. When they go abroad, they are blown away by the diversity of the United States in general. They are very happy to see that. And they often come back and say Japan should be more diverse itself. In terms of the relationship between Japan and Hawaii, I fully agree with you, Jay. Because of the Japanese community being so strong, in a way, if we go back to the earlier days and the influence that they had on the development of the country, the linkage between the two places between Japan and Hawaii is very, very strong. Abe has gone to Hawaii when he was prime minister and many Hawaii officials come to Japan on visits and so forth. And I think tourism is the basic tenet of the economy that binds us. Hopefully that will return. I'm sure once Japanese can travel again internationally, they can't right now. They'll be back in Hawaii in significant numbers. Yeah. Well, and when they come back to Hawaii, let's look at what might happen. If we were able to solve COVID, I'm not saying we will or can, but what would happen? Let's assume that the travel restrictions are off. And that means not only Japanese coming to the US and coming to Hawaii, but also coming from other places to Japan as tourists. What are the places that like to send tourists to Japan? And what are the tourists that Japan likes to have from where? What's their main connection? Okay, you're talking about tourists coming into Japan? Both ways. I think in terms of Japanese people going to Hawaii, I don't talk to anybody that anywhere who's not excited about going to Hawaii. If they haven't gone, they want to go. If they've gone before, they want to go again. There's a very strong positive relationship between Japan and Hawaii. I certainly advocate for the state all the time. I'm in front of my door, my office, as a Live Hawaii, a Loha sticker that I got from somebody. So I'm promoting the state myself in my own small way. And in terms of inbound tourism, as you know, I have a hospitality program. So I talk to the general managers. And through COVID, they are trying to focus more on high-end tourism. So they would welcome people from Hawaii because they're coming from a developed country. They're trying to get people who will stay at the nicer hotels and spend more money. Historically, before COVID, the bulk of tourists were coming from China. It used to be high-end Chinese would come in, but then the demographics changed so that more middle-class or lower middle-class Chinese were coming in. And there was a pretty strong negative reaction about that. Not so much because they were Chinese, but just the way they spent, the way they behaved and so forth. So right now, if Japan could have its way, it would try and have high-end tourists come in. People who are more well-off, who have traveled before, that's what Japan's... And who are respectful of their... That's an element as well. What about Japan, Japanese people from the U.S., including Hawaii? Do they have an advantage in traveling to Japan? Are they well-liked? Are they accepted? Are they treated a little better? Yeah, I think if there's still family connections, if the auntie or the grandmother are still living in Japan, I think, yeah, that's a very positive reason for travel to the country. Right? If you put the context slightly different, if you look at Nisei or Sansei when they come into the university environment, there is an expectation by Japanese that if you are Japanese, even if you've been in America, maybe your second generation, you should still speak Japanese and you should still be knowledgeable about Japanese culture. So sometimes Nisei and Sansei, they come on a longer-term basis, feel a little bit oppressed because there's an expectation that they should be familiar with Japanese language and Japanese culture and they're not because everyone goes through that Americanization. When I went to Italy, I'm Italian background, my Italian family said, why don't you speak Italian? So even my mother didn't speak Italian, we just give up the language, we all switch to English primarily after a certain number of generations. So I think overall on a travel, a tourism basis, I think most Nisei and Sansei are very happy to be in Japan. Jay, everybody who comes to Japan loves this country because it's like Hawaii in a way. Japanese people are so nice, they're so supportive, this is so safe, and this country also is very, very beautiful. So there's a great experience, which is why Japan was just skyrocketing in terms of tourism before COVID and it will come back. But then for those to stay longer, because the expectations are you're Japanese, you should speak Japanese and maybe you don't. There's a little bit of a sense of unease there. For me, they look at me, they go, no way, he doesn't speak Japanese. So the expectations for me are lower. So I have, when I do speak Japanese, I just, oh, it's amazing. The European Caucasian guy can speak Japanese, they're surprised. But if I was Nisei or Sansei, they go, yeah, he's Japanese, he should speak Japanese. Well, if you wanted to apply, you had something before I go to that. Yeah, I just wanted to very briefly get to the point about what's behind the demographics. Why is this the birth rate going down? And of course, that's a very complicated question, but a lot of it has to do with the role of women in the society. The economy, as I mentioned at the top of the show, has been going sideways for many, many years. So women have begun to get more involved with work. And the dynamic between husband and wife, it used to be the husband was the provider and the woman stayed at home. That's been thrown out the window now 70% of Japanese are working. But that, but in the household, men are still not contributing at all to household chores or raising the family. There's still the traditional model that many Japanese men work under even though their wives are working and the wives are under pressure. So the wives are doing everything at home that they used to and then they're working as well. So it creates a dynamic where women really are exhausted and the birth rates are going down. Also, many women are not getting married. They're choosing not to. For example, the number of unmarried women between 35 and 39 about 15 years ago was 10%. It's now 25%. So you can see that women are choosing to avoid that dual life of working in the home, taking care of everything, taking care of the in-laws and also working outside. So women are under considerable pressure. And that's one of the factors behind the drop off of the demographic. It's a lifestyle thing. I would enjoy the good life. Yeah. They'll look at that and go, Hey, I can work. I can buy my own apartment. I have my friends. I can go out. That's a more fulfilling life than marrying into a family. I mean, this is generally right. There are families where the dynamic is different. Certainly my family, the dynamic is different. I do more household work than my wife does actually. That may be one of the reasons she married me, Jay. I'm not quite sure. So I don't want to say that's true for everybody, but that's true generally. So if you or some other Holly person like me wanted to apply for citizenship in Japan, what would that be like? It's possible to do. I'm now a permanent resident. So I have the equivalent to a green card. That's because I'm married to a Japanese national. So I think how long ago, maybe seven or eight years ago, I applied for that and was automatically granted it. So if I wanted to become a citizen now, I could apply for it and get it very easily. I have a long work history in Japan. I have children here. I fit the profile of a responsible person. If I did that, Jay, of course, I'd have to give up my American citizenship. So of my friends in the expat community, there's very few people who would actually consider doing that or who have done that, but it is possible. I could become a Japanese citizen, thus allowing me to vote in the elections and so forth. But again, like we were talking at the top of the show, I would never be accepted as a Japanese, even if I was a Japanese citizen. That just would never happen. It's a problem. I mean, I don't think if I were the Prime Minister, I'd advocate for an open door policy, but I might advocate for some kind of softening, some kind of temporary or limited opening to have enough trained people come to replace the human resources that are being lost by these other processes, by the low birth rate, by the aging out, by any number of things. And so my last question to you is the Charles Dickens question. What about the ghost of Christmas future here? If this keeps going, if COVID maintains a threat, if these bell curve phenomena keep on limiting population growth, if the political and cultural climate keeps on discouraging immigration as a political cultural matter and the population goes down and they cannot fill the jobs and the schools, what happens to Japan? Economically, it just sinks. So the other day, I saw that Taiwan and Korea in a couple of years will have a higher per capita GDP per capita income than Japan. And I've seen forecasts that Japan will drop down on the top economies from number three, or it's currently to number five, to number seven, to number nine. It's just inevitable. There won't be enough people to sustain the economy. The taxes will become incredibly high here because the younger people who are small in number will be paying taxes to support the older people who are becoming huge. Like I mentioned, 30% are over the age of 65 and they're consuming most of hospital services and government services. I'm always short-term optimistic about this country because the Japanese people are so resilient and brilliant. Japan was devastated after World War II and in less than 20 years it became the second economy in the world, just remarkable. And look at what happened with the nuclear power plant and they recovered from that. And the seismic events and the weather events and climate change, they recover every time in a matter of weeks. They're back to business. That's remarkable how resilient and talented the people are here in Japan. So I remain optimistic, but given these demographic factors, given this inclination of Japan to not be able to manage immigration in a mature way, there's still this kind of emotional reaction to immigration. Long term, it's not good. So the ghost of Christmas future when it comes to Japan, it's going to be tough. And that has a secondary effect, of course, in terms of the balancing of economic and geopolitical power in Asia vis-à-vis China. That's a topic for another show. What's going on between the United States, Japan, and China right now is remarkably interesting. It's hard to predict how that's all going to roll out. But you're right. If Japan loses economic power, its influence in the region goes down. China dominates to even greater extent in Asia. Yeah, looks like I have to get along in my Samsung television and not have any great expectations about Sony. Never mind. Steve Zercher, the host of this show. Let me offer you the opportunity to close now. Well, I want to thank you, Jay. I always enjoy your questions. You are so good at what you do. Thank you for suggesting this topic. And I ask the viewers of this to tune in two weeks. I'll have looking to the East Show again, another topical subject regarding either Japan or Asia. So, again, thanks, Jay. Appreciate switching roles for this show and makes me nostalgic for the early days when we started the show a couple of years ago. Thank you so much. Thank you, Steve. And congratulations yet again on winning the award for the best of our shows. Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you, Jay, for your support of my humble show.