Japan to open its doors wider to foreigners

TOKYO — Japan aims to reverse a decline in the country’s foreign population in recent years, and its minister in charge of foreign labour predicts that annual growth will rise from the pre-financial crisis average of about 50,000 to 80,000 or even 100,000.

“We don’t use the word ‘immigration’,” Mr Yasutoshi Nishimura, a deputy minister in the Cabinet Office, told the Financial Times. “There is still a strong insular mentality. Still, (it) would be a big change for Japan.”

With the Japanese public opposed to mass immigration, the government has treaded carefully on the issue of allowing for more foreigners.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe favours expanding some targeted programmes for importing foreign labour. He wants more outsiders to fill low-wage jobs where shortages are acute — from construction workers to nannies — and to make it easier for skilled professional and technical workers to take permanent residency. Proposals are expected to be included in a package of economic measures being announced later this month.

Japan’s population has been shrinking and fewer than 2 per cent of residents are foreign, prompting questions about whether it is time for the country to open its doors wider to foreigners.

Mr Abe was asked about this on a recent television programme. Mindful of public sentiment, he warned against opening the floodgates to foreigners.

“In countries that have accepted immigration, there has been a lot of friction, a lot of unhappiness both for the newcomers and the people who already live there,” he told the audience.

Despite Mr Abe’s televised rejection of immigration, his speeches on reviving economic growth are full of pledges to attract international capital of both the financial and human kind.

Experts say the government’s plans to import foreign labour do not add up to a strategy for shoring up the overall population, however. That might suit users of Tokyo’s packed commuter trains, but future crowds will not only be smaller, they will be much older.

Today, there are three people of working age to support each retiree, but, by mid-century, the ratio will be close to one-to-one — a potentially catastrophic economic problem in a country that has the world’s heaviest public-debt load, and where a third of the national budget already goes to pensions and healthcare.

Aside from neighbouring South Korea, no wealthy country has combined a low birth rate and tight immigration controls the way Japan has. The country’s labour force began to shrink in the mid-’90s, and the total population peaked in 2008, at just under 130 million. If nothing changes, there will be 30 million fewer Japanese by 2050, and by the early 2100s — admittedly a distant extrapolation — the population could be half or even a third what it is today.

One issue is that the increase in newcomers may not last. Some of it would be reversed after the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, since extra construction workers — the plan calls for 15,000 — are meant to ease a temporary shortage created by stadium and road building related to the games, as well as reconstruction in the tsunami-damaged northeast.

Meanwhile, a more drastic proposal that has been circulated among Mr Abe’s advisers has gone nowhere. It calls for the number of foreign residents to be increased by 200,000 a year, a rate that would keep the total population from falling much below 100 million, if the native birth rate could be increased as well, says the Japan Center for Economic Research (JCER), the think-tank that drafted it.

“The question Japan faces is, do we continue to do nothing and accept demographic and economic decline, or do we accept foreign workers to stabilise the population and the economy,” says JCER economist Jun Saito. “We are at a crossroads.”

Mr Saito says immigrants would make up 6 per cent of the population in 2050 under the JCER plan, still just half the level of the United Kingdom, France and Germany today. But since few experts think the birth rate can be raised to replacement levels, as the plan envisages, the real percentage would almost certainly be higher.

The public has shown little appetite for such a change. A poll by the Jiji news agency in March showed that just under 60 per cent would accept an increase in temporary foreign workers to address labour shortages, but large-scale immigration is different. A survey by the Asahi newspaper in 2010 found two-thirds were against it. THE FINANCIAL TIMES