TOKYO: With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Japan has been forced to look at the once unthinkable and accept wide-scale immigration, a prospect which could keep its economy running but makes much of the public uneasy. A justice ministry report submitted on Tuesday asked the cabinet to “firmly consider” bringing unskilled foreign workers to historically homogenous Japan in a bid to ward off the looming demographic crisis.
Young Japanese are increasingly turned off by the idea of children, considering families an obstacle to their careers, finances and lifestyles. Unless the Japanese have a change of heart on immigration or child-rearing, the United Nations believes the Japanese population will sink to 109 million people in 2050 from 127 million in 2004, forcing a small working population to toil to support a mass of pensioners.
Japan in 2003 hosted under two million foreigners making up about 1.5 per cent of the population. About half of them are Koreans, most of whom have roots in Japan dating back generations but never took citizenship.
While the Japanese government predicts the drop in the population will start from 2007, it could have already begun.
“In reality, it has already been declining since 1995,” said Isao Negishi, deputy director of the justice ministry’s immigration policy planning office. He said the fall in population was concealed from view due to the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s and subsequent recession, during which there was no visible need for foreign labour.
“Nowadays the business world is urging a more open attitude toward foreign workers,” Negishi said.
Negishi stressed that immigration was not the only solution to make up for the expected labour shortfall, as Japan could bring more women and elderly people into the active population.
“We don’t imagine opening our doors or closing them, but rather shooting for a selective immigration on the basis of occupation,” he said, noting that Japan already lets in foreigners of certain skilled professions such as engineers, doctors, scientists and nurses.
While many traditionally closed European countries have begun to recognize the need for immigrants to offset population slumps, in Japan such calls mostly ring hollow among policymakers.
“It’s a topic which the politicians don’t touch,” said Takamichi Kajita, a sociology professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. “There is no debate on the issue.”
Public opinion is sharply divided on immigration. A government-commissioned survey last year asked people how they would feel about a foreigner taking a job which no Japanese wanted to do. Thirty-three per cent rejected the idea, 31 per cent said they had no objections and 29 per cent said they would support it if there were no other option, with the rest having no opinion or undecided.
But at the same time, polls have shown that a majority of Japanese fear foreigners as a source of crime.
Police statistics for 2004 showed that the number of serious crimes fell by 4.4 per cent year-on-year in Japan, but crimes by foreigners — while still accounting for a minority of incidents — shot up by 16 per cent.
“Foreigners generally never appear in the newspapers except for crimes,” Kajita said. “In reality there isn’t that big of a difference between the criminality of citizens and immigrants.”—AFP
