NIIGATA: The Indian-born head of one of Japan’s most famous snack brands has warned that the country must change its mindset and admit more immigrants to get the economy back to the glory of its boom years.

Politicians have struggled for years to recover from the so-called lost decades as a range of differing programmes have failed to kickstart growth, including an ultra-loose monetary policy and trillions of dollars in stimulus measures.

And as the new government of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba eyes a fresh drive to bring back the heyday of its global tech domination Lekh Juneja, the head of rice cracker giant Kameda Seika, said he worries his adopted country has lost its edge.

“Forty years ago I came to Japan because it was close to number one in GDP... it was booming,” the biotech scientist said at Kameda’s headquarters in Japan’s rice heartland of Niigata. But at some point “Japan thought ‘we have everything now’. And I think that the hungry spirit to (have) the guts to go global started disappearing a bit”.

Kameda’s expansion mirrored Japan’s postwar boom, increasing revenues tenfold between 1965 and 1974 and becoming synonymous with the nationally adored “senbei” crackers in the process. But the country that gave the world the Sony Walkman, the bullet train and Super Mario is no longer setting the pace in technology, overtaken by Silicon Valley, South Korea and China.

In the late 1980s, Japanese firms dominated the world’s top 10 companies by market capitalisation. Today not one makes the list.

The population is ageing and projected to drop by almost a third in the next 50 years, and firms are already having problems filling vacancies.

Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2024