Many industrialized countries are battling falling birthrates, as human societies change and shift. The numbers of babies born per female in Russia, Italy, and Germany, for example, are 1.25, 1.29, and 1.35 respectively. There are all too few babies being born in Japan, too, just 1.29 per female, a situation made worse by the lack of imigration to offset the drop in real population here, unlike the U.S. and Europe. To avoid a future in which there are too few people in Japan to do the jobs that need doing, a group of Japanese Diet members has for the first time put forth a proposal calling for Japan to create a forward-looking immigration policy and accept 10 million foreigners over the next fifty years as a way of keeping its society and economy healthy. In making the proposal, Japanese legislator Hidenao Nakagawa said, “There is no way to save Japan’s future without turning to other nations. Japan must open its doors as an international state and shift toward establishing an ‘immigrant nation.'” I’ve long thought that Japan should form relationships with countries and eliminate barriers to long-term work-stays and full-fledged immigration, and maybe this will be a first step. Incidentally, while many nations are seeing their birth rates fall, they’re actually on the upswing in the U.S., up to 2.2 per female on average. Japanese leaders must be asking themselves how America can keep its birth rate high without the social programs that give parents a monthly bonus for having three or more kids, which are common here. It’s hard to know what the reasons for the difference in birth rates are, but personally I think the American tendency to be positive about the future plays a big part. The Japanese are rather quick to see huge, unsolvable problems when they look to the horizon, which can cool couples to the idea of having another child, but Americans are (at least as seen from the outside looking in) much more likely to be optimistic about the future, and I think this is one factor at play here.
Nakagawa-san is on the left, and the otaku who almost became Prime Minister is below
