Aging Japan considers allowing in more foreigners

YOKOHAMA, Japan — As the United States and Europe take steps to keep more people out, Japan is cautiously moving to let more people in.

Japan is a country that has long sought to defend its culture and its ethnic homogeneity by discouraging immigrants. Now, with its population continuing to shrink and age, and its labor force dwindling, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is thinking the previously unthinkable.

This month, his government introduced a bill that aims to bring in hundreds of thousands of “semi-skilled” foreign workers in the years ahead, opening Japan’s doors like never before.

He is careful to stress that this is not “immigration,” because these workers are not supposed to stay indefinitely, but it is still a shift that is being described as a watershed moment in the country’s modern history.

“This is the biggest turning point in postwar Japan,” Akira Nagatsuma of the opposition center-left Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan told parliament, calling the government’s proposal “irresponsible” and “half-baked.”

But birth rates are falling across the developed world, and populations are aging, and nowhere is this reality hitting harder than in Japan.

Its population is expected to drop from about 127 million to 88 million by 2065. People older than 65 already account for 28 percent of the population, and 500 schools close every year due to a lack of students.

Letting in more people might be the only way to reverse the slide to stagnation and decline, experts say.

“If depopulation continues, people will come to Japan somehow,” said Toshihiro Menju, managing director of the Japan Center for International Exchange. “We need an immigration policy to prevent an immigration problem.”

Abe’s government is conservative, but it also is closely entwined with the business community, and the message it hears from every quarter — shipbuilding and construction, agriculture and fishing, elder-care establishments and convenience-store Children of foreign workers take a Japanese-language class at the YSC Global School in the city of Fussa, in western Tokyo. owners — is insistent: We need more workers.

Though the highly skilled have always been welcome, Abe wants to allow in 345,000 semiskilled workers by 2024, letting them come for a maximum of five years in about a dozen industries, including agriculture and construction. If they pass some still-unspecified tests at the end of that period, they could be allowed to stay for five more years, and even bring relatives.

Previous efforts to ease Japan’s labor shortage have had mixed results.

In the late 1980s, Japan opened its doors to the descendants of ethnic Japanese who had emigrated at the beginning of the century, and hundreds of thousands came from Latin America, especially Brazil and Peru.

But many barely spoke the language and failed to integrate. In 2009, after the global financial crisis, Japan started offering them money to return home.

Workers of different ethnicities also came, but under much more restrictive policies.

The main vehicle was the Technical Intern Training Program, or TITP, introduced in 1993, under which workers from other Asian countries were supposed to be given training for three to five years before returning home.

“It is a sham, pretty much just a way of importing cheap labor from overseas,” said lawyer Yoshihito Kawakami, adding that workers often don’t receive any real training.

Japan is home to 2.6 million foreigners, about 2 percent of the population, and based on current trends, that number could rise to 12 percent in 50 years, said Makoto Kato, who analyzes the economics of immigration for Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting.

But Japan’s unwillingness to admit that it is accepting immigrants means no government funds are allocated for integration efforts, and there are no laws against hate speech or discrimination against foreigners, Kato and other experts say.

A lack of inclusion could be a recipe for social unrest, and an economic downturn could leave Japan regretting how many people it allowed in, some experts warn.