This is very nice for the Philippines. Filipinos will undoubtedly grab this opportunity if it was presented to them. It is really sad that we may lose more of the cultural diversity in the world. Globalization has almost made sure that there is a world culture developing. When I think about this more I realize that the Philippines if it doesn’t get it’s act together will surely see a lot of its culture forgotten. In this respect when ( it is not an if, an if means Japanese culture has not died) Japan takes the immigration plunge their great effort in recording and preserving their culture will not go into waste. I hope we are not too poor to not be able to save most of the cultural capital our beautiful country has.
Japan will have a median age of about 55. This means that the vast bulk of the Japanese population (or more precisely Japanese women) will be well beyond child-bearing age and given low fertility rates anyway (below 2.0 per woman) the population will crash. That is more-or-less baked in. Simple equation – most the women past child-bearing age and very low fertility amongst those who bear children anyway.
There is a solution – immigration. There are an endless supply of well educated and skilled young people (mostly) from the subcontinent who would happily move to a developed country. There are more than a few from China too. Australia will import them. Ampontan rhetorically asked where I expected them all to fit into Japan? Well that is easy – with a demographic like that I expect them to fit into the slots left by the dying warriors of Japanese industrialization.
If Japan does not do it then aging and death is inevitable. The working population will be stuck looking after and funding the huge numbers of retired. Japan’s industrial growth – now anemic – will collapse entirely with its population. The great Japanese industrialization experiment will walk slowly into the setting sun aided by a walking stick.
There is of course an alternative which is modest levels of immigration. New immigrants will – like it or not – be Asian – mostly from the subcontinent. Over time they will also include many Muslims. The Japanese will have to accept – as Australians have accepted – that their children will breed with these people. As a white Australian I have fully accepted that it is likely as not that my grandchildren will arrive as little brown babies. I do not have a problem with that.
But Japan is a country where they won’t let their hookers sleep with foreigners because – well they are foreigners. (It was that story in this post that got Ampontan all upset with me.) But it does not have to be that way. There can eventually be an Asian co-prosperity zone in Japan – it will be with Japanese children and other Asian children and eventually their joint grandchildren. The Meiji racist ideology does not have to end with a walking stick – it can end in a truly multicultural society that will lead Japan onto greater things than the original modern revolutionaries of the Meiji era could ever have imagined.
via Bronte Capital: The final failure of the Meiji right-wing ideology … Japan fades into the future with a walking stick….