PACIFIC BASIN ECONOMIC COUNCIL
MAIN PAGE | SPEECHES & EDITORIALS | 2002 | AN OPEN JAPAN

An Open Japan? By Dr. Helmut Sohmen Chairman World-Wide Shipping Agency Limited (Hong Kong) Mainichi Daily News Tuesday, January 1, 2002     Dr. Helmut Sohmen Let me wish all readers of the Mainichi Daily News a happy and healthy New Year 2002. I hope the coming Year of the Horse will be more auspicious than the current Year of the Snake, and that despite a number of predictions to the contrary the Japanese economy will finally again turn to a path of growth. It is not surprising that anxieties about the economic situation of Japan abound, both within Japan and among her friends around the world. A decade of slow or no growth has impacted on general confidence. Public debt is large, the financial sector is straining, bankruptcies are increasing, unemployment is rising, and consumer spending and new investments are down despite low interest rates, and thus provide insufficient stimuli. Japan's impressive export machine has slowed, and the country's neighbours in East Asia are concerned about a much-reduced foreign investment from Japan in their economies. The rapid economic development of the People's Republic of China, now also a member of the World Trade Organization, is prompting a strategic re-assessment around the world of the likely future roles of Japan and China in the Far East in the coming decades. But beyond the ups and downs of business cycles, as long or as harsh as they may turn out to be from time to time, lie more serious problems for the Japanese society. Demographic shifts manifest themselves only over generations and are more difficult to see, interpret, and react to than economic boom and bust periods. They therefore receive much less attention. It is startling to learn that on present trends, Japan's population is expected to fall from today's 120 million to 95 million in 2050. Not only the shrinkage in total numbers, but the rapid growth of the older population in Japan, mirrored also in other developed countries, should set loud warning bells ringing. Since at the same time India is expected to reach a population number of some 1.5 billion with two more generations, China will be housing at least 1.3 billion people, and Indonesia possibly 400 million, it is not that hard to predict that international migration will take on an altogether new dimension. Developed countries can of course increase life expectancy through improved medical care, thus allowing longer working lives. But such improvements also have to be paid for and do not produce an answer for the urgent need for babies, nor for the need to have more imaginative young brains available to compete effectively in an increasingly knowledge-based and globalising world. Short of future genetic and ethical breakthroughs that would allow cloning, the ready answer to incipient manpower problems in many nations will therefore lie in facilitating migration. For this to happen, i.e. to move from negative to positive immigration policies, we will need to change current attitudes in the world at large, but particularly in culturally more isolated and introspective societies like Japan's. At present, national immigration rules and practices by and large are designed to keep people out; they are not meant to assist people in crossing national boundaries in a search of a new existence. Refugees, be they asylum seekers or economic migrants, are often regarded as suspect or unreliable per se, no matter what their origins, background, qualifications, talents, or ambitions. And yet, as self-selected risk-takers, they might in majority just be the type of new blood required to fill local manpower needs and refresh the gene pool. The idea that migrants should be welcomed as a matter of political and economic reality and for the benefit of each receiving nation, rather than as a mere act of charity or generosity towards those seeking a new home, requires a fairly radical change of mindset. It will require a national education program to remove and to fight discriminatory instincts from an early age onwards. It will mean planning and implementing new legal frameworks and infrastructures, the provision of language acquisition opportunities even before arrival, and nation-wide efforts to integrate newcomers into society by avoiding ghetto-formation and every other conceivable cause for ethnic conflict. A positive programme will have to be coordinated closely with the governments of countries that are the more obvious sources of migrants. In fact, regional or global commitments to the goal of facilitating an orderly system of international migration are more likely to show beneficial results than sporadic or individual actions by only a few countries. We all speak with fervour about economic globalization: at the same time we tend to overlook or disregard the human and social consequences of this process or -- tradition-bound and largely afraid -- we are unprepared to make appropriate plans to deal with them. I am conscious that the above suggestion presents a tall order, especially for a country like Japan. And yet Japan in particular will encounter difficulties sooner and probably in a more dramatic fashion than other nations. The planned enlargement of the European Union towards the East and the freedom of the movement of labour within its borders, and the history of migration and the modern process of economic integration in the Americas, will allow both regions to better balance manpower supply and demand, but also more readily prepare national communities in these zones to deal with the acceptance of newcomers. Japan could, and probably should, spearhead a move in the Far East along these lines for the benefit of its very own national interests, but also with a view to re-asserting a constructive leadership position in this part of the world.