Haruko Arimura, Japan's minister in charge of administrative reform and gender equality, speaks during an interview in Tokyo, Japan, on Friday, May 8, 2015. Japan should fix its shrinking workforce by enabling women to work, before turning to the "Pandora's box" of immigration, the country's minister for the empowerment of women said in an interview last week.Akio Kon/Bloomberg
Before I left on a recent trip to write about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Abenomics revival program, I sat down for a coffee with a former Canadian ambassador to Japan. He gave me a bit of advice: Don't bother asking anyone about immigration.
I mainly heeded the warning, focusing instead on areas prioritized by the Japanese government as it seeks to boost its economic growth, such as getting more women in the work force, a policy many Japanese refer to as Womenomics. As I heard more about Japan's economic woes, though, I was surprised some began to raise the topic on their own.
That's how bad the economic situation had become: Even in Japan – on an archipelago where people have long considered themselves distinct, where isolationism was once a state policy and where foreigners are still viewed with distrust – people were finally beginning to talk about immigration.
Everyone, it seemed, but the politicians: In the upper echelons of Japanese politics, immigration remains taboo, the equivalent of political suicide. Immigration policies are infamously tight. Bringing up the issue in Japan with the wrong people is an awkward experience, prompting embarrassed laughter, or statements like "That is sensitive."
And that's too bad, because meaningful immigration reform could form a key component of Mr. Abe's so-called Three Arrows policy of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform.
New comments this week prove just how wary senior Japanese politicians are of immigration – what some call the missing arrow – which has halted population declines and added vibrancy to the societies and economies of aging, Western democracies.
Haruko Arimura, the Japanese government minister in charge of women's empowerment, called immigration a Pandora's box that should be used only as a last resort. First, the country should employ other options such as getting more women into the work force, increasing the birth rate to produce additional employees and raising the retirement age.
In an interview this week with Bloomberg News, she said immigrants might be mistreated, as they are in many parts of Southeast Asia, and could nurture grudges. "The world has been shaken by immigrants who come into contact with extremist thinking like that of ISIL, bundle themselves in explosives and kill people indiscriminately in the country where they were brought up," she said.
That's quite a leap – and is all the more remarkable when you consider she's talking about the children of immigrants being potential terrorists, not necessarily the immigrants themselves.
To some degree, her opinion reflects the new globalized reality many Japanese now feel they're facing, in an era where Japanese journalist Kenji Goto could be beheaded by the Islamic State, and in which Mr. Abe is trying to revise the country's pacifist constitution to be able to deploy its armed forces abroad.
But it mainly reflects long-standing fears about how immigration might destabilize Japan's remarkably harmonious social order, a status quo of low crime rates and social cohesion that has endured even as the country grapples with ongoing structural and societal challenges, including labour shortages. Ms. Arimura's point is that Japan should try to exhaust all other options in reversing decades of deflation – but the problem is that Abenomics has been sputtering for some time, and could use a boost itself.
Since the collapse of its bubble economy in the early 1990s, Japan – while enjoying the prosperity of an advanced, industrial economy – has essentially had zero economic growth. The population is aging rapidly, and the number of deaths now exceeds the number of births. Government estimates suggest Japan's population could fall from 127 million today to around 86 million by 2060. The working-age population is set to halve in the same time period, declining to just 44 million workers.
Demographics run through almost every problem Japan faces. The average age of farmers is now 66. Roughly 70 per cent of women stop working after having a child. The aging population is beginning to put a huge strain on the health-care system, to the point where people have talked about offshore health-care resorts for elderly Japanese in lower-cost locales in Southeast Asia. Government debt is soaring as social-security costs increase. Demographics even touches on geopolitics: A declining population means a declining economy, and that translates into less clout and influence in international and regional affairs.
But some Japanese politicians and economists want to look everywhere but immigration for the solutions. Robots and women, for example, are often cited as being able to fill the labour shortage. At the same time, the government is introducing health-care reforms to lure companies focused on commercializing experimental regenerative medicine – which could reduce looming health-care costs for Japan's elderly.
On immigration, Mr. Abe's administration appears to be taking cues from the Persian Gulf: focusing on higher-value economic immigrants from advanced countries (or English teachers), while letting in many others on limited-term work permits to toil in housekeeping and nursing. Some older Japanese farmers already employ hired hands from abroad. But in many cases, outside of financial services and the wealthy foreign residents of Tokyo, when Japanese mention immigration reforms, they are almost certainly – if not explicitly – talking about increasing the flow of low-cost labour from Southeast Asia. They would never consider making these economic migrants actual citizens.
Naoyuki Yoshino, dean of the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo, has a lot of theories about how to improve Japan's economy, but immigration is not one of them. He points to the segregation of immigrant communities, and Germany's integration of Turkish labourers who mainly came during the labour shortages of the 1960s and 70s, mentioning that Germany will now face problems because of their retirement from the work force. "We should first utilize old people, and have the ladies work," Mr. Yoshino told me over dinner near his Tokyo office, shortly after a meeting he held with high-level members of Mr. Abe's ruling party.
But not everyone sees it that way. In an interview with the powerful Japanese Business Federation, which is known as Keidanren, I was told immigration may be a short-term solution to manual-labour shortages. However, it will not on its own be able to halt the serious, macro-level population declines – and all the subsequent consequences – that Japan now faces. "It is necessary to have a public debate," said Kiyoshi Tanigawa, a manager in Keidanren's industrial policy bureau.