Future imperfect: Japan's immigration policies and the winds of change: for too long Japan has dodged the immigration debate. But its population is now dwindling and complacency is not an option. Can integration work? Take Toyohashi—please - Cover Story

Japan, Inc., Oct, 2003 by Tony McNicol

TOYOHASHI IS A MEDIUM-SIZED city in the middle of Japan. Local residents will tell you that their home city has a population of about 400,000, makes some of Japan's most delicious chikuwa (fish cake) and has an excellent surfing beach. They might even point out Toyohashi's futuristic Shinkansen station.

In short, Toyohashi is an average sort of place in a conservative and some might say ultra-Japanese part of Japan. But Toyohashi also has an energetic and conspicuously un-Japanese population: 10,000 South American immigrant workers, most of whom are Brazilians and Peruvians.

What makes Toyohashi special is that it could possibly provide a template for the future of the nation as a whole. A UN report on replacement migration and declining birth rates estimates that if present trends continue, Japan's population will have declined by 22 million in 2050. To fill the gap completely through immigration, the nation would have to welcome an average of 381,000 foreign workers per year all the way to 2050. Even with only a moderate influx of immigrants, every city in Japan could become another Toyohashi.

Is this economically and politically feasible? Those who think not are already casting about for alternatives. A demographic sea change which some argue is an economic necessity would mean that the immigrant population of Japan would swell from around 1 percent now to 17.7 percent by the middle of this century.

Of the nearly 2 million foreigners in Japan now, over half are Korean and Chinese, many of whom live in long established communities. Of the other million, over 300,000 are recently arrived Brazilians and Peruvians.

Sergio Okamoto arrived in Toyohashi in March 1990, close on the heels of new visa rules designed to encourage immigration by Brazilians, Peruvians and Argentines of Japanese ancestry. Born in Brazil to Japanese parents, Okamoto speaks fluent Japanese, Portuguese and English. At first, and like most South Americans, he found work in a factory. But now he works for a recruitment company supplying workers to a Toyohashi factory.

According to Okamoto, there is plenty of work for South Americans, recession or no recession. Foreign workers are still almost the only ones ready to do the most difficult, unpleasant and often dangerous jobs. Despite high unemployment in Japan and competition from some often over-qualified and desperate Japanese workers, it is still possible to find work paying [yen] 300,000 to [yen] 350,000 per month (including overtime).

Most of the Brazilians employed by Okamoto's company work 40 to 50 hours overtime per week, saving money to send home.

"If you stay here for a couple of years, you can buy a house, buy land and have capital to start a business [in Brazil]."

Professor Hiroshi Komai of Tsukuba University in Ibaraki has studied immigration into Japan. He says that Brazilians are no longer confined to the factories and have started finding other types of work--everything from being golf course caddies to caretakers for the aged.

In short, the immigrant economy is hollowing out just like the rest of the Japanese economy. Manufacturing jobs are going east to China, and South Americans are turning to the service sector. Japan's public policy planners in the early 90s may have imagined immigrants sweating unseen through automobile and electronics factory night-shifts, but a decade on many are working in shops, restaurants and offices--not least in the small economy of services catering to the immigrant communities themselves.

With its 15,000-strong immigrant community, Toyohashi may well become a model for the rest of Japan. But one major difference, says Komai, is critical: Future immigrants are unlikely to be South American. "The resource of the Japanese population in Latin America is already exhausted."

The newcomers are more likely to be from poorer countries elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Komai believes that the government may decide to open up the geriatric care sector to Asiatic foreign immigrants. By some estimates, in 2050 Japan will have more than 33 million additional aged persons needing care.

However, Komai doesn't believe that this sector alone can provide enough work for the immigrants Japan will need to sustain its population--and its tax income. What's more, the demand for general unskilled labor has been shrinking for the last 10 years.

"The industrial structure has already changed," Komai says. "We have no capacity [to absorb unskilled immigrants]."

He says the die was cast when Japan shied away from large-scale immigration at the beginning of the 90s--and the nation's manufacturers found cheap labor in China.

So with as many as 17 million new residents to find by 2050, the Japanese government is now considering a different kind of immigration. For a number of years it has been chasing highly skilled foreign workers--mainly for the IT industry.

Pasona-Tech is an IT recruitment company founded in 1998 and based in Tokyo. When the Japanese government reacted to a shortage of home grown IT workers by relaxing visa rules for foreign IT specialists, Pasona-Tech started recruiting eagerly from India. But today, of the 200 IT specialists on their books, over 170 are Chinese. Again, the change can largely be explained by the manufacturing exodus to China. Many tech companies straddle the Sea of Japan with their headquarters and research departments in Tokyo and their factories firmly ensconced in China.