What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?
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Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
population growth ≠ wealth growth
who will build them back up in the future? The Chinese would prefer to see them poor.
"a turtle that retracts its head will later extend it"
Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
Hopefully Korea has figure out something more actionable
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
(The worldometer site makes it easy to look up and compare various countries: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...)
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
Always a bad idea to compare with the US which is known to have a terrible social net.
> The community support and available activities.
Interesting. Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children? That seems to be a huge pain point in Germany. Also child support is too low.
I agree that solutions might not be so simple that you can just "buy them". What you can buy at least is removing pain points and giving incentives.
Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any. Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
It will only becomes worse over time, though.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.
The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.
I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.
It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.
I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.
AFAIK the pension system is quite well invested and can continue for many decades even with current trends. Where do you get that it is crumbling? There is a silly law forcing recalculation of pension payments vs inflation to happen too infrequently causing issues right now but that is probably a different issue.
How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.
Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.
Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.
And places become more boring if the have the same migrants as every other place, not less boring.
Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.
Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).
My understanding is, the "original flood" from India, just like the turkey workforce in Germany, was desperately needed back then, "flooding a dry land" so to say.
Just as in Germany, a significant portion of doctors (30%) in the UK were born in another country. So it seems they (just as Germany) still pretty much rely on foreign workforce which is also why the numbers didn't go down after brexit even with the foreigner unfriendly political climate that caused it.
Such as? It looks like the country is doing much worse now that the border is closed.
America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth.
So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/highcharts/data/dubina-cha...
Recent policies have resulted in significant population decline, but so far they are just another blip.
I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.
Their work culture actually rivals the US for toxicity.
And they dove into the modern technological society fully before anyone other than maybe Korea... Who is also having birth rate problems
Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade.
The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...
but if you want to keep the economy functioning, you need to do something. immigration is something.
I'd say it's due primarily to the collision of their values with Western values, particularly concerning family and workplace roles. The core issue is actually being faced by all developed nations, but it hits Japan really hard due to their immigration stance as well as lack of natural resources (they need to excel in providing globally scoped services).
This is an issue that develops over decades and places like Japan, South Korea and potentially China, this is already baked in to the point that it is unstoppable. The same is coming to many other nations over the coming decades.
Personally, I would love to have a few kids but after many years of trying and all manner of treatments we have gotten nowhere at all. But that is just how if falls I guess.
More kids means you need a bigger house, bigger car, extra furniture, a part time job for mother to manage kids.
The Japanese government already struggles to pay out pensions with its aging population, healthcare and pension costs are both rising, where do you propose the money for this comes from?
Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
But the real cost of giving birth is not the giving birth, it's the millions of yen you then need to spend over the next 18 years to raise and educate the child, not to mention the cost of possibly dying during childbirth.
Yes
> Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
Yes
> If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
Yes and no. There are a zillion different support programs where you have to fill out a 4 page form in triplicate and submit to city hall to get $80 3 months later. Childbirth is induced regardless of medical necessity because there's one programme that covers medical costs up to the scheduled due date and another programme that covers medical costs after birth, but if you need medical care after your due date with the baby still unborn then you fall through the cracks. The country badly needs to replace its patchwork subsidy program with simply including childbirth under normal medical insurance.
In Japan? Doubt. The social cost may be harder to measure, but it's huge.
And even if they are more "economically efficient", why is that the goal?
I'm suggesting they have a more positive lifetime impact yes. Obviously publicly-funded education, healthcare and the like for the newborn until they're ready to contribute financially has a cost, but an immigrant is just massively disruptive - language support in public services alone is a significant cost, but much larger is losing the benefits of a cohesive, high-trust society. If the neighbourhood's kids can no longer run errands alone but now need (or are felt to need) an adult escorting them, you're going to get mothers quitting their jobs to do that; if an unattended shop is no longer viable then those businesses will close; if every business switches to payment in advance because they can no longer trust people to pay their bills then that's a whole lot of friction that slows down all economic activity...
There is just not enough labor/time for people to have kids and also sustain the elderly that can no longer contribute to the same degree.
Not really. Cultural values is a huge factor, and that was seriously upended when the US invaded and occupied them.
Not a bet I would be willing to take though lol.
Because there are no resource or technology constraints that prevent solving it, just regulatory concerns, and because regulatory concerns are easy to solve in unfree countries almost by definition, and because unfree countries face this problem to a larger degree than free ones so will be also forced to act sooner, and because once they figure the solution it will become imperative for all other countries to do the same or quickly cease to exist so regulatory concerns will be quickly overcome - there is really no way this won't be satisfactorily solved.
Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
That's what the robots are (or, rather, will be) for.
More seriously, I'm all for liberalizing immigration policy, myself, in almost every respect. But unfortunately the conservative reaction is costing us everything. It's too easy for them to use "Open borders, ooga booga!" to scare the rubes. When conservatives have nothing more to offer the future and no defense for their past, they can always fall back on that. It works.
Every country will end up with its own army of MAGA zombies if it pursues this course, and Japan is no exception.
They don't though? Pensions will be cut. Retirements will be pushed back. Grandparents with dementia will be kept mostly-alive in their children's homes rather than getting proper care. There will be pain and suffering. But I don't see any of that pushing the country to breaking point.
> And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
As hard as fixing a low population is, it's easier than fixing a society where trust has broken down, which is what the western countries that went hard on immigration are already starting to face.
I think it is even better to not have immigration as a solution, because it accelerates this whole problem and forces the society to search for other ways to solve the issue.
If you become poor enough and weak enough, you'll be "replaced" anyway. And not on your own terms.
They become more attractive to outside non-governmental powers looking to engage in economic arbitrage, which brings its own challenges.
They have less negotiating power with wealthier countries which impacts their sovereignty.
Poor countries also tend to have more internal conflict: https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/
If we look at this empirically it seems clear that countries that trade ethnic sameness for economic prosperity end up more stable, peaceful and capable of directing their own affairs.
There could be some advantages to living in a country where strangers are also distant cousins, but they seem marginal.
There could even be emotional improvements for parts of the population who feel anxious about living near people who are genetically distant from themselves, but I've not seen great evidence of that. Particularly since ethnically cohesive but poor countries tend to fall into civil war regardless.
When you put it to the test and measure outcomes, there are tradeoffs that go far beyond giving up consumerism.
If any country was truly serious about this problem, they would end social programs for the elderly and focus that funding for families.
Looks like the trolley problem in action.
If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
One big downside of any kind of social programs is that it conditions the population to rely solely on the state, thinking that their payments into the system will guarantee them safety. We tend to forget for a state to exist and to provide services, it needs people. Those people need to be born, raised and cultured in order to act as a community.
I'll bite.
In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today. Or an ancestor that suffered because the locals did think that way.
We honor that heritage by paying it forward, lest we be lumped among the trash of history that punished the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews for the cardinal sin of living down the street.
Lot of Americans in this forum, so that's why.
Because that’s so much better
>>In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today.
I don't think you thought it through before you wrote this. As the locals, certainly didn't want what you imply and were defeated tribe by tribe.
I partially agree. Counter evidence is that Little Italy, Chinatowns and the like exist and have done for many decades. Ethnic clubs like Sons of Italy persist. Some Pennsylvania Dutch still don't speak English, and still set themselves apart. But at the same time, many from those groups join the majority culture and leave their old languages behind.
In this respect I don't see modern immigration in America any differently. Newer immigrant groups have their culture enclaves, but many from those groups also enter and adopt the majority culture.
> I don't think you thought it through before you wrote this
You're misreading my comment. For most of us, the locals at time of ancestor arrival had already displaced the natives to whom you refer
… that the races should keep to themselves? Yea, I’m going to have to disagree on this one.
This was pretty handily disproven by the New World. Mixing, sharing, cohabiting… this creates culture and makes us stronger. Isolation, protectionism, and fear makes us weak.
Which is to say: There is no inherent psychological tribalism that makes having a diverse country impossible or ruinous; rather, this tribalism is manufactured and spread by hatemongers. The New World is a very good case study, here.
I'm not "... liberal", however there are two reasons. For one it has turned or to be very hard to convince people to "just have more babies". Second reason is that immigration workforce is available immediately, while an increase in birth rate will only help 20 years later.
Even if you manage to reverse the trajectory of the birth rate, how long would it take to approach 2.0? How long until you have healthy demographics? 50, 70 years, maybe, that's just too long.
> truths about human tribalism?
Truth is that human are complicated and have survived for so long not because of their thumbs or their language, but because of their adaptability.
Talking about homogenous culture I hope you don't live in the US, because that guys for sure never had one. US is way too big for that which is also why so many laws are still defined by the states.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
You literally posted an example of the opposite.
I'm pretty sure where ever you come from that you have a dominant groups which imposes it's culture to every other subgroup. Every country where that is not the case, you infighting and war.
Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that.
The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war.
The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.
>The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity
This, and race/culture, is what is meant when people say Japan is homogeneous compared to other developed nations.
This is a very postmodern point view.
It is not, if by "general-purpose robots" we mean humanoid robots, and by "AI" we mean LLMs. Factories will continue to be designed around robots that are designed for specific purposes and controlled by normal, predictable software.
Japan's population around 1900 was mere 43 million people - when most of them were required to work the fields.
Japan will be fine. Europe, on the other hand...
In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.
Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.
Older people, en masse, become a burden. If you add another 43 million people aged over 60 on top of your 43 million from 1900, suddenly that 86 million is less productive than the original 43 million.
Currently Japan has ~41 million people aged 0-40, ~41 million aged 40-60, and ~41 million aged 60+
Their culture has a lot of good things, but also bad things that are leading then to the abyss, but if you watch Japanese media they never discuss any sensitive topic and always try to paint themselves as the best country in the world. Maybe they should start doing some self-criticism...
This is an insane way to frame immigration reform. It isn’t “ceding” anything, it just means being OK that not every single person you know is the same race. Having some cultural exchange, growing as a person, learning about the world beyond your borders… these are virtues.
Wrong! Korea has successfully reversed theirs starting this year due to some extreme policies benefiting families with children
[1] https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-05-27/nationa... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/25/south-korea-bi...
You need limits, and integration, assimilation would be even better.
Seems like economic uncertainty or fear of it breeds xenophobia. Who knew
> They are willing to accept a smaller economy, strained pensions, and dead rural towns as the price for keeping their core cities safe, clean, and culturally familiar.
I'll not pretend that immigration is an easy, uncontroversial and solved topic. But can we maybe not equate immigration with dirty and dangerous cities? Yes that has been the rhetoric for thousands of years, but it's most often the rhetoric of those with a dubious track record of saying true things. Trump is famously anti-immigration, why trust what he says? Since 9/11 the stereotype of a terrorist in the USA has been a brown Muslim. The facts tell us the majority of domestic terrorism is done by white christian dudes. I get that xenophobia is an emotional topic for many, but that doesn't excuse racism.
What isn't reversible is losing a country's identity. As a foreigner, I'd rather see Japan remain Japan than become a messy cultural mix, like Europe.