The Japanese alternative

Japan is robotizing not only manufacturing but also the service sector (Wikicommons - Michael Ocampo)



In my last two posts I argued that South Korea has embraced not only ultra-low fertility but also mass immigration. In this, it has more in common with Western Europe and North America than with neighboring China and Japan.

China is out of step with Western immigration policy for understandable reasons: it is only now exhausting its reserves of cheap labor and, furthermore, has problematic relations with the West. But those reasons hardly apply to Japan—a Western ally with fewer and fewer people of working age. Yet that country has been going its own way on immigration, just as it has in other areas, notably automation and robotization.  In the West, robotics research is a low priority, except for military applications. In Japan, it is a high priority and has the stated aim of staving off immigration:

"Japan's push for automation has historically been driven by political and social resistance to large-scale immigration by non-Japanese, rooted in the idea that there would be a deep cultural incompatibility with such immigrants," says Grant Otsuki, a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington.

"In contrast, robots are generally seen as compatible with tradition and culture, or at least 'neutral', and therefore more acceptable than immigrants." (Townsend 2019)

Robotic beings have a good image in Japan, as shown by a spate of movies where a shy boy falls in love with a female android: Chobits (2002), Cyborg She (2008), and Q10 (2010). In contrast, we see a darker image in Western movies, such as the Terminator series, Ex Machina (2015), and Blade Runner (1982 and 2017).

Keep in mind that culture is upstream from policy. If you think movies are made only to provide entertainment, you probably also believe that newspapers serve only to cover the news and that advertisements are used only to sell a specific good or service. Culture is an effective way to shape future policies.


South Korea and Japan: different responses to the same demographic crisis

The South Korean response

Although South Korea and Japan face the same demographic crisis, i.e., an aging society and a low birth rate, they have responded in very different ways. South Korea has greatly liberalized its immigration policy, both in law and in enforcement of the law. Since 1997 the country has opened up its labor market to guest workers and has relaxed enforcement to the point that half of all migrants are undocumented (Moon 2010).

Song (undated) sees a link between the beginning of large-scale labor immigration to his country and the IMF bailout of 1997. However, the "Memorandum on the Economic Program," written by the South Korean government in response to the IMF, says nothing specific about immigration. There is only a promise to implement "labor market reform" and take "further steps to improve labor market flexibility" (IMF 1997). Perhaps other promises were made off the record.

To gain support for large-scale immigration, the government began to promote multiculturalism from 2006 onward:

But the South Korean media also began to host fervent discussions of multiculturalism. In 2005-2006, the number of articles on the topic tripled from previous years. The media shift was echoed by a change in policy from the top, initially driven by President Roh Moo-hyun. The campaign then crossed ministerial divisions and party lines, surviving the changeover from the liberal Roh administration of 2003-2008 to the more conservative administration of President Lee Myung-bak. Lee's government sought both to persuade the public to embrace immigrants and to promote integration by educating new foreign-born brides in the intricacies of Korean culture. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family simultaneously started a campaign to persuade the public to accept multiculturalism. Immigration commissioners and the presidential committee on aging set multiculturalism as a national priority to combat a maturing society. South Korea was to become a "first-class nation, with foreigners" — a phrase echoed throughout government documents and speeches. (Palmer and Park 2018)

Watson (2010) ascribes this new policy to the neo-liberalism that has dominated both the Right and the Left, particularly since the IMF bailout of 1997:

For the conservative government, South Korean nationalism and democracy is fundamentally tied to the doctrine of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism refers to the flow of economic migrant labour and mobile global capital. This global environment also requires government policies to attract foreign migrants and workers into South Korea's economy and society.

Multiculturalism is a state-led response to these global changes. The policies of multiculturalism define the present and future economic, security and cultural national strength of South Korea. Critics suggest that, in fact, the GNP regards multiculturalism as an instrumental policy of increasing national state power in this global environment. (Watson, 2010)

The GNP is the Grand National Party. It dominates the political right and resembles mainstream Republicanism in the United States:


The Japanese response

Meanwhile, Japan has been much less willing to open its borders, despite being East Asia's primary destination for foreigners. Its illegal immigrant population has actually declined through stronger law enforcement, and legal immigrants have been mostly overseas Japanese from Latin America. Last year, however, its parliament passed a law to bring in foreign workers for jobs in construction, agriculture, the hotel industry, cleaning, and elder care. Initially, 500,000 were slated to come over the next five years, but the total was cut to 345,000 (Denyer 2018; Nikkei 2018; Shigeta 2018).

Those numbers are still much lower than the 2.4 million foreign workers currently in South Korea, a much smaller country in size and population. In addition, Japan's guest workers will be paid the same as Japanese doing the same work (Denyer 2018). This is in stark contrast to South Korea, which has the largest wage gap between local and immigrant labor in the OECD (Hyun-ju 2015).

Japan is still criticized for not opening up enough. One example is this Washington Post article, whose author warns the U.S. against becoming another Japan:

Now, to be clear, Japan is a wondrous nation, with an ancient, complex culture, welcoming people, innovative industry — a great deal to teach the world. But Japan also is a country that admits few immigrants — and, as a result, it is an aging, shrinking nation. By 2030, more than half the country will be over age 50. By 2050 there will be more than three times as many old people (65 and over) as children (14 and under). Already, deaths substantially outnumber births. Its population of 127 million is forecast to shrink by a third over the next half-century. (Hiatt 2018)

Robotization may make life easier for Japan's growing numbers of elderly but will it pay for their pensions? Mind you, the same sort of question could be asked about low-wage immigration to the U.S.


Why is Japan so different?

A key reason seems to be a high degree of cultural autonomy and a correspondingly high degree of cultural isolation. The term "isolation" might seem strange for a country that does so much importing and exporting. Nonetheless, manufactured goods are not the same as beliefs. The latter are distributed not via shipping containers but through shared language and through shared discourse spaces in academia, entertainment, and the media.

Poor knowledge of English

English has become the language of globalism, and knowledge of English correlates worldwide with public acceptance of core globalist beliefs. In Japan, English is not widely used or understood, even among the well-educated:  

Although English is a compulsory subject in junior high and high school in this country, Japanese still have a hard time achieving even daily conversation levels. According to the most recent EF English Proficiency Index, the English level of Japanese is ranked 35th out of 72 countries. The top three are the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, which are all northern European nations. Among Asian countries, Singapore is placed sixth, Malaysia 12th, the Philippines 13th, India 22nd and South Korea 29th. Japan places between Russia and Uruguay. (Tsuboya-Newell 2017)

Sullivan and Schatz (2009) found that attitudes toward learning English correlated negatively with patriotism (defined as positive identification and affective attachment to one's country) and positively with nationalism, internationalism, and pro-U.S. attitudes. Here, "nationalism" is defined as "perceptions of national superiority and support for national dominance"—what Steve Sailer has dubbed "Invade the world, invite the world!" 

Relative isolation of academia

Academia can propagate a new discourse in several ways:

- by inculcating it in young adults

- by acting as a trusted gatekeeper that serves to distinguish between "correct" and "incorrect" discourse.

- by mobilizing scarce intellectual resources for the development and dissemination of "correct" discourse.

New forms of discourse, like globalism, cannot easily penetrate Japanese colleges and universities by means of overseas-trained leaders. Unlike the case in many other Asian countries, educational authorities prefer to select future leaders from within, attaching little importance to foreign experience and credentials for promotion within the system (Yonezawa et al. 2018, p. 235). Foreign-born professors are hired mostly for teaching English language and literature.

Relative isolation of policy makers

This relative isolation is true for Japanese in general, including policy makers. International organizations, like the IMF, have little input into public policy, in large part because Japan's debt is almost wholly Japanese-owned. This economic independence has been a longstanding characteristic of Japan and enjoys support not only from the political left but also from the political right:

In Japan, unlike many of the social democracies resisting capital movements, the most important political opposition came not from organized labor and a political Left anxious to prevent capital flight and to protect the welfare state; rather, it came from nominally "conservative" politicians; many bureaucratic agencies, including the MOF; and protected, cartelized sectors of the economy, including banks, securities houses, and insurance firms. (Pempel 1999, p. 911)

In the West, globalism coopted first the Right and then the Left. That process is still at an early stage in Japan.


Conclusion

I would like to conclude with three points: 

- Japan will be a nice place to visit during the troubled 2020s. The same decade will see South Korea become more and more like the West, especially the United States—in keeping with stated policy goals.

- English is the language not only of globalism but also of anti-globalism. Just as Japan will move toward globalism more slowly than the West, it will also move away more slowly ... when that time comes. As for South Korea, it will enter a period of polarization, perhaps violent polarization.

- Japan shows that the Western model of modernity is not the only one, or even the best. The Western model is a product of specific circumstances, particularly the presence of a large rentier class that feeds on growth while doing little to make growth sustainable. At home and abroad, our rentier class continually pushes for high rates of growth through expansion of the money supply, through mass immigration, and through rapid exploitation of resources that are either non-renewable or slowly renewable. 

Japan's slow-growth model is problematic in other ways, but it promises to be more sustainable in the long run.


References

Denyer, S. (2018). Japan passes controversial new immigration bill to attract foreign workers. The Washington Post. December 7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-passes-controversial-new-immigration-bill-to-attract-foreign-workers/2018/12/07/a76d8420-f9f3-11e8-863a-8972120646e0_story.html  

Hiatt, F. (2018). Anti-immigration Republicans have a decision to make about America's future. Washington Post January 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/without-immigration-america-will-stagnate/2018/01/28/e659aa94-02d5-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html

Hyun-ju. (2015). Korea's wage gap between local, foreign workers largest in OECD. The Korea Herald, September 9
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150909001162  

IMF (1997). Memorandum on the Economic Program. December 3.
https://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/120397.htm#memo  

Moon, S. (2010). Multicultural and Global Citizenship in the Transnational Age: The Case of South Korea. International Journal of Multicultural Education 12: 1-15.
https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/261 

Nikkei (2018). Abe vows to bring in more foreign workers. Nikkei Asian Review. June.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Abe-vows-to-bring-in-more-foreign-workers  

Palmer, J., and G.-Y. Park. (2018). South Koreans learn to love the Other. How to manufacture multiculturalism. Foreign Policy. July 16
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/south-koreans-learn-to-love-the-other-multiculturalism/  

Park, Y-B. (2017). South Korea Carefully Tests the Waters on Immigration, With a Focus on Temporary Workers. Migration Policy Institute, March 1
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-korea-carefully-tests-waters-immigration-focus-temporary-workers  

Pempel, T.J. (1999). Structural Gaiatsu: International Finance and Political Change in Japan. Comparative Political Studies 32: 907-932.

Shigeta, S. (2018). How Japan came around on foreign workers. Nikkei Asian Review, June.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/How-Japan-came-around-on-foreign-workers

Song, H-J. (undated). Immigration Policy in South Korea & Japan - A Comparative Perspective Theoretical framework. University of Tsukuba. International and Advanced Japanese Studies. PowerPoint presentation
http://japan.tsukuba.ac.jp/09225Song.pdf

Sullivan, N. and R.T. Schatz (2009). Effects of Japanese national identification on attitudes toward learning English and self-assessed English proficiency. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 33(6): 486-497
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147176709000236

Townsend, R. (2019). Japan's big dilemma: robots or immigrants? Asia Media Centre. March 1
https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/japans-big-dilemma-robots-or-immigrants/

Tsuboya- Newell, I. (2017). Why do Japanese have trouble learning English? The Japan Times, October 29
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/10/29/commentary/japan-commentary/japanese-trouble-learning-english/#.XWK2DHdFzct 

Watson, I. (2010). Multiculturalism in South Korea: A Critical Assessment. Journal of Contemporary Asia 40: 337-346.

Yonezawa, A., Y. Kitamura, B. Yamamoto, and T. Tokunaga. (2018). Japanese Education in a Global Age. Sociological Reflections and Future Directions. Springer. 
https://books.google.ca/books?id=shdnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false