Yes. The maths isn’t hard here.
Where:
EW (Entering workforce) < LW (Leaving workfoce)
CW (Current workforce)
Then:
CW (EW - LW) * Enough Time = Shortage of workers
The only way around the above formula is automating everything…
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Or just killing off the elderly I suppose.
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Which means its doomed to fail spectacularly. Guest worker programs do not work. Unless there is effort made for these “guest workers” and their families to become citizens in the eventual future all this does is create multigenerational slums and a permanent PO’ed underclass.
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Well that is what happens when countries don’t really make efforts to integrate immigrants in a reasonable fashion. Taking in refugees IS a humanitarian act, but what one does with them once they are here is important.
Funny thing is the US has been taking in refugees and asylum seekers for probably a lot longer than your corner of Europe is likely to have done. Refugee status confers permanent residency and a path to citizenship. Former refugee communities flourish here. Generally ending up at worst as working class (ex. Somali and Haitian communities) and well off on the other end of the scale (ex Iranian and Cuban)
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It’s common in nursing to have multiple patients to one person. I’ve seen 15:1 ratios advertised as luxurious. Again: can you point me at a scholarly source that shows the issue is number of bodies, not rate of pay?
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You’re focused on one profession. Sure, Japan could address the issue aged care by making the field more attractive relative to other jobs; but with a constantly shrinking workforce, that just shuffles the problem around.
As you pointed out earlier, “5-10 years in the future they’ll be hard pressed to keep their infrastructure up to date” that requires tax dollars, but it also requires engineers, planners, construction workers, etc.
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Part of why rent in Tokyo is low is salaries are low. It;'s similar to Berlin - cheap, but because salaries are compressed. I’m getting annoyed that people seem to think they can come in and mansplain at me when I made a pretty reasonable request for a source multiple times.
They could make a lot of money allowing relatively wealthy remote workers be tax residents.
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You’re the one questioning the entire premise of the article and the discussion; and Japan’s ageing population and declining workforce size aren’t exactly secrets. How about you do your own Googling?
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Depends on the artistic medium. If your friends are willing to endure traditional Japanese artistic training, they might want to look into it. Lots and lots of fairly fascinating Japanese artforms are in danger of dying out because native atristic-types aren’t interested in “preserving cultural treasures” when the pay is not enough to live on. Which is kind of the problem facing the Japanese population as a whole, I suppose…
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Soooo… what I hear you two saying is: we need to develop killbots?
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I know of at least one white guy who works in Japan doing wood cut prints. He makes the wood cuts based on the work done by this one artist I like, Jed Henry.
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AFAIK the govt never actually had any formal plans for that. Yes there’s been some R&D but its unclear how much is really just vaporware or grants to a favored industry.
I think its really more of a case of the western press doing their typical Orientalist “wacky Japan” coverage.
Over the last few years, there have been lots of changes to the various laws regarding different types of visas and eligibility for permanent residence here. On the whole the pattern has been to make it much easier for foreign workers to establish residence and setup a path to PR.
I with this myth would die off. Even if a small percentage of the population is in fact xenophobic, thats hardly representative of Japan as a whole.
FWIW Japanese companies can get lots of that same talent with Indian & Chinese remote devs and thats been the strategy lots of companies here have pursued for years now. Costs are much lower than hiring westerners to do the same work.
If Aichi is any example, it seems things didnt work out that way. There are now definitely various ethnic neighborhoods that are not slums at all. Citizenship is possible but isnt the only alternative. There seems to have been some “backdoor” path to PR even before the recent relaxation of the laws.
Not a desirable situation for the “rock star” level salaries in the West due to the income tax ladder here. Once a person hits the JP20M threshold (~USD200K) income tax becomes a world of pain.
I ran into him in Kanda station in 2018, we ended up having a chat about our relative experiences with Drobo storage units.
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Japan opens its doors wide to immigration specialized foreign workers who qualify for 5-year work visa
FTFY.
Yes.
… and the Japanese women who do have babies have found their workplaces to be uh regrettably unsupportive.
Before anyone asks whether I am cherrypicking data, let me just make this pitch: Japanese women who both choose motherhood and enter the workforce in Japan…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/business/japan-work-jobs-women.html
… should be celebrated, especially if there’s a common sentiment that Japanese men of similar age are having a hard time finding steady work, and thus having a hard time attracting a mate.
… another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.
“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” said Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University who edited the recent collection of scholarly essays Japan: The Precarious Future . “The birth rate is down, even the coupling rate is down. And people will say the number-one reason is economic insecurity.”
ETA: grammar, clarity
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LEGAL immigration.
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Politely tolerating bad behavior is a lesser form of the same behavior. And for the same reasons America is racist because we tolerate racists.
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I’m not a fan of “.01% = 100%” reasoning. It is not productive when speaking of people.
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Even if legally, the guest worker can naturalize and/or become a citizen, it would only be on paper.
Culturally, if you aren’t 100% Japanese through and through, you are looked down on and are a de facto second class citizen. Second and third generation Koreans and Chinese in Japan are still not accepted as “Japanese”. Tolerated, but not accepted. And these are people who, superficially, can pass for Japanese. Those of us who are truly Gaijin, will always and forever be Gaijin in the eyes of the native Nihonjin.
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A news article ≠ a scholarly article.
So it’s basically similar to the program the Saudis and other Arabian peninsula countries use? Legal slave labor must be cheaper than robots for now.
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I think significantly more 1% of people tolerate the .01% of racists and xenophobes.
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