When I was at the Association of Pacific Rim Universities conference in Tokyo last month, the featured speaker was Heizo Takenaka, Minister of Economic Policy and later Postal Privatization under the former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. Takenaka, an academic who had a genuinely remarkable run under Koizumi, gave us a brisk rundown of some of the gains the Japanese have made over the past year in confronting its (primarily) macroeconomic problems – a surfeit of bad bank loans, inflated public works spending, and so on – as well as some of the challenges that remains.
However, when an audience member asked him about Japan’s rapidly graying population and declining birthrates and whether the Japanese government was developing a policy in response to this increasingly urgent situation, he insisted that the government thinks it antithetical to individual rights to develop and pursue a vigorous population policy: why should the government tell women how many children to have, and so on? Many of us found that raising ‘individual rights’ in relation to this specific point to be curious, given the relative paucity of such emphases in Japanese political discourse and the growing magnitude of the problem (which, Takenaka claimed, all countries will face – to which one can only say, maybe, but not as quickly as Japan!). Was this disavowal of a population policy instead a tacit reflection of strong resistance from certain quarters to relax Japanese immigration policy, which many think necessary if Japan is to attract a labor force that will come and work and provide the necessary tax base to support social services and welfare for the expanding elderly class? Or does the government think that economic growth and government decentralization and cost-cutting alone will take care of it?
I puzzled over these questions for a while at the conference, but the confusion finally cleared up after I saw this YouTube vid posted here. No need for a population policy, perhaps, but can it be much longer before a robot policy is announced?
