Japan sees record drop in population – DW
Japan sees record drop in population – DW
For the fourteenth year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign population dropped by nearly 900,000 — an unprecedented fall.
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Japan is relying more and more on a shadow army of millions of imported foreign workers that is slowly changing its populace. Japan could see a right wing backlash to the changing demographics at some point as we've seen in Europe.
“Shadow army”, you mean people, immigrants for low wage jobs in convenience stores and cleaners.
Hardly an organized “army” lol.
It's a metaphor, not "literal" army. And it is in the millions. Many are unseen as they come out when the streets are empty doing the garbage picking and cleaning, etc.
Ah yes, the shadow army of cleaners. Nefarious and unseen.
One also can't even get a working visa to work some place like a cleaner or convenience store; those people are all on: student with parttime job permit; spouse/family/dependent; PR; and working holiday visas.
Source? I live in Japan and have no idea what you're referring to here. Japan already has its share of xenophobic fuckwits, particularly the old right-wing guys, but I don't think people are generally trending that way. The one exception might be people living in places inundated with tourists who are tired of that aspect.
They're not saying that Japanese people are trending that way, but rather that they will inevitably go that way for the same reasons America did and Europe is. The reason it's not happening yet is because Japan simply doesn't have enough foreigners yet; the cutoff seems from Europe's track record to be around 5%*. More than that and they start getting scapegoated for all sorts of problems.
*As seen in this map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Europe#/media/File:Islam_in_Europe-2010.svg), percentage of obviously foreign people (in this case Muslims) and far-right politics are strongly correlated and other than Italy all European countries with a strong far right have more than 5% Muslims.
Japan could see a right wing backlash to the changing demographics at some point as we've seen in Europe.
They'd need to import a lot more before that happens (it seems 5% of the population being visibly foreign is the cutoff), but otherwise all the pieces are already in place. If America doesn't survive Trump democracy is gonna die isn't it?
Japan is very insular, especially around immigration policy, they don't like foreigners. It's the same thing going on in China right now. China is trying to encourage more births, but Hcol is basically the reason plus their one child policy has screwed the ratio of women in china
Japan is very insular, especially around immigration policy, they don't like foreigners.
True, but also there simply aren't enough foreigners there yet for them to progress from the "damn foreigners grumble grumble" phase to the "We must deport those foreigners or they'll Westernize/Islamize our children and end the Japanese race!" phase. I mean it's gonna happen eventually, but we still have a bit of grumbling before they start calling it a crisis.
