Japan is entering an era of mass foreign immigration,” said Junji Ikeda, president of Saikaikyo, a Hiroshima-based agency that sources and supervises foreign workers. “Incremental adjustments will not suffice.”
While many of the newcomers meld into the cosmopolitan fabric of big cities, their impact is especially conspicuous in small towns such as Oizumi, located about a two-hour train ride from Tokyo in Gunma prefecture.
On any given weekday it isn’t immediately obvious that about a fifth of Oizumi’s roughly 42,000 residents are foreign-born, because most of them are at work. But evidence of their presence is plain to see upon arrival. Signs at the local train station feature directions in Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, English and Japanese.
Oizumi shows that Japan’s rapidly aging society, known for its resistance to immigration, can open up to foreign workers to plug its labor shortage. That may ultimately be the country’s best hope for stemming a rapid population decline that puts its economic might, its standard of living and the upkeep of its welfare system at risk.
Japan’s chronic labor crisis has been brewing since the working-age population peaked in 1995. More and more businesses are struggling to keep running. A year ago, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned that “the country now finds itself on the brink of being unable to maintain social functions” because of its low birthrate.