Japan's Robot Babies

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

FEB 25, 2015 

Why immigration probably won't save Japan from demographic decline.

Over at Reason, Pete Suderman has a great piece about how Japan is looking to robots to help care for its geriatric citizens. It’s funny and creepy and you should totally read it.

Japan probably has the worst demographic problem in the world. The country’s fertility rate has been below replacement (way below) for three generations. First, this slowed population growth to a halt; the contraction has now begun and will accelerate in the coming years. Today, Japan has just under 127 million people. If its fertility rate were to stay constant from here until the end of the century, Japan’s population would drop to 59.5 million. (Go and play with the U.N. Population Division numbers; it’s fascinating.

But the real problem for Japan, as Suderman notes, isn’t total population: It’s the ratio of old people to young people, which is already skewed and will only get top-heavier with each passing year. Have a look at Japan’s population pyramid here and what you see will blow your mind: In 2050, Japan could have close to four times as many women over the age of 75 than girls under the age of 10. And that’s from the rosy-colored scenario where the fertility rate actuallyrebounds. If it stays constant, matters will be much worse.

So what’s Japan to do? The choices are (1) Make more babies; (2) Allow massive immigration; or (3) Build robots.

For a host of reasons too complicated to get into here (but helpfully expanded on in this fine bookabout demographics!) the Japanese have chosen Option #3. Which is where Suderman’s piece comes in, suggesting that this may be a larger technological hurdle than many futurists have assumed.

Instead, Suderman closes by hinting that what Japan really ought to do is consider Option #2:

For years, Japan has been notoriously resistant to immigration. Of its current population, less than two percent are from outside the country, and the nation has traditionally only allowed about 50,000 immigrant visas each year—far less than the 700,000 estimated to be necessary to keep population levels afloat.

In early 2014, reports suggested that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe might allow for expanded immigration, perhaps as many as 200,000 newcomers each year. But by summer, he had backed off the idea. “In countries that have accepted immigration,” he declared on a Japanese TV show, according to The Financial Times, “there has been a lot of friction, a lot of unhappiness both for the newcomers and the people who already lived there.”

Robot workers might provide some assistance for the country’s aging population, but they won’t do much to solve the nation’s underlying fiscal problems: They don’t pay taxes, start businesses, or contribute directly to a growing economy. At best, they’ll make it easier for Japan to grow old. But unlike immigrants, they won’t make the country young again.

Suderman isn’t wrong—by many utilitarian measures, immigrants probably would be preferable to robots. But if you look at the question from Japan’s perspective, you can understand why the Japanese would find this pathway problematic.

For starters, look at the scale. In order for immigration to work as a demographic band-aid, Japan would need to move from 50,000 immigrants admitted annually to 700,000—that’s an increase of 1,400 percent, virtually overnight. Japan is 98.5 percent Japanese right now. That percentage would plummet over the course of just a few years.

There’s no real way to illustrate how large the consequences of this change might be. So let’s try a couple analogies:America has just under 320 million people. America’s net immigration, counting both legal and illegal immigrants typically runs to about 1.1 million a year. (This number fluctuates yearly and is not written in stone, since arrival and departure data for illegal immigrants—who make up roughly a third of the whole—is necessarily imprecise.)

So if Japan were to suddenly start letting in 700,000 immigrants per year, as a proportion of the population it would be the equivalent of America bringing in 1.8 million immigrants a year. If you believe our political class, America’s current immigration levels have already brought the country to the brink of crisis: Can you imagine what it would be like if we suddenly increased current levels by more that 60 percent?

Or think of it another way: as a percentage increase of current immigration numbers. If America were to somehow increase its current immigration levels by 1,400 percent, it would mean bringing in 1.1billion immigrants a year. As you can see, we’re in silly territory now. My point is simply this: We’re talking about changes so gargantuan that it is impossible to conceive of how they would affect Japan. Even America, with a long history of immigration and a relatively open system of social and economic mobility would struggle with such a program.

And it’s important to remember that Japan is not America. It is an ancient society based on ethnicity, not a young country founded on a set of principles. Japan has little experience with immigration, where America was founded on it. And while America has had a reasonably pacific history with its neighbors, Japan has not. The Mexican-American War is not the Rape of Nanking. At the risk of being indelicate, Japan has had an often brutal relationship with its neighbors, and not all of this unpleasantness is shrouded in the mists of history.

All of which is a short way of saying that you can understand why the Japanese might not be inclined to make immigration a large feature of their society.

The real question about Japan’s demographic disaster is why Option #1 (Barry White-style baby making) seems to be out of the question. Certainly, there is a raft of literature examining exactly this issue, with partial explanations ranging from economics, to the (very real) Japanese patriarchy, to theparasaito shinguru, to stuff like this. (Don’t worry, that’s the safe-for-work version.)

I don’t mean to make light—clearly Japan’s failure to sustain itself demographically is a serious problem. But if I were running domestic policy over there I’d focus on figuring out how to make life easier for people who want to make babies the old fashioned way. It’s the most complicated of the three possible solutions—by far. But it’s also the one with the highest upside and lowest downside.