Japan historically has been among the most negative minded nations in the world regarding allowing foreigners to enter and become citizens. Over the past few years, the government of Prime Minister Fukuda encouraged lawmakers to explore possibilities of developing a long range program of encouraging immigration. Hirohiko Nakamura, who helped draft a bill that would dramatically alter the ethnic composition of his nation by allowing foreign immigrants to enter over a fifty year time period until they constituted about 10 percent of the population said “we got this far because it was Fukuda” who was the first Japanese leader to support such ideas.
Nakamura’s report, “Proposal for a Japanese-Style Immigration Policy” argues, “the only effective treatment to save Japan from a population crisis is to accept people from abroad. For Japan to survive it needs to open its doors as an international state” and “shift toward establish an ‘immigrant nation’ by accepting immigrants and revitalizing Japan.” Most population forecasts indicate without an immigration influx, the Japanese population will undergo a dramatic drop which would leave its society with a much smaller economic base to generate new ideas.