Does Japan Have a Future?

I watched the TV program called “Close-up the Contemporary.” Today’s program was about foreign students in Japan—Japanese-Brazilians in particular—who have difficulty continuing their education in Japan. At Japanese schools, they have hard time keeping up with classes taught in Japanese. (Although there are Brazilian-Portuguese schools in Japan, poor families cannot afford them.) To help these foreign students, some municipal governments hire bilingual teachers and NPOs organize classes to teach them Japanese; however, these political and civic actions still lag behind the fast-changing reality of Japan—a huge influx of immigrants since the 1990s.

Anybody can see that the number of immigrants will continue to increase in Japan, as the “ethnically Japanese” population is shrinking. The critical task now is to set up political and cultural frameworks to accommodate immigrants as assets to Japanese society instead of seeing them as liabilities. If Japan fails to start evolving into a multiracial/multicultural society in the next few decades, it will sink to the status of an insignificant country within the “Asian Union.” (I think there will be something like the Asian Union to counter other regional powers, such as the EU.)