The same Washington Post reporter who gave us Jero earlier in the week (Blaine Harden) is reporting on the Japanese labor shortage due to the greying of Japan and a hesitancy to increase immigration to deal with the problem.

Now Japan faces a fundamental threat to its future — demographic decline that experts say will delete 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.  Inside the government, there is growing agreement that Japan can head off disastrous population decline by significantly increasing immigration. Japan has the world’s highest proportion of people older than 65 and the world’s smallest proportion of children younger than 15. Without immigration in substantial numbers, it will soon run perilously low on people of working age.

Yet among highly developed countries, Japan has always ranked near the bottom in the percentage of foreign-born residents. In the United States, about 12 percent are foreign-born; in Japan, just 1.6 percent. Most immigrants here are from Asia or South America. The largest number come from Korea (about 600,000 people), followed by China and Brazil. The Brazilians are mostly of mixed Japanese descent.

Yet there is little or no political will here to persuade or prepare the public to accept a sizable influx of foreigners. “There are people who say that if we accept more immigrants, crime will increase,” Fukuda said. “Any sudden increase in immigrants causing social chaos [and] social unrest is a result that we must avoid by all means.”

There is another way for Japan to slow population decline and maintain its workforce: persuade more Japanese women to marry, have children and remain on the job. The percentage of women who choose to stay single has doubled in the past two decades. When they do marry and have children, they drop out of the workforce at far higher rates than in other wealthy countries. To that end, the government is working on a bill to require companies to offer shorter hours to parents with young children and to stop requiring them to work overtime.

Here is the Open Thread for this week.

Readers are invited to discuss things that have been on their minds, regardless of whether they are on topic.

If you want to say something that normally would be deleted under comment rules, here is your chance. Rules are very loose for open thread posts, and usual restrictions concerning topic matter do not apply.

Feel free to sound off about anything you want.

On the heels of Brian’s post about the truculent crows of Tokyo, I thought I’d share a charming story I uncovered about a family of very ingenious swallows.

A family of swallows lives in this youkan shop in Futaminoura, Japan.

The shop was built in the Taisho period, and specializes in sweets flavored slightly with salt from the ocean. That’s a real piece of gold on top.

Inside the shop, up high against the ceiling, is this little Shinto shrine. You can just make out a sheet of paper sticking out from the bottom shelf. It’s hard to tell from this photo, but the paper is covered with bird droppings. That’s because, at the very top, is a bird’s nest.

The store proprietor told me that the swallow population has plummeted in the area because crows will not stop attacking them. This resourceful swallow couple decided that the safest place to start a family was inside the shop. And what’s safer than a shrine?

I asked the shop proprietor if she closes the store doors. She says that she does, promptly at 7PM every night, by which point the swallows have come home for the day. She says they remain inside, quietly, until 5:30 in the morning when she gets up extra early to open the door

It took my wife a year to train me to take a shopping bag with me when I went over to the konbini to buy lunch. It was all I could do to remember my shoes and what I was supposed to buy when I got there. And when I got there, I usually realised I’d forgotten the bag. But eventually, like Pavlov’s dogs - only different - I was conditioned to hear the call for lunch, and automatically pick up a shopping bag.

What has taken slightly longer is training the staff in the konbini to stop trying to give me another bag every day. Along with chopsticks, spoons, forks, and wipes that I don’t need.

I stood at the cash register, counting out money, the bag tucked under my arm, and keeping my left eye on my money, I’d have to swivel my right eye - chameleon-like - to catch them as they grab a plastic bag. I’d tell them I didn’t need one. They’d express surprise, then thank me, then apologise. I tried variations on this which involved opening the bag obviously while counting out my money, but found that not only did this do nothing to dissuade them from thinking I might like another bag, it also required three hands at the very least.

After two years of standing at the till going through this Groundhog Day routine, I was shaken out of my complacency today. I chatted with the cashier about the weather - good, safe, conversational ground for the English and Japanese - and then something peculiar happened. We just stood looking at each other waiting for someone to do something.

I realised that the routine had been thrown to the wind - she’d overcome her reflex to reach for a bag. Unprepared, I stood there, gormless, with my MyBag (yes, ‘my MyBag‘) under my arm (no, not ‘my MyArm’), until my brain creaked back into action.

When I stepped outside, it was no longer raining. The sun was even making an effort to shine.

Photo from Roseville California community site, entitled ‘The Urban Tumbleweed’

The issue of the North Korean abductions is one of the most thorny issues between Japan and North Korea.  I saw the documentary, The Megumi Yokota Story, on that subject at the Cleveland International Film Festival in 2006 (it turns out that it will be broadcast on U.S. Public television in a few weeks). In a nutshell, in 1977, 13-year old Megumi was abducted in Japan by North Koreans for the purpose of teaching their spies how to speak Japanese fluently to be more effective spies. She was actually one of at least 13 Japanese who were abducted. Now the Daily Mainichi reports a small development in the case. North Korea maintains that Megumi died in April, 1994 but an eyewitness is now saying that he saw her at least 2 months after that. The mystery (and heartache for the family) continues…

The Washington Post has an inexplicably long article on Jerome White, Jr., also known as Jero who is a Pittsburgh born and bred, 26-year old entertainer in Japan who happens to have a Japanese grandmother (now deceased) and performs old style Japanese enka songs. The article describes enka as WWII-era syrupy and maudlin music. His debut single went as high as #4 on the music charts. The article is certainly interesting and touches on many issues bandied about here on Japundit (gaijin in Japan, greying society, etc.) but the article is about three times as long as it needs to be.

If the Washington Post article doesn’t satiate your Jero needs, Japan Today also has a long bio article. 

Thank you to my student, Ruka.

It’s beer for astronauts, and Sapporo is going to brew it with barely grown in space (or at least from the lineage of space barley).

So Sapporo is going to brew about 100 bottles of the stuff which will only be available to astronauts on the space station.

The question is will NASA allow them to drink it?

And what does a hangover feel like at 0 gravity?