Japan’s demographic crisis and resultant opening of Japan to Foreign Workers and Permanent Residency.
Japan’s population began to decline after peaking at 128 million in 2008, registering 125 million in 2022. If this trend continues, Japan’s population is projected to decline to 63 million in 2100, half of its population in 2022. Behind the trend lies Japan’s declining birth rate.
From April 2023, foreign workers who fulfilled specific criteria became eligible for permanent residency after one year instead of the previous three.
Japanese universities have also started offering special programmes aimed at luring graduates (‘future creative talent’) from the world’s top 100 universities, who would then .
The Japanese government announced it had passed an alarming milestone. The native population of the country had fallen by 837,000 in the 12 months to October 2023, a decline of almost 100 people an hour.
JapThealso plans to more than double the number of foreigners eligible for skilled worker visas in the five-year period starting fiscal 2024 to over 800,000, as the government seeks to alleviate labor shortages in industries like manufacturing, construction and agriculture
The world has shifted from dire predictions in the 1960s of a population explosion to today’s all-too-optimistic view that large youthful populations are a guarantee of demographic dividends in places like India and Africa, but Japan has always been an outlier.
In in February, the Japanese government announced that the number of babies born in 2023 showed a 5.1% decline. The number of people in the country above the age of 65 is almost 30%.
In another development, Japan’s central bank had raised interest rates for the first time since 2007. Rates rose to a marginal 0.1%, but proof that wages are rising at a decent clip of 4-5% suggests that inflation of about 2%, the central bank’s repeatedly stated aim, may be here to stay.
