Burning Atlanta

This is kind of interesting from a totally different slant. We're Americans, we're the junkyard dog of the world. Americans are made up of every kind of former nationality and ethnicity. However, the Japanese are big on being Japanese and keeping out foreigners in large numbers.

At the end of WW2 Japan could have easily opted to bring in a massive cheap workforce to help rebuild their industries and manufacturing. Instead, they opted to mechanize. And that mechanization helped propel them into a manufacturing giant. Now, they're being confronted with a dwindling workforce as fewer Japanese are being born and more of the workforce is getting older/retiring. Humm? what will they do?

Washington Post

Now Japan faces a much more 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.

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.