I don't see where the problem is... The vast majority of countries, even many western countries only wish they had Japan's 'problems'.
Japan does a lot of things exceedingly well but demographics are one of those forces of history that are dammed near impossible to mitigate or circumvent without enormous cost, like trying to stop a train with your fist.
EDIT: Just to be clear, my point is about demographics, not immigration. We have yet to see if productivity advancements such as robotics can fill the void, but either way, Japan has a significant struggle ahead of itself.
Citation needed. Sure fertility is well correlated with educational attainment which is likely somewhat "heritable" by proxy (social class, intelligence, lack of disabilities) but that doesn't mean the heritable effect will be large enough in aggregate.
While Japanese economic progress postwar was astonishing, it was entirely premised on them having favored status in the region. Few people know, for example, that the US forced Korea to purchase massive amounts of goods from Japan to rebuild its economy, essentially reinstating their former colonial relationship and stoking tensions that culminated in the Korean War.
Japan is a cautionary take because it was entirely too dependent on using its favored status in American geopolitics to throw its weight around Asia-Pacific, as opposed to building meaningful, trade and immigration agreements with other countries in the regions. Now that US dominance is in retreat and the Chinese ascendant, they’re in a poor overall economic position to counter them.
Certainly the geo-strategic position was favorable, but I think this is quite the exaggeration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
source: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
Of course contributing to those fears was vast underinvestment in modernization by US firms which were still relying on very old and inefficient technologies, so of course to some stateside companies (and “pundits”) they looked like worldbeaters.
Economical measures are hard to interpret, but they can give an indication: Japan GDP/capita is standing at 48,920 USD, and Australia at 56,919 USD. Germany is at 47,502 USD, France at 43,664 and UK at 42,986 USD. Japan is there, slightly ahead of Europe. Australia is somewhat ahead, but benefits from way more natural resources (minerals and oil). You can only grow fast so far: once your entire country is middle-class growth will be slower.
By comparison, Korea is at 26,762 USD, and China at 7,755 USD. These two countries have way more potential for growth, but also because they are way less developed for large groups of people. I forgot the exact salary difference for the same job between a chaebol and a small company in Korea, but I think we are talking 4x or 5x more at the chaebol.
Ethnic diversity has been part of the fabric of the US since before it was a country. Per census figures, the percentage of the population that wasn't born in the US was higher in 1910 that in it today.
And, of course, the very concept of "immigrant from Europe or descended from them => white" is a lot more recent than 250 years ago. The Irish weren't considered "white" when they arrived en masse after 1820. Italians, Greeks, and various Slavs also weren't considered "white" when they arrived in the early 20th century. Suspicion of divided loyalties for a Catholic president was a big issue in the 1960 elections (JFK vs Nixon).
Yes, but it had Naturalization Act of 1790 that restricted naturalization only to white people. It wasn’t an immigration restriction, to be sure, but very few non-whites immigrated to US anyway (other than the forced immigration of black slaves), rendering the issue moot.
> And, of course, the very concept of "immigrant from Europe or descended from them => white" is a lot more recent than 250 years ago. The Irish weren't considered "white" when they arrived en masse after 1820. Italians, Greeks, and various Slavs also weren't considered "white" when they arrived in the early 20th century.
This is very much false and ahistorical. Many of them weren’t liked by then-locals, and in fact we’re often discriminated against, but at no point they were seriously considered non-white. There have been some activists recently claiming otherwise, but it has been based on very weak historical grounds. Consider, for example, that after the Ozawa case, at no point the question of Irish or Slavs’ whiteness ever came up on a court docket, while it did for Arabs, Syrians, Filipinos, and many others: https://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/White05.htm
> Suspicion of divided loyalties for a Catholic president was a big issue in the 1960 elections (JFK vs Nixon).
There was, but, as it turns out, Catholicism is not a race.
Irish and Italians are lumped into White and now we have comments like yours. Most of the people in the US are from Europe so of course they favored family, friends, and countrymen coming over.
The US has the most immigrants than any other country by almost 5x at 48 million.
There was a recent study from Peking University which hypothesized that the population actually peaked in 2018 and is already shrinking. (government numbers are unreliable)
Also we might argue that the Chinese "self-migrate" with a huge amount of students that go for studies outside China but return later.
Japan was expected to become the next global superpower in the 1980s, and instead has seen closing in on three lost decades.
It’s only now trying to catch up, politically, culturally and economically.