Stephen Robert Nagy (ed.), Japan's Demographic Revival: Rethinking Migration, Identity and Sociocultural Norms Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2016. xxvii + 410 p. $128.58.

Abstract

Japan, recently headlined by The Economist as “the incredible shrinking country,” is by most accounts clearly in need of demographic revival. This collection of essays points to some of the formidable difficulties an activist population policy would face, whether directed at fertility or migration. Its intention, according to the editor, is to widen the policy discussion from migrant numbers as the sole remedy for the country's population decline to “the structural, organizational, and cultural impediments” that contribute to the demographic predicament. Fertility enters as a minor part of the picture, as if little there can be done. A chapter explores the cultural background of Japan's low marriage rate, which given the minimal extent of extra-marital childbearing is a major proximate cause of low fertility. Another points to the conflict between women's childraising and career goals, blamed on employers’ persisting intransigence even as many more women enter the labor force. An only slightly positive slant is given in a case study of adherents (several million families, it is claimed) of the new religion Soka Gakkai, whose doctrines are mildly pronatalist. The migration chapters range more widely. Emphasizing the ideational obstacles to a multicultural Japan, it is noted that the last significant waves of immigrants to be smoothly assimilated into Japan's cultural space ended in the twelfth century—thereafter, the myth of the homogeneous nation took root, one that “has provided its constituents with existential equanimity” for many generations. The history of the Family Registration System and the Alien Registration Law is recounted, tracing the slow emergence of a more unified population management system, albeit one still with nationality determined by family registration rather than at the individual level. Japan's naturalization procedures are depicted as drawn-out and opaque, admitting in recent years a mere 10–15,000 foreign nationals annually, mostly Koreans and Chinese. The cautionary tale is offered of the Brazilians of Japanese ancestry welcomed in the 1990s but never culturally accepted and whose children now have no clear linguistic identity. Temporary migration is explored in several chapters. One presents a positive assessment of the program that recruits care workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, modest in size and subject to demanding nursing credentials and language facility. Another looks skeptically at the solution to labor shortages exemplified by the helot societies of the Gulf States—some with 60–80 percent of their populations non-citizens, most of them migrant laborers rather than skilled expatriates. A concluding chapter by the editor contrasts the migration integration experiences of Tokyo with Hong Kong and Vancouver—only the last of these seen as a qualified success. The contributors are a mixture of scholars and PhD students, the majority at Japanese universities. The editor is in the Department of Politics, International Christian University, Tokyo and the Japan Immigration Policy Institute. Chapter bibliographies, index.