JAPAN’S BEST HOPE
Takaichi does not have a lot of options, because enshortification is now baked into Japan’s demographics. Her pledge, minutes after winning last Saturday’s leadership race, that she would abandon work-life balance and toil like a horse may work for her. It isn’t a national policy. Some industries will, inevitably, hone non-human solutions to many of their labour shortage problems, and let the tech do the toiling.
But Takaichi knows that large-scale immigration will, for some years to come, represent Japan’s best hope. And here, perhaps counter-intuitively, her nationalism and hardline conservatism put her at an advantage in two important ways.
The first is that Takaichi has spent three decades in politics making herself quite difficult to attack from the right, even if she leaves the immigration taps relatively wide open. Her scepticism on immigration is a matter of record, her projected fear of an erosion of Japanese culture authentic: if she opens the turnstiles in the face of enshortification, she can present that as reluctant realism.
The second advantage is that Takaichi, unlike her predecessors in the PM’s office, has shown a willingness to discuss immigration in the open, and treat the subject as a necessary public debate.
That is shrewd. Where public anger has been stirred, it has been directed not at immigrants themselves, but at the absence of a serious discussion about what continuing mass immigration means for Japanese culture, public finances and the national sense of self.
Takaichi has given herself the tools to lead that debate, and survive it. Enshortification provides a strong motive to do that now, rather than later.
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