Can Japan's commercial dominance continue?

• Author: Nathan, James A.

"Despite the problem with adjustment to new economic realities' [its] economy will be bigger than the US.'s by 2030. . . .

WHEN Commodore Matthew Perry forced open Japan in the early 1850s, he brought a miniature train. The official American chronicler of the mission wrote: "On the first day, the Japanese marveled at the wonderful train. On the second, they studied how it worked. On the third day, they suggested some improvements."

For nearly 150 years, the Japanese have been engaged in a process of adjusting to the external world. The process neither has been natural nor always successful. Even today, in cosmopolitan Tokyo, 60% of those surveyed recently said that foreigners made them uncomfortable and that they try to avoid contact with them. The Japanese believe themselves members of a tribe into which a person must be born to belong. Hawaiian-American Salvea Atisone--a 576-pound Sumo wrestler married to a Japanese woman--recently failed to get elected a "grand master." In the minds of the Sumo authorities, Atisone (or Konishiki, as he is called there) didn't have, as the Japanese put it, the "right stuff"--qualities of character that only could be obtained by being born in Japan of Japanese parents.

The Japanese discomfort in the face of differences and in confronting the outside world is starting to become something more than a curious vexation. There is a labor shortage. Soon, foreigners will become more essential to Japan's continued prosperity than ever before. About 1.25 openings are available for each job seeker. Demographers point out that fewer and fewer young workers are becoming available, while the older segments of the population are growing faster than anywhere else in industrialized society. Wages are increasing faster than productivity. As elsewhere in the developed world, the Japanese have little fondness for work that encompasses "the three Ds"--dirty, dangerous, or dreary.

For Japan's stunning prosperity to be sustained, there are two choices--automation or immigration. They are trying both. When Tokyo calculated that, by 1995, there would be a 2,000-man shortfall in the police department, they planned to replace most of the missing manpower with robots and mechanical patrol and surveillance devices. Robot maids already are on the market for cleaning whole floors of office buildings at a cost of 54,000. Japan uses roughly 10 times more robots in manufacturing than are employed in the U.S. (despite America being the place of their invention).

The Japanese also are importing labor and are planning to import more. The trouble is that the overseas laborers are considered undesirable. Third-generation Turks and Algerians in Germany and France have been the butt of nativist, and even neo-Nazi, agitation. In Japan, foreigners are even more isolated. Like the Europeans, the Japanese hope immigrants will, after a time, go home. Many will depart, but some, inevitably, will come to believe they have no other home than Japan. Perhaps they will become internal aliens, like the Koreans, brought to Japan three generations ago, who still carry internal passports, and remain frozen as a near-permanent underclass.

Despite the problem with adjustment to new economic realities, Japan's economy will be bigger than the U.S.'s by approximately 2030 if even the...