How Japan went from a model nation to a problem

Fumio Kishida was lucky. And a thoughtful companion. With his briefcase, he nimbly wiped away a pipe bomb thrown at the prime minister in the western Japanese city of Wakayama on Saturday during an election campaign. Kishida escaped unhurt, no one was seriously injured.

The assassination attempt did not end well, but the horror was great. Just nine months earlier, Kishida’s predecessor, Shinzō Abe, had been shot on the street in Nara two days before the Upper House elections. Abe, 67, the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, has died in hospital.

The 41-year-old killer had used a homemade firearm. As a motive, he indicated that Abe was partly responsible for his mother’s financial ruin. The 24-year-old man, who carried out the pipe bomb attack on Prime Minister Kishida on Saturday, has not yet made any statements about his motive, according to the police.

On the surface, everything is fine

Two attacks on high-ranking politicians in less than a year: that would be unusual in almost any country in the world. In Japan, it’s downright spooky. It may be pure coincidence, but it is completely out of place in a society that is very harmonious and has long been regarded as a kind of model nation.

On the surface, that is still the case today. The “land of the rising sun” is the third largest economy in the world after the US and China. The Japanese enjoy the highest life expectancy in the world. Crime is lower than in almost any other country, thanks in part to strict gun laws.

“Japan is Stuck”

In terms of culture and cuisine, Japan is one of the leading countries. The dense network of high-speed trains, some of which run at S-Bahn intervals on the main axes, is considered exemplary. On closer inspection, however, some things are not quite right. “Japan is stuck,” the former BBC Tokyo correspondent said in a January report.

The decline of the Empire is particularly evident in two areas:

The economy

In the 1980s, Japan was admired and feared as the new economic superpower. But in 1991, a huge stock and real estate bubble burst. Since then, the country has been in permanent stagnation. As a result, the Liberal Democrats, who have ruled Japan almost continuously since World War II, massively increased government spending.

The national debt, which amounted to 64 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1990, has exploded to 264 percent. According to the International Monetary Fund, Japan is the most indebted country in the world. There is no bankruptcy because most of the debt is with the central bank and interest rates are extremely low.

About ten years ago, Shinzō Abe tried to boost the faltering economy. His economic policies, known as “Abenomics”, relied on loose monetary policies, state economic stimulus programs, and labor market deregulation, among other things. This led to a brief revival, which, however, did not last long.

For the population, this means that “work for life” is no longer guaranteed. This has consequences for income. At the height of the boom, the Japanese were richer than the Americans. Today, their average wage in the OECD ranking is lower than South Korea and even Italy.

Annoying, because according to the market rules, wages in Japan should rise sharply. It is not for nothing that the country has the working population:

The demographics

In almost no other country is the birth rate as low as in Japan. In 2022, fewer than 800,000 newborns were registered in a population of 125 million. In the 1970s there were three times as many. Japan is already the country with the oldest population after the Principality of Monaco. Every third person is over 60 years old.

The empire is aging fast. More and more people are working well past retirement age, whether they want to or not. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced a series of measures to increase the birth rate. Think of subsidies for childcare, because having children is expensive ‘fun’ in Japan.

In other countries, however, such measures have had little effect. And immigration is a hot topic in Japan. Only about three percent of the population has a migration background. There are mainly cultural reasons for this: a ‘homogeneous’ society is still very important to many Japanese.

This is evident in several areas: the dominance of foreign fighters in, for example, the national sport of sumo is a thorn in the side of many conservative Japanese. And when Japan closed its borders at the start of the corona pandemic, even people who had lived in the empire for decades were no longer allowed to enter.

When the BBC correspondent asked the Foreign Office why, the blunt answer was: “They are all foreigners.” His sobering conclusion: more than 150 years after being forced by the Americans to give up self-isolation, Japan “is still skeptical and even afraid of the outside world”.

Tentative attempts by the government to allow more immigration came to naught. Instead, Japan relies on the automation and robotization of the world of work and business. Experiments with robots in elderly care caused a stir. But that is treating the symptoms, which does not change the increasing aging.

In a sense, Japan is in a dilemma that is difficult to solve. The country would need to change for a revival, but that would mean losing much of what makes it special, the BBC report concludes. Perhaps that is part of why politicians become targets in the truest sense of the word.