The Vision of Japan as the Future: A Reflection

Back in the '80s it was common for Americans to think of Japan as "the future"--the country on the leading edge of technological development and business practice, the industrial world-beater that was emerging as pace-setter, model and maybe even hegemon.

A few years later, as Japan's economic boom was revealed as substantially a real estate-and-stock bubble that had been as much a function of American weakness as Japanese strength (as America's exploding Reagan-era trade deficit filled the country's bank vaults with dollars, and American devaluation translated to a massive strengthening of the yen); as Japan's supremacy in areas like chip-making proved fragile, and its prospects for leaping ahead of the rest of the world in others (as through breakthroughs in fifth-generation computing, or room-temperature superconductors) proved illusory; and the country went from being the fastest-growing to the most stagnant of the major industrial economies; all that faded, reinforced by the illusions and delusions of America's late '90s tech boom, which shifted the tendency of America's dialogue away from hand-wringing over declinism to "irrational exuberance" (at least, for a short but critical period after the debut of Windows '95).

Yet in hindsight it can seem that Japan never really did stop being the image of the future. It was just the case that observers of conventional mind failed to recognize it because the future was not what people thought it was at the time. They pictured technological dynamism and economic boom--but the future, since that time, has really been technological and economic stagnation, with Japan's "lost decade" turned "lost decades" turned "lost generation" matched by the world's own "lost generation" these past many years. And the same goes for that stgantion's effects, like social withdrawal--Americans, certainly, seeming to notice the phenomenon of the "hikikomori" in Japan long before they noticed it at home.

Thus has it also gone with Japan's demography--the country's people less often marrying and having children, such that even by the standards of a world on the whole going through the "demographic transition" the country's situation has been extreme. According to the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook tiny and ultra-rich Monaco apart, Japan is the oldest country on Earth, with a median age of almost 49 years, and only 12 percent of its population under age 14. Still, others are not so far behind, with, according to the very same sources, dozens of other countries, including every major advanced industrial country but the U.S., having a median age of over forty (and the U.S. not far behind, with a median age of 39), and similarly dwindling numbers of youth (the percentage who are 0-14 in age likewise 12 percent in South Korea, 13 percent in Italy, 14 percent in Germany, with 15 percent the Euro area average).

Considering the last it seems fitting that the trend was already evident at the very peak of that preoccupation with Japan as industrial paragon, 1989, the year of the "1.57 shock" (when the country recorded a Total Fertility Rate of 1.57--at the time regarded as a shockingly number, though the government would probably be ecstatic if it was that high today). The result is that those interested in the difficulties of an aging society are looking at Japan wondering how it will deal with these difficulties as they manifest there first--and what the country does here as likely to inform others' thought about how to cope with contemporary reality as much as it did back when business "experts" seemed transfixed by "Japan Inc." as the epitome of industrial competence.