Posts Tagged: immigration

Miscellaneous — 5 Comments
30
Jan 08

Ramsay Ramblings 1/30/2008

Today’s ramblings cover Japan’s desire for foreign workers, a Japanese alternative to Adsense, the latest on JapanSoc, and an unexpected present.

Japanese businesses gearing up for foreign workers

I’ve just been watching my wife’s favorite TV show – no, not Aura no Izumi! – actually, she turns on the telly every night to watch World Business Satellite News, possibly the only news show I can stomach watching. The first segment on the show was about how companies are preparing themselves for foreign workers and what more could be done.

I was pleased to see a positive approach to the inevitable influx of foreigners. The program introduced a company developing language tuition software to help foreigners learn Japanese, and suggested following Germany’s lead by giving lessons on culture and history to help ease the transition into Japanese society. It also discussed the need to make finding accommodation easier, and talked about how nurses may be hired from the Philippines if they pass the same exams required of Japanese nurses.

There was also a documentary about airlines and how JAL is cutting costs by recruiting and training flight attendants from Thailand, another sign that companies are willingly hiring foreigners, regardless of whatever position the government takes on the immigration issue.

MicroAds – an alternative to Google Adsense

I was over at Ameblo the other day, a popular online blogging community in Japan, and noticed the following ads. They look remarkably like Google Adsense adverts, but obviously a Japanese competitor of the big G. They belong to MicroAd, which is obviously doing quite well to score a spot on Ameblo.

Microad - Adsense competitor?

I was going to study the Japanese MicroAd homepage and give you more details, but I figured they would only be useful if you blogged in Japanese and had a Japanese-reading audience, which rules most of us out. :???:

Japansoc updates

JapanSoc is buzzing with activity, and I’m enjoying looking through the articles people are submitting. You’ll notice I’ve set up Top Users page with ranks us by “karma”. The current karma formula is based on votes and submissions over the last 7 days, so now you know how to increase it! If any of you are having problems uploading an avatar, just email it to me (nick AT longcountdown DOT com) and I’ll put it in manually. Finally, don’t forget to include the JapanSoc voting button in your blog posts if you want more ’socs.

A big thank you goes to Nipponster.com for including a JapanSoc submit button on the Nipponster toolbar. More on this in a later post.

Buy someone a chair, get a desk in return

About five years ago, I bought a friend a big black “President’s chair” for his office, and today I was surprised to receive a nice new desk in return! It was probably the best present I could have hoped for since I was actually looking to get a new desk anyway. So folks, remember, if you want to make someone happy, buy them some office furniture! You never know, you might just get a big filing cabinet or a fancy new desk in return! :-D

Japan — 10 Comments
14
Dec 07

Japan’s Aging Population Problem – Alternative Solution

Japan is facing a crisis. The population is aging and by 2050, one in three people will be past retirement age. Meanwhile, the birth rate is currently at 1.25 babies per woman, much lower than the 2.1 needed to keep the population stable.

The result is a workforce too small to support the huge number of retirees. Who will do all the work? Will there be enough tax money to pay for pensions? What about the cost of health care?

How to solve Japan’s aging population problem

Plan A would be to increase the number of workers, and you could do that by:

1. Having more babies

Some companies are offering financial incentives to their employees to have more children. The government is also supposed to give a little financial support to parents, although I haven’t yet seen any evidence of this. Will this solve the problem? Not likely.

2. Upping the age of retirement

This might have already been put into action, and I’m sure everyone is thrilled about it (sarcasm). Still, adding an extra five years of labor and taxes to one’s life doesn’t look being the magic bullet.

3. Increasing the number of foreign workers

Easing immigration laws to allow hundreds of thousands of foreigners to live, work and apparently terrorize the natives is not likely to happen. I think most Japanese would rather forfeit their pensions or have robots do the work instead.

An alternative solution – decrease the number of elderly people!

I’m not suggesting genocide or anything quite that evil, but it’s interesting to consider ways the government could reduce the burden of an aging population without people suspecting a thing!

According to my students, a hundred years ago, elderly parents would ask their children to take them into the mountains and leave them there. While this is shocking to hear nowadays, it was considered honorable in the past. We can’t expect and wouldn’t wish to hear such a request from our current generation of pensioners, although putting them in a nursing home might be considered the modern equivalent!

Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting the following is a good idea. I’m just putting it forward as something the government might consider, and don’t give me that “They wouldn’t do that!” argument because that’s just opinion, not fact.  

Plan B: If you wanted to secretly reduce the lifespan of millions of people in a few short years, the best way to do it would be to hit them in the wallet. If people don’t have enough money, they can’t take care of themselves. Necessities such as medicine, food, accomodation, heating, transportation, etc. could all be subject to price increases.

Before you know it, thousands of people aren’t making it through the winter. A few tax increases here and there and the threat of pension reductions because of the shrinking workforce will have the elderly population in a state of panic. As a final measure, scare them to death with news stories of crime against defenseless pensioners.

So what do you think? If Japan can’t manufacture babies, and robots won’t pay tax, is Plan B a likely alternative? Let me know in the comments.

Perhaps there really isn’t a pension problem after all!

To end on a lighter note, one of my students suggested that inheritance tax would cover everybody’s pension because there would be so much of it! Let’s hope he’s right, because that’s much easier to stomach than my alternative solution!