By JOSEPH COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 3 minutes ago
OIZUMI, Japan - At the Brazil Plaza shopping center, Carlos Watanabe thinks back on 12 lonely years as a factory worker in Japan — and can't find a single thing to praise except the cold mug of Kirin lager in his hand.
"I want to go back to Brazil every day, but I don't go because I don't have the money," says Watanabe, 28. "Sometimes I think I should go home, sometimes stay here, sometimes just go to another country."
The administrators of Oizumi, 50 miles north of Tokyo, are also dissatisfied: The outsiders don't speak enough Japanese. They don't recycle their trash properly. Their kids don't get along with their Japanese classmates.
"We want people to study Japanese and learn our rules before coming here," Oizumi Mayor Hiroshi Hasegawa, whose business card is in Portuguese. "Until the national government decides on an immigration system, it's going to be really tough."
As a town of 42,000 with a 15 percent foreign population, the highest in Japan, Oizumi's troubles are getting nationwide attention as the country wakes up to a demographic time bomb: In 2005, it became the world's first leading economy to suffer a decline in population, with 21,408 more deaths than births — the feared onset of what may become a crippling labor shortage at mid-century.
The prospect of a shrinking, rapidly aging population is spurring a debate about whether Japan — so insular that it once barred foreigners from its shores for two centuries — should open up to more foreign workers.
Japan's 2 million registered foreigners, 1.57 percent of the population, are at a record high but minuscule compared with the United States' 12 percent.
For the government to increase those numbers would be groundbreaking in a nation conditioned to see itself as racially homogeneous and culturally unique, and to equate "foreign" with crime and social disorder.
"I think we are entering an age of revolutionary change," said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute and a vocal proponent of accepting more outsiders. "Our views on how the nation should be and our views on foreigners need to change in order to maintain our society."
