Japan takes the highway to Johannesburg

Japan has launched an unusual migration initiative. In a conscious decision to benefit special economic partners of the governing party, they will be importing cheap African labour, and confining them to special “hometowns”. But they will soon learn that there is nothing as expensive as cheap labour.

Most of us are aware of Japan’s low birth rates, comparable to that of the native populations of Italy and Spain. And much like the West, Japan is now trying to impose the burden of cultural pluralism on its youth so it doesn’t have to have a hard conversation with its elderly.

But as Germany has just admitted, that conversation is going to come anyway. The West can no longer afford a modern welfare state, not just because they are overly generous to their pensioners, but because the overall cost created by foreigners exploiting their welfare systems, causing friction and inefficiencies in everyday economic and administrative transactions, and engaged in antisocial behaviour has meant that they are a net drain on the fiscus and society as a whole.

Serious data on this is available for only a few countries, but includes studies from Denmark, Netherlands, Denmark and Finland (more on this here). And then there’s the infamous graph:

Defenders of this insanity have to resort to Mugabenomics (i.e., we can just print all the money we need) to justify it.

But of course, the biggest risk now comes from political friction, and increased nativism. We see this backlash everywhere, and now Japan is seeing it emerge too. Japan is a conservative country with strong, high-trust social norms, and is already straining against the relatively modest levels of immigration imposed on it compared to the West (which is now in the terminal stages of national apoptosis).

The new anti-global-governance party Sanseitō (the “Political Participation Party”) founded in 2020 by Sohei Kamiya, won one upper house seat in 2022, three lower house seats in 2024, and 14 upper house seats in 2025, becoming the fourth-largest opposition party.

Sanseitō advocates strict anti-immigration measures, capping foreign residents at 5% per municipality, tightening naturalization, and banning naturalized citizens from public office. These rather moderate and sensible policies are generally being attacked as far-right, but Japanese citizens are understandably reluctant to transform their countries into the fiscally incontinent, terminally declining cultural wasteland the West has set its compass on.

More exotically, the party seeks to rewrite the Constitution to centre the Emperor, eliminate human rights provisions, and promote traditional values. It supports tax cuts, increased child benefits, agricultural self-sufficiency, and opposes gender equality and LGBT laws, favouring automation over foreign labour.

But all of this stuff has been done before. Apologies to my South African readers, I will be teaching foreigners the ABCs now.

Apartheid through forced proximity

Here in South Africa, we are well aware that living as a minority in the country of one’s birth is a somewhat less than ideal situation. But it was not always so – South Africa was not always a country, and white people used to be a majority or at least a plurality in most of the areas they lived in.

This settlement pattern was a result of the fact that, at the time of the 1911 census report, from which this map was taken, South Africa was home to only 6 million people. The black Africans were confined to “homelands”, the areas in which they had settled since 1 500 years ago, with borders tidied up by a series of smaller ethnic cleansing campaigns only conducted two years later, in 1913.

In the middle of the 19^th century, there were only 2 million. Maps of this time show exclusion zones between white states, but the Afrikaners did not attempt to govern the black Africans under their rule, but simply keep peace with them through bilateral treaties. White settlements were placed far from them, to avoid the violent raiding parties that were typical of traditional tribal behaviour.

The distances between white and black settlements were great enough that the British colonial office in Natal had to impose a poll tax on the Zulu territories in order to force them into white areas to work, and the later South African government of Jan Smuts imposed the same policy on South Africa as a whole, to benefit his financial backers in the Chamber of Mines.

This led to a rising Afrikaner nationalism, as the white labour force got priced out of their jobs in their own settlements by forced labour. In 1922, the communists, unions, and nationalists teamed up to keep black labour out, in what was called the Rand Rebellion, and the state put their labour unions down with machine gun fire and aerial bombardment.

Thereafter, the Afrikaner nationalists and the Labour party won the 1924 elections. But their attempts at populist reform failed, as the Chamber of Mines used their enormous leverage against parliament both legally and illicitly, and went so far as to threaten to collapse the mines.

The nationalists compromised by introducing increasing segregation and legal privilege for whites, and after the nationalists were absorbed into the Liberal-imperialist SAP in preparation for the Second World War, the state continued allowing the neverending migration of black labour.

After the Second World War, when they won an election outright again in 1948, they tried to deepen the homelands policy by increasing their autonomy with enormous investment in hospitals, schools and infrastructure, outspending the entire UN development budget for decades. But the “black spots” in migrant townships in “white” South Africa kept growing, at a rate of 3% a year, until the state was forced to initiate reforms of their segregation regime in 1976 after a visit from henry Kissinger. By the time of the 1994 election, there were no segregation policies left.

Apartheid by fax

And now the Japanese authorities are attempting to do the same.

The Japan Native Auth- sorry, International Cooperation Agency will be assigning the city of Nagai in Yamagata Prefecture to Tanzania, Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture to Nigeria, Sanjo in Niigata Prefecture to Ghana and Imabari in Ehime Prefecture to Mozambique.

Unveiled at the 9th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD 9) in Yokohama this last week, the policy introduces a special visa category to attract skilled African professionals and artisans “willing to upskill”. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has paired these municipalities with African nations to foster cultural and economic ties, turning the cutesy “sister city” concept into a colonial labour treadmill.

At TICAD 9, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announced a $5.5 billion investment package, emphasising private-sector growth, youth empowerment, and regional integration. For African nations, the scheme promises training and professional opportunities, facilitating skills transfer and economic cooperation.

Japan, meanwhile, promises its citizens “municipal revitalisation” through population growth and workforce replenishment in sectors like technology, manufacturing, and healthcare.

But even a cursory glance at the effects these migrant populations have on European towns would destroy such a rosy illusion. It turns traditional communities into ghost towns, as native communities flee crime, hostility, and more quotidian antisocial behaviours caused by cultural frictions.

This has been part of a slow-moving 20-year push by the Nihon Keidanren (Japan Business  Federation – hereafter, “NK”), formed in 2002 by merging Keidanren (est. 1946) and Nikkeiren (est. 1948). It is Japan’s leading economic organization, representing over a thousand companies. It advocates for “sustainable” economic growth, influencing policies on trade, labor, environment, and corporate social responsibility (i.e., forcing Japan to be governed in the suicidal manner of the modern West).

Much like the Chamber of Mines’ control of the SAP in the old South Africa, NK has historically allied itself with the dominant party, the LDP. It played a key role in Japan’s post-war economic recovery, promoting trade liberalization and privatization of entities like Japan National Railways.

Like all corporate lobbies, it is seeking to depress wages. It is well-known in developmental economics that the Japanese under the Meiji Restoration pioneered the only successful model of developmental economics, the key component to which is labour repression, without which, such rapid development as seen by its copycats in Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Deng-era China would not be possible.

But labour repression is politically expensive under a democratic system, and so the present captains of industry have now taken the South African route, importing cheap labour while separating them from the rest of the country to mitigate political fallout.

The NK has been lobbying for these changes since its formation, releasing an inaugural statement of intent with its paper,  “Japan 2025: Envisioning a Vibrant, Attractive Nation in the 21^st Century”, pushing slogans like “dynamism of diversity”, and intending to make Japan “a vibrant, attractive nation to people around the world.”

In its report, it explicitly aims to turn Japan into a multicultural country, by design:

As the press release accompanying the report put it, way back in 2003:

“The business community has already recognized the importance of transcultural management. As markets diversify and de-segment, the diversity of a corporation’s own work force has become a source of profitability. Spillover potential benefits in the corporate management include increased creativity and tolerance within an organization […] But a diverse workforce does not create itself […] government tends to react cautiously in accepting blue-collar non-Japanese workers by holding back until a general public consensus is reached. However, even as Japanese companies shift production bases abroad, certain sectors in Japan will be hit by shortages of Japanese workers, and steps must be taken to ensure that these sectors are able to secure sufficient labor. The agriculture and service industries – particularly the welfare and nursing sectors – are expected to be hard-hit by worker shortages in the future, even if women and senior citizens enter the workforce in huge numbers. It is also true that foreign nationals of Japanese descent who work in manufacturing, service industries and other non-office jobs in Japan struggle to make a decent living. In light of these circumstances, studies aimed at how to better integrate foreign nationals of Japanese descent into Japanese society should be undertaken immediately. Other measures should be undertaken to ensure that unnecessary friction and confusion does not surface when non-Japanese workers eventually enter those sectors suffering from shortages of Japanese workers.”

But this process of transformation was not even begun by the industrial sector. In fact, it was precipitated by a deliberate conspiracy by the Central Banking system to destroy national manufacturing, in the interests of preserving American market dominance.

In “Princes of the Yen”, Richard Werner argues that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) empowered by its independence, orchestrated the creation and subsequent bursting of the asset price bubble to push for structural reforms and consolidate its own power, citing conscious statements to this effect by bank officials.

Werner claims the BOJ deliberately encouraged excessive credit creation in commercial banks the 1980s through “window guidance,” a tool that directed banks to increase lending, particularly to speculative sectors like real estate. This fuelled an asset price bubble, with soaring stock and property prices, as the BOJ loosened monetary policy to align with U.S. pressure for a stronger yen under the Plaza Accord (1985). They then abruptly tightened monetary policy by raising interest rates and restricting credit, triggering the collapse of the bubble. This led to a prolonged economic stagnation known as the “Lost Decades.”

Werner argues this was not a policy mistake but a deliberate act to create a crisis of a particular form. Along with other elites, the central bank sought to dismantle Japan’s traditional economic model, which emphasized manufacturing, lifetime employment, and corporate conglomerates (keiretsu). This crisis justified neoliberal reforms, such as deregulation, privatization, and market-oriented policies, aligning Japan with Western economic models.

By engineering a crisis, the BOJ also strengthened its control over economic policy, reducing the power of the Ministry of Finance and other bureaucratic institutions (note that the UK also relinquished control over its central bank around the same time). This opened Japan’s economy and reduce its trade surplus as it weakened its capital markets.

The central bank, backed by reformist factions, viewed the crisis as a means to break the entrenched power of traditional industries and bureaucracies, paving the way for a more foreign-market driven, globalized economy, and to cement its role as the primary economic policymaker, free from political oversight, by demonstrating the consequences of defying its authority.

While many point to the precipitous population decline since the early 70s, the housing crunch almost certainly accelerated this process – nobody wants to have a family of five in a one-bedroom apartment, nor does family planning gel well with job insecurity.

The conveyor belt

What is worse, there will never be enough, and the immigration will only accelerate. As South Africa loosened migration controls in 1985, workers piled up outsode white towns, and now every single one has a squatter camp abutting it. In wealthy countries, this takes the form of expensive government-built apartment blocks.

Everyone knows that migrant labour works harder. But over time, as each labour cohort settles in, the work they are doing bores them, and their motivation to work and behave themselves declines. After all, where is the satisfaction in repetitive labour? For this reason, as well as other legal pressures related to workers’ rights, employers will replace their labour cohorts every year, or every season, with fresh, rootless new arrivals.

This forms a conveyor belt which feeds a neverending pool of immigrants, who never ever vote in accordance with native interests. In the Western Cape, traditionally not home to many black individuals, and none before the early 19^th century (the natives of the Cape are of a different race to the black people who migrated south to the eastern half of South Africa a thousand years ago). These new arrivals vote exclusively (well, 95%) for black-nationalist parties who support the confiscation of property from non-blacks, and impose racial quotas in employment, education and corporate ownership.

The liberal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has held onto municipal and provincial power in the Cape only by refusing to campaign in black areas, because they soon realised that the more they campaigned, the more the ANC and EFF turned out to vote. Cultivating voter apathy has become the only means of electoral survival.

Japan is headed for national suicide, but they still have plenty of time to turn the ship around. Whether they are up to the challenge depends on their will to resist the geriatric owners of their economy.