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This growth in immigration, in turn, is changing the image of Japan from ethnically homogenous to moderately diverse. Among Tokyo residents in their 20s, 1 in 10 is now foreign-born. And Tokyo is no longer an outlier. Much of the migration is happening in small industrial towns around the country, such as Shimukappu in central Hokkaido and Oizumi in Gunma prefecture, where migrant populations make up more than 15 percent of the local population. In the mostly rural Mie prefecture, east of Osaka and Kyoto, foreign migration has reversed years of population loss.

Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has based his support for the changing immigration policy not on any humanitarian concerns but rather on pragmatic, demographic arguments. By 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 billion people, according to the United Nations, but Japan’s population is expected to shrink by at least 20 million. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in Japan has fallen to 1.4 children per woman, while 28 percent of the country is over 65 years old. This means that the country’s population has been dropping by around 400,000 people a year

With unemployment consistently below 3 percent in recent years, even after the pandemic, employers are increasingly raising alarms about labor shortages. Last year, for the first time in Japan’s history, there were more jobs available than the number of job seekers in all of Japan’s 47 prefectures. In a country long known for its restrictive borders, immigration is now seen as the most obvious solution to that demographic challenge.

Japan has developed a unique program of customized immigration, based on specific requests for workers from various countries

Japan custom-orders a labor force in the 14 sectors where they are most urgently needed, including nurses and care workers, shipbuilders, farm workers, car mechanics, and workers in the fishing and construction industries

he said he prefers the casual xenophobia of Japan to the structural racism of America

most of Japanese society supports the changing immigration policy. In a recent survey by Nikkei, almost 70 percent of Japanese said it is “good” to see more foreigners in the country. “The nationalist, anti-immigrant groups here only make up perhaps 1-2 percent of voters. It’s not like Europe. And they have not raised their voices about this so far,”

given that latest bill allows an easier pathway for skilled foreign workers to apply for permanent residency and, eventually, Japanese citizenship—it may do more than simply sustain society. “More workers will try to stay here permanently,” Oguma said. “So even if the bill is not meant to change Japan, it certainly has the potential to change Japanese society in the long term.”

opposition has largely come from Abe’s left, over concerns about a lack of regulation on employers, which they fear could lead to exploitation. Many foreign workers are already forced to work overtime, receive less pay, and risk having their passports and travel documents confiscated by employers

some factories in the mostly rural Gifu prefecture have implemented segregated bathrooms and locker rooms for domestic and foreign workers

This dynamic was common in the immigration debate in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, when pro-business conservatives often pushed for more immigrants and guest workers, while labor unions raised concerns for workers’ rights and downward pressure on wages.

The widespread xenophobia in Japan is hardly a myth. In 2010, the U.N.’s human rights experts called out Japan for racism, discrimination, and exploitation of migrant workers. Increased immigration has not changed the country’s notoriously strict asylum policies. In 2018, only 42 asylum-seekers were approved, out of around 10,000 applicants.

bilateral agreements Japan has drafted with countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which will allow them to send tens of thousands of care workers to Japan annually. Both countries see this as a win-win proposition. Japan gets much-needed labor, the Philippines gets an increase in foreign remittances, and many workers will eventually return, having learned new valuable skills

Sooner or later, Japan may face nationwide debate on what it means to be Japanese in the 21st century. Few countries undergoing demographic shifts are able to avoid these challenges.

When South Korea accepted 500 Yemeni refugees in 2018, it created storms of protests, with street rallies demanding that the Yemenis be sent back, calling them “fake refugees.”

In early June, thousands of people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Tokyo, which has contributed to a nationwide debate on harassment of migrants and foreigners—as well as race.

“Xenophobic nationalists are generally irrelevant in politics. If there is a backlash, it will most likely begin as a local uprising against Tokyo, a populist revolt against the central government, just as in the EU,” Oguma said. “But I don’t see it happening right now. The far-right here is too atomized, each faction want different things. So I don’t really worry about an organized uprising.”

With massive stimulus spending and a robust, universal health care system, Japan has weathered the pandemic fairly well. Unemployment in April was 2.5 percent. While there has been some anecdotal evidence of increased racist harassment of foreign workers, coupled with an emerging skepticism toward globalization and migration, Japan at the moment is one of the few countries where resentment against immigrants is not the defining feature of politics.

A brief three decades after some had heralded the “end of history” it’s possible that it’s democracy that’s nearing the end. And it’s not just populist rabble-rousers who are saying this. So is one of the establishment’s pioneer social scientists, who’s daring to actually predict the end of democracy as we know it.

His theory is that over the next few decades, the number of large Western-style democracies around the globe will continue to shrink, and those that remain will become shells of themselves. Taking democracy’s place, Rosenberg says, will be right-wing populist governments that offer voters simple answers to complicated questions.

Democracy is hard work and requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to respect those with different views from theirs and people who don’t look like them. It asks citizens to be able to sift through large amounts of information and process the good from the bad, the true from the false. It requires thoughtfulness, discipline and logic.

Rosenberg makes his case that human beings don’t think straight. Biases of various kinds skew our brains at the most fundamental level. For example, racism is easily triggered unconsciously in whites by a picture of a black man wearing a hoodie. We discount evidence when it doesn’t square up with our goals while we embrace information that confirms our biases. Sometimes hearing we’re wrong makes us double down. And so on and so forth.

right-wing populism offers a quick sugar high. Forget political correctness. You can feel exactly the way you really want about people who belong to other tribes.

the reason for right-wing populists’ recent success is that “elites” are losing control of the institutions that have traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses

When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism.

While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously

The irony is that more democracy—ushered in by social media and the Internet, where information flows more freely than ever before—is what has unmoored our politics, and is leading us towards authoritarianism.

Compared with the harsh demands made by democracy, which requires a tolerance for compromise and diversity, right-wing populism is like cotton candy.

People have been saying for two millennia that democracy is unworkable, going back to Plato. The Founding Fathers were sufficiently worried that they left only one half of one branch of the federal government in the hands of the people

unlike democracy, which makes many demands, the populists make just one. They insist that people be loyal. Loyalty entails surrendering to the populist nationalist vision. But this is less a burden than an advantage. It’s easier to pledge allegiance to an authoritarian leader than to do the hard work of thinking for yourself demanded by democracy.

At the conference Ariel Malka reported evidence that conservatives are increasingly open to authoritarianism. Brian Shaffer related statistics showing that since Trump’s election teachers have noted a rise in bullying. Andreas Zick observed that racist crimes shot up dramatically in Germany after a million immigrants were allowed in.

the psychological research shows everybody’s irrational, professors included!

if Rosenberg is right, democracy will remain under threat no matter who is in power

“The ‘cordon sanitaire’ which once kept far-right groups and thought out of mainstream discourse has collapsed, both here and on the continent.”

increases in hate crime across Britain, and warnings over rising Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Outside the UK, the report said that the international far-right terror threat had hit “unprecedented levels” following the attacks in Christchurch, El Paso, Halle and Hanau. It found that the threat was involving younger and more violent individuals, and that the ideological paths into extremism had become more diverse because of the rise of conspiracy theories, incels and the “manosphere”.

“In 2020, far-right terror operates through a virtually leaderless online, global community waging its battles internationally, from Christchurch in New Zealand to Halle in Germany, through a new generation of increasingly young and more extreme terrorists, but the authorities have been slow to make connections between offline hate crimes and the ideological ecosystem behind them.”

Comparative data suggests that the United States may be somewhat overstocked with authoritarians, though they may simply be more easily identifiable in the country’s high-arousal political environment.

Whether in Washington or Warsaw, Western liberal democracy’s ongoing struggle with populism is united by fear.

Authoritarianism is not the same as conservatism, although they are modestly correlated. Authoritarians’ fundamental aversion to diversity—complexity and variety—is distinct from traditional conservatives’ aversion to change—which is more about novelty and uncertainty

the rapid demographic transformation of the United States likely provokes both authoritarians opposed to diversity and traditional conservatives averse to change

All people have an innate bias toward those like themselves; studies confirm that humans are wired to be tribal. For authoritarians, this bias is greatly magnified

Significant proportions of both Democrats and Republicans appear willing to endorse violence or violate democratic procedure to defend their values

the strongest predictor of anti-democratic attitudes among Republicans was not partisanship or political expediency; it was ethnic and racial antagonism

the strongest predictor of a Brexit “leave” vote—ostensibly rooted in racial and ethnic intolerance—was support for the death penalty and for the public whipping of sex criminals

those who are predisposed to favor freedom and diversity over authority and conformity must recognize that the authoritarian preference for oneness and sameness is largely innate and unlikely to change

even creating the mere feeling or appearance of oneness and sameness can be reassuring to authoritarians

authoritarian predispositions are not a problem that can just be educated away: In fact, liberal democracy’s loud and showy celebration of freedom and diversity drives authoritarians not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes

The formal justification for the raid was based on a decree issued on Sept. 3, 2019. It authorizes the government to assume control of local plants and seeds and to regulate their production and sales.

Turkey’s first lady Emine Erdogan, a passionate advocate of herbal and organic food products, introduced the so-called “Ata Tohum” or “Ancestral Seed” project that envisages “agriculture as the key to our national sovereignty.” The scheme is aimed at collecting and storing genetically unmodified seeds from local farmers and to reproduce and plant them so as to grow “fully indigenous” aliments.

Ata Tohum is thought to be the brainchild of Ibrahim Adnan Saracoglu, an Austrian-trained biochemist.  He is among Erdogan’s ever expanding legion of advisers. The 71-year old has written academic tracts about how broccoli consumption can prevent prostatitis. He was with the first lady at the Sept. 5 Ata Tohum event.

The professor railed against assorted Westerners who had plundered Anatolia’s botanical wealth and carried it back home.

“Seeds” he intoned, “are the foundation of our national security.”

a “classic nationalist move to dig deeper and deeper into the past for justification of the [nationalist] policies that you are currently putting in place.”

parallels with the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who “connected Turkish civilization back to the Phrygians and the Hittites” as part of his nation-building project.

“You have these genetic ties to the land through these seeds as proof that our civilization belongs here and has been here since time immemorial. To want to have these [seeds] in the first place is part of the nationalist framework.”

The ultimate fate of the British Institute’s seeds remains a mystery. It’s just as unclear what practical purpose they will serve.

“the archaeology seeds are essentially charcoal, dead and inert.” As for the modern reference collection “we are talking about stuff that was collected 25 to 50 years ago and is not going to be able to germinate.”

“But in order to get genomic information you only need one or two grains, not the whole collection. What [Turkish authorities] have done is they’ve removed this research resource from the wider Turkish and international community of researchers. It was a nice, small research facility, open to anyone who wanted to use it. Now it’s all gone,”