Does Japan Need Immigrants?

Abstract

During Japan's 2000-year history, there have been four waves of large-scale immigration, beginning in the eighth century with the arrival of many intellectuals and skilled artisans, most of whom came from Korea, in a period of great cultural growth. The second wave occurred in the 1640s, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, when several noble families of the Chinese Ming dynasty sought asylum in Japan, escaping from political oppression by the newly established Ch'ing dynasty (Shiba, 1987, pp. 498--507). The third wave occurred during the 1930s and 1940s, when many Koreans and Chinese were imported as forced labor. Most of these returned at the end of the Second World War, but more than 100 000, mostly Koreans, remained. Except for this third wave, modern Japan remained a country of net emigration until the early 1960s (SOPEMI, 1993:58--62).