demography
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2013Reading a term paper by one of my Växjö students, I learned something surprising.
Being a well-read and erudite sort, Dear Reader, you may not be surprised. You already know that Japanese women have been having very few babies each since the 1950s, and that thus there's a growing shortage of strong young people to work in the care for the elderly. It has gone so far, and the prognosis is so dire, that the Japanese electronics industry is busy developing robots to care for old folks.
What I learned is that the problem is really one of xenophobia. All of Japan's neighbouring countries across…