Originally posted on May 5, 2019.
This chapter discusses the Japanese government’s stance on immigration policy, the influx of foreigners amid a shrinking and aging population, China’s hegemonic ambitions, and the growing sense of danger surrounding Japan’s national survival.
It argues that the foremost duty of a state is to protect the lives and property of its people, a line that must take precedence over sentimental cosmopolitanism.

2019-05-05
The most important duty of a state is to protect the lives and property of its people.
That transcends ideology, and more than pretty words dressed up as noble tales such as “global citizenship” or sentimental cosmopolitanism,

The chapter posted on 2019-02-19 under the title, “In the near future of 2050, a map of the Far East in which western Japan has been incorporated into ‘China’s East Sea Province’ and eastern Japan into the ‘Japan Autonomous Region’ is being treated as plausible on the Chinese internet,” is now in goo’s real-time top ten searches.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Amid shrinking domestic demand caused by a declining birthrate and aging population, I do not completely deny the government policy of aiming to become a tourism-oriented nation by bringing in 40 million foreign tourists by 2020 and accepting 300,000 foreign students.
However, the sight of the government and ruling parties loudly setting targets, while the relevant ministries scramble to secure budgets and make the numbers add up, is far too shortsighted and excessively driven by bureaucratic self-interest.
To say, “We brought in foreigners, and after that we do not know,” will only make the young people who must bear this country suffer.
The Japanese government should not evade the fact that the problems now becoming visible are precisely the immigration problems that Western nations are struggling with, and should properly explain this to the people.
An immigration policy that fundamentally questions the very shape of this country has been left behind in the absence of the people.
What the writer feels by going to the actual sites is the fact that the inflow of immigrants has been effectively opened up without the people even knowing it.
The immigration issue that stirred controversy around President Trump in the United States is not someone else’s problem for the Japanese either.
It is not only visible borders that are borders.
Medical and educational systems, legal systems related to public safety, and the countless other forms of this country’s “soft” infrastructure have begun to show signs of collapse in the face of foreign immigrants.
I want the Abe administration to face such problems head-on.
There is also constitutional revision.
Many domestic and foreign issues are piled up, but the priority of the immigration problem, which is directly tied to the lives of the people, surely cannot be low.
Criticizing the administration is fine.
But the opposition parties too, instead of only looking for scandals involving ministers, bureaucrats, and ruling-party lawmakers, should seriously debate in the Diet issues like immigration that concern the very foundation of the state.
“Population is a weapon.”
At a time when depopulated towns and villages and housing complexes in the Tokyo metropolitan area, suffering from population outflow and aging, are being targeted, the words of Mao Zedong, once China’s supreme leader, sound ominous.
Even in just the last 200 years, fifty nations and regions have disappeared from the map.
Tibet, Uyghuristan (East Turkistan), and Southern Mongolia (Inner Mongolia).
So many nations, so close at hand, have continued to be exposed to the danger of ethnic cleansing by the Chinese Communist regime.
In the near future of 2050, a map of the Far East in which western Japan has been incorporated into “China’s East Sea Province” and eastern Japan into the “Japan Autonomous Region” is being treated as plausible on the Chinese internet.
For now it is still no more than a fantasy, but it is also a fact that there is a dangerous neighbor nearby who is indulging in such a waking dream.
If what President Xi Jinping calls the “Chinese Dream” is also meant to signify the sphere of the Yuan and Qing dynasties, which swept across the Eurasian continent under the name of the Belt and Road, China’s modern Silk Road economic sphere concept, then this is an extremely dangerous way of thinking.
For example, in 1995, when Chinese Premier Li Peng visited Australia, he told then Australian Prime Minister Keating, “Japan is a country of no importance.
In thirty to forty years, it will disappear.”
That was probably his real feeling, mixed with jealousy and wariness toward a country that after the war achieved astonishing economic recovery and contributed to the international community as a technological nation and a peaceful nation.
If, just as military great power China says, Japan too goes on chanting the slogans of antiwar and peace, aligning its steps with them and zealously weakening its own strength, then around 2050 Japan may disappear from the world map just as they expect, become part of China, and be treated as second-class citizens.
The most important duty of a state is to protect the lives and property of its people.
That is a line that transcends ideology and takes priority over pretty words dressed up as noble tales such as “global citizenship” and over sentimental cosmopolitanism, a line that cannot be yielded even by one millimeter.
This installment will continue.