The chairman of one of Japan’s most well-known snack firms, who was born in India, has cautioned that in order to restore the economy to its former glory, the nation needs to adopt a new perspective and let more immigration.
Since a variety of different programs, including an extremely permissive monetary policy and trillions of dollars in stimulus measures, have failed to spur growth, politicians have been struggling for years to recover from the so-called lost decades.
Lekh Juneja, the CEO of the massive rice cracker company Kameda Seika, expressed concern that his adopted nation has lost its competitive edge as the new government of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba looks for a new way to restore its former dominance in the global IT industry.
“Forty years ago I came to Japan because it was close to number one in GDP… it was booming,” the biotech scientist told AFP at Kameda’s headquarters in Japan’s rice heartland of Niigata.
But at some point “Japan thought ‘we have everything now’. And I think that the hungry spirit to (have) the guts to go global started disappearing a bit”.
Kameda’s expansion mirrored Japan’s postwar boom, increasing revenues tenfold between 1965 and 1974 and becoming synonymous with the nationally adored “senbei” crackers in the process.
But the country that gave the world the Sony Walkman, the bullet train and Super Mario is no longer setting the pace in technology, overtaken by Silicon Valley, South Korea and China.
In the late 1980s, Japanese firms dominated the world’s top 10 companies by market capitalisation. Today not one makes the list.
The population is ageing and projected to drop by almost a third in the next 50 years, and firms are already having problems filling vacancies.
Although it has relaxed the rules in recent years, Japan has not turned in a big way to immigration as a solution.
The country “has no choice” but to allow in more immigrants, said Juneja, 72, who first came to Japan in 1984 and previously worked for a food ingredients maker and a pharmaceuticals firm.
“It’s not only the numbers. It’s also the mindset, the culture. We have to go global,” he said.
According to a recent study, Japan needs to more than triple its number of foreign workers to 6.88 million by 2040. Currently it’s on track to be almost a million short.
