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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I'm sorry to disapoint but I don't have a ton to stay. Expanded immigration is an Abe-era legacy to help try to boost the economy and address their crazy age demographic pyramid. A decent amount remains lower paid labor from Southeast Asia (Japan ironically used to bring in Indonesians to do rice farming and now Indonesia has serious labor shortages in rice farming) though Abe did expedite pathways to permanent residence for high skill guest workers (actual citizenship remains mega hard). For scale though, the numbers are still pretty small; 2 million foreign born out of a population of 125 million, or 1.6% of the country (US is 13.6% for comparison) and a lot of them are on temporary visas. Their population is notoriously aging and birthrates are low though so they will have to address this one way or the other.