Japan’s GDP growth is said to be around 1.5 percent. This year it is expected to grow more or less at the same rate as last year. Behind the hard figures, however, one can find more than what they show. 

The country experienced back in 1989 what is known as the bubble economy created by ample supply of money. Everybody suspected such a boom wouldn’t last forever and that someday the bubble would break down, but only God knew when it would be. When it burst, the Nikkei Stock Average which once peaked at close to 40,000 yen plummeted to below 7,000 yen. It is the hard fact that the breakup of the bubble economy had triggered a recession which went on two decades before being finally subdued. The rainy days didn’t end there. The global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 triggered by Lehman Brothers Holdings was equally devastating as the GDP of Japan dropped down even to the minus six percent. 

Today the stock market is significantly robust, with its Nikkei Average at around 21,000 yen (as of writing this) reflecting robust income status of the listed companies, thanks largely to rich liquidity. But despite the similarity of high stock prices there seems much difference between now and then. The current business incomes are substantiated by hard work, not on speculative motives as in the past. Businesses all have learned lessons out of the pain that many of them went through. 

Their earnings retained in recent years primarily come from their global operations; much of it from revenues from the emerging Asian counties. China is probably the biggest contributor. With their limited domestic market growing much less than vast global markets, the presence in particularly emerging Asian areas is a vital lifeline to assure their growth potential. All countries today are mutually dependent where close collaboration and friendship are indispensable economically and politically.  

Any economy stands on a delicate balance of boom and bust; it is subject to political stability and world peace. Barring a regional crisis, how can Japan be more mutually beneficial to the Asian emerging countries? The country is rapidly heading for the aged society, where the elderly outnumber the young because of a low birth rate. Some industries right now suffer a labor shortage to such a degree that they must shrink their business operations.  The effort to increase the birth rate is most commendable, but it takes years before it becomes effective. So we seek some other solutions besides it. Although there is no panacea, a couple of quick remedies seem effective; one is to mobilize more robots to replace human labor, the other is to encourage more foreign laborers to come in and fill in the gap. 

Historically Japan has been aggressive in sending people out but so much more reluctant in accepting people from other countries. Expatriate candidates for overseas business assignments, however, are getting scarcer and scarcer.  All such things considered, it is high time that the country should take a look at the immigration policy all over again. Why not be more aggressive to look at Asian neighbors where the demographic situations stand opposite? Why not let in more students from emerging Asian countries and offer job opportunities on graduation? Such talents must be good substitutes for much-needed global business operations, indispensable resources to be harnessed as capable expatriates to be sent out overseas for Japanese industries in need. 

Japan has had a series of international trade frictions, mostly caused by massive exports to the United States. The historic Plaza Accord 1985 finally settled the long disputed yen rate. The appreciated exchange rate was made no longer affordable to keep exporting their products as before, forcing them to move production out to various overseas locations, including China, which has turned out to be one of their largest production centers. The global presence has been in progress at a faster rate. 

Any nation can have its own pains to grow as an inevitable byproduct of industrialization; emerging national have universal pollution problems, particularly China and India.  Japan had serious pollution problems way back in sixties and seventies, when the rivers running in major metropolitan cities were so contaminated by industrial waste that no fish could survive. So was the air – so many people were suffering asthma.  Now, fish have come back to the rivers and the air is clean. 

Companies go to other countries for mutual benefits, that is to say, we gain money and profits and you do too; that’s what the division of international labor theory advocates.  But this alone isn’t good enough. There has to be a little more than this. That’s the love for all humans. Why not let them go with pollution control expertise to help their trading partners, the knowledge they painstakingly acquired because a clean environment is the universal asset to all human kinds. That’s the greatest mutual benefit that the age requires, and the GDP earned on it will be the best GDP in deed. 

(Tatsuo Nobu is a visiting professor at the University of International Business and Economics. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.)