Japan's population is falling so fast the country is beginning to think the unthinkable and trying to attract foreign labour, reports David McNeill from Tokyo.
Japan is officially shrinking. The most recent national census found 19,000 fewer Japanese than the previous year; the first time, barring the catastrophic year of 1945, that the population has dropped since censuses began in 1920.
The population of almost 128 million is expected to fall to 100 million by 2050 and some alarmist predictions have the last Japanese switching off the lights some time in the next century. Long before then, the world's second-largest economy will plummet down the prosperity tables, warn many experts.
Even the country's normally staid national newspapers reacted with something akin to mild panic last week to the news that the number of children born here has fallen for the 25th straight year. "What on earth are we going to do?" asked one headline.
With a hint of desperation, the government is offering women financial incentives to end what wags have dubbed a national womb strike. Some ministers are even considering reviving the matchmaking industry.
But such measures are unlikely to succeed without a radical overhaul of the country's entire social system. In the meantime, one man has a solution: turn Japan into the Asian equivalent of the United States.
Hidenori Sakanaka was until last year the head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, a career bureaucrat with three decades' experience of controlling the movement of people; not the most promising source for radical solutions to social problems.
Yet, he recently wrote a book with a startling, even utopian message: Japan should become a magnet for at least 20 million immigrants from China, India and the rest of Asia. "I'm no radical but this is the most practical option," he says.
"The population of the world is over six billion, and about half of these people live in Asia. The population of China , India, Vietnam and so on is growing very fast at the same time as ours is shrinking. We're a rich country surrounded by developing countries.
"It's like a dam; we're sitting behind it and a tsunami is coming and what are we going to do about it?"
The sound of these comments from the bowels of the ultra-conservative Justice Ministry was music to the ears of those who have been arguing for years that Japan must open its doors. At present, fewer than 2 per cent of people living here are foreign-born.
But the debate Mr Sakanaka hoped to provoke has been slow to ignite. His book has sold fewer than 6,000 copies and he sits today waiting for the phone to ring behind the desk of the think-tank he founded, the Japan Immigration Policy Institute.
Japan, it seems, is just not ready for a gaijin - a foreigner - on every street. For one thing, foreigners are widely blamed for a recent spike in crime thanks partly to sensationalist media coverage, and the police, who are happy to point the blame for falling detection rates at outsiders. For another, foreigners are potential terrorists, say the authorities.
Under the rubric of anti-terror legislation, Tokyo has just introduced controversial revisions to the Immigration Control Law, allowing the fingerprinting and photographing of people entering the country. The plan comes just six years after Japan abandoned the practice following decades of protests.
Still, there are signs that the rest of the country is slowly coming around to Mr Sakanaka's point of view.
The conservative business Nikkei newspaper recently ran an editorial calling for an orderly opening of the labour market, and prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has finally ordered a long-awaited study on the issue.
"Whether we like it or not, there are many foreigners who want to come to Japan," said Mr Koizumi, according to the minutes of a closed-door meeting on immigration. "We must think about how we can accept those who want to work or settle in Japanese society, without friction."
After warning of the "tremendous" social costs and friction of opening up too far, Mr Koizumi continued: "We must think how to improve the environment and education system in order to let foreigners work comfortably as a steady labour power."
As a ringing endorsement of multicultural society it left a lot to be desired, but perhaps this is the way history changes: in the timorous, grudging language of a bureaucratic memo. Mr Sakanaka, at least, is a happy man.