Move, page 23
Oceania’s low-lying island nations don’t have the luxury of relocating citizens across Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago. Instead, they’re planning for their own evacuation. The 2.3 million citizens of Pacific island states such as the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Solomon Islands have been the first to take up New Zealand’s “climate visa” program. Eventually all will have to relocate there, to Australia, or other countries with which they have strong demographic or political associations. Some have asked China to help finance raising their roads so they can withstand rising seas awhile longer, but China surely prefers the islands vacated so China can mine the phosphate deposits and seabed minerals without local protest.
Perhaps the worst fate has been dealt to those who are both political and climate refugees at the same time, such as the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar. More than 1 million persecuted Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh—where their main refugee camp (known as Cox’s Bazaar) gets flooded during monsoon rains. Since Bangladesh is hardly a climate haven, soon there will be millions of Bangladeshis fleeing in the opposite direction toward the temperate highlands of northern Myanmar (and the hills of northeast India) near the Chinese border, from which the Irrawaddy River flows southward and nourishes the country’s farms and fisheries. If Myanmar gets its act together, it could go from military-run basket case to climate oasis within a generation.
Climate refugees from Bangladesh and Muslim political refugees from Myanmar may well wind up farther south, in fellow Muslim Malaysia, the regional nation least vulnerable to adverse climate effects with its dense forests and hydrating monsoon rains. Conveniently, all these countries are undergoing a strong improvement in their overall ties. As part of its “Act East” policy, India is investing in robust road connections through Bangladesh and Myanmar to Malaysia, seeking to boost cross-border trade in energy, raw materials, and textiles. Such connectivity isn’t designed to smooth the path for mass migrations, but that’s likely what will happen anyway.
Japan: High-tech melting pot?
Throughout the late twentieth century, Tokyo held the title of world’s largest megacity. Today, of the world’s two-dozen megacities, Tokyo is the only one registering a noticeable population decline—much like Japan as a whole. Nationwide, Japan has the world’s largest vacant housing stock: One out of every seven homes is abandoned, a share expected to rise to one-third in the coming decade. Entire towns are emptying as the elderly pass away and the young move to cities.
To convince people to occupy the country’s charming towns, Japan is literally giving away homes to young couples on the promise that they’ll have children and contribute to the revival of civic life. At least they’re doing something, which is more than one can say for the more than six hundred unemployed middle-age (mostly) men known as hikikomori, who live in total seclusion, unable or unwilling to find jobs. With more women working (and more elderly staying in the workforce), Japan’s birth rate has collapsed.
Perversely, this is why longtime Japan watcher Jesper Koll argues that now would be the ideal time to be reincarnated as a twenty-three-year-old Japanese millennial. Your parents would be the world’s richest baby boomers, with full ownership of their homes and low debt, world-class medical care, and protected pensions. You could live off their savings in multigenerational homes and have cheap immigrant maids or robots (or both) taking care of their and your needs. Out in the professional world, university students get jobs within a week of graduation, part-time workers are moving into full-time employee status, and the corporate old boys’ club is cracking open as firms restructure and divisions are spun off into new ventures. Japanese corporations are also getting serious about investing in blockchain and IoT sensors, with SoftBank and other VCs (both domestic and foreign) making big investments in startups. Writing off Japan has become passé. What if the country is headed for a renaissance? The scenario is not only plausible but likely—if Japan reverses its demographic freefall.
Even countries with high automation need migrants. Japan is famous for having robotic seals as companions for the elderly; robots handle check-in at hotels, and there’s even an android Buddhist priest who delivers sermons at a temple in Kyoto. But still there are worker shortages in farming, healthcare, education, and other essential services. However, other than the periodic waves of Koreans who have been brought to Japan as laborers or artisans, Japan has historically been averse to immigration—until now.
Indeed, Japan has never been as open to migrants from all over the world as today—and they have come in record numbers. In fact, Japan ranks in the top tier for the number of migrants entering the country each year, about four hundred thousand. The foreign population in Japan is touching 3 million, a record that gets reset each year as the number of students, vocational trainees, and skilled professionals continues to expand. Another surprise: At least 1 million are Chinese. When Japan began to open to increased migration a decade ago, it hoped for almost anyone but Chinese to come and settle. Yet today, Chinese constitute the largest share of foreigners, and the largest number of annual tourists as well. Chinese are followed in share of the population by seven hundred thousand South Koreans and three hundred thousand Vietnamese, with all three nationalities continuously increasing their presence in Japan. The number of Indians has also risen by one-third every five years and stands at more than fifty thousand. Indians and Nepalis are visible at construction sites and convenience store checkouts across the country. But with continuous aging combined with labor shortages, Indian doctors and nurses could be next.
For rank-and-file foreign workers, Japan’s regimented ways persist: Migrants are classified based on their education level and sector, such as construction or shipbuilding, and are usually restricted from bringing family members. That is a telltale sign that Japan is primarily interested in plugging labor shortages, not in becoming like America, Australia, or Canada. But as one finds in North America, once migrants arrive, few want to leave—especially if rights groups succeed in advocating for higher pay for migrant workers, making Japan (inadvertently) even more attractive. This has already led to novel culture clashes: Long-term Muslim immigrants from Indonesia and Pakistan seek to bury their dead, but in a land of cremation, space for cemeteries is heavily restricted, leading to petitions and negotiations to establish special graveyards.2
Higher up the value chain, Japan’s evolving immigration policy represents a new era of radical openness. Taxes are being slashed to attract finance and tech talent. Blue-collar workers are offered five-year renewable visas, and high-earning professionals are granted permanent residency, including for their families. Servicing these new long-term arrivals requires legions of cooks, cleaners, and nannies from Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Not surprisingly, Japan has long been a favorite expat destination, the utter antithesis of a hardship post. From chic Tokyo developments to ski resort towns, the foreign population is rising in all of more than forty prefectures. Japan is becoming not just a posh expat contract, but home.
The Japanese government has favored locals with incentives to buy abandoned properties, but there aren’t nearly enough takers. So-called akiya banks dedicated to financing the purchase of vacant homes will soon expand their offerings to foreigners. Expats are already snapping up land for as little as $20,000 and fixing up traditional homes or building new condo-style compounds with a dozen or more units. They’re taking to the local customs of neighborhood sharing of everything from bamboo to beer. Japan, like China, is not going to become demographically diluted or evolve into a multiethnic melting pot, but its doors are open to more “new Japanese” than ever.
Given Japan’s insular history, there is a generic notion that foreigners could never “fit in” with Japan’s old-world customs. But as with many things in Japan, reality is more counterintuitive. It’s the older Japanese who went out into the world in pursuit of commercial conquest on behalf of “Japan Inc.,” learning English and adopting cosmopolitan mannerisms, while younger Japanese have grown up complacently enjoying the fruits of their parents’ labor, speaking only Japanese and barely traveling abroad. It’s perhaps also to compensate for the reclusiveness of its youth that Japan hosts more than three hundred thousand foreign students at a time, with universities actively recruiting and offering entire degrees in English. New international schools are allowed to mix foreign and local students, and Japan’s leading gaming company, Rakuten, has adopted English as its office language. Densely packed with colleges and language schools, Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward is fully 50 percent populated by foreigners—not just from China and South Korea but from places as far-flung as Africa and Brazil.
All of this is before climate change wrecks Australia, India, and China, prompting even more people from Asia and beyond to decamp to Japan, which is in many ways the ultimate island fortress. Its ultramodern infrastructure and massive healthcare spending have made it a blue zone par excellence, with the highest life expectancy in the world and lowest Covid deaths per capita of any large country.
No doubt Japan is vulnerable to severe typhoons that lead to intense flooding and strong earthquakes, such as the 2011 earthquake-tsunami combo that devastated the coastal city of Sendai (on the main island of Honshu) and flooded the Fukushima nuclear reactor. In the north, tiny islands off Hokkaido have already sunk into the Sea of Okhotsk, while in the south, Typhoon Jebi in 2018 flooded the runway of Osaka’s Kansai Airport. Record rainfall on Kyushu in 2019 led to the forced evacuation of more than 1 million people. The Siberian air stream has made Honshu one of the world’s snowiest places, while summer heat waves led to events such as the Tokyo Marathon being shifted north to Sapporo on Hokkaido island.
But Japan also has the political will, financial firepower, and technical prowess to fortify itself. On Honshu, engineers are busily deploying alternative energy systems, structurally reinforcing buildings against earthquakes, designing high-throughput floodwater control and irrigation systems, and protecting towns and roads against landslides and other damage resulting from super-typhoons. In the foothills of Mount Fuji, Toyota is breaking ground on a new city where only renewable and driverless cars will ply the streets. Honshu’s 100 million residents today—and perhaps double that in the coming decades—are better off than people in almost any other geography on Earth.
Just steps from the famously crowded Shibuya crossing is an eight-story wonderland of high-tech tinkering called EDGEof. A sleek creative space that brings to mind the MIT Media Lab—but with a tropical-themed rooftop lounge—EDGEof is home to Silicon Valley and Japanese VC-funded startups in areas such as neuro-wellness, with one company making meditation-inducing chairs. There is also a zen tea garden in the basement where the bamboo ceiling slides open to reveal a large flat-panel TV screen for 4K video conferencing. Funded by tech companies, development institutes, and research centers, EDGEof hosts incubators from Canada, France, Sweden, and Israel, who alternate in putting on product demos, game nights, and art exhibitions. One hundred meters away and connected via elevated gardens, EDGEof is opening a co-living (three or more biologically unrelated tenants) property, a pay-as-you-go-style residence for startup hipsters, making the heart of Tokyo affordable. EDGEof and its partners are also working with mayors in various prefectures to turn their idyllic but depopulated towns into “Prosperity Villages” that will feature the yin and yang of urban and rural life that millennials want, as well as multigenerational housing, blended education, and other lifestyle offerings. EDGEof’s ventures thus embody the future of Japan: Full of young people from just about everywhere, a multiracial civilization is displacing an older Japanese one.
Of all the countries opening to mass migration, only Japan is also a living experiment in the coexistence of humans and all manner of technologies. Everywhere you look in Japan you see vacant buildings in immaculate condition, minimal traffic on roads, ferryboats sitting idle, and bridges connecting sparsely inhabited districts over calm waters. Today we fumble through communicating with the Japanese taxi driver who wears a suit and tie, white gloves, and a germ-protecting white mask, but soon there will be language translation devices on every mobile phone, and the cars will be driverless. Where all signs are digital, the language can also be changed.
CHAPTER 11 QUANTUM PEOPLE
Welcome to Expatistan
For all intents and purposes, an MBA is a passport. The world’s eight hundred business schools spread across fifty countries are perhaps the leading agents in stirring the pot in the global war for talent. They recruit worldwide for students and compete fiercely to feed their graduates into multinationals, which then circulate them around the world. Each new cadre of MBAs joins the growing ranks of effectively stateless tech and consulting firms, often feeling a greater sense of belonging to their professional circuit than to any one country.
The same goes for a wide range of nomadic tribes that migration expert Malte Zeeck categorizes as “go getters” (for example, IT technicians or international schoolteachers who chase higher salaries), “optimizers” (those seeking better lifestyle or medical care), “romantics” (who follow a spouse to his or her home country), and “re-pats” (who take advantage of economic growth in their country of origin, such as the millions of “sea turtles” who have returned to China or the millennial Jews of Europe who are buying up Tel Aviv’s real estate).
The coronavirus pandemic has done nothing to change expats’ motivations. In a time of economic stagnation, everyone is seeking to stretch their savings by cutting their expenses. It’s much easier to live somewhere three times cheaper than San Francisco than to magically earn three times more in San Francisco, and with tech jobs going permanently remote, that could mean moving anywhere you’ve ever wanted to live. Renting or buying a house is much cheaper in Mexico or thriving Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand. As one real estate executive confided to me during the pandemic paranoia, “My job is to sell homes in America to foreigners, but maybe I should be selling homes abroad to Americans instead.”
Talent doesn’t identify itself by nationality; it identifies itself as talent. It is geographically mercenary. With the right skills, today’s young talent can move practically anywhere they want based on lower taxes; better public services; more affordable housing, education, and healthcare; more predictable politics; or other preferences. Ample websites such as Nomad List, Expatica, and Expatistan have cost-of-living calculators to help current and aspiring nomads arbitrage across hundreds of cities—and keep moving among them.I Those who are sedentary find such a lifestyle unbearably complicated, but movement is easier when you are already in motion.
Where talent meets opportunity, migration will occur. The combination of global education and identity, remote work, and shifting growth markets will add considerably to the number of so-called “perma-pats” for whom home is wherever they are, for however long they’re there. Like riding a bicycle, the first move may be the hardest, both logistically and emotionally. But after that, moving becomes routine. Each year, more countries, cities, and companies join the global war for talent—and more people too.
Permanent until it’s time to go
Few fields on an online form annoy a young professional more than “Address.” Does it mean they’ll have to wait for a letter and physically sign a form? What if they no longer live there in a few months? Will they have to get the mail forwarded? Why does anyone still use paper anyway?
Their frustration is warranted. After all, you can be found in far more places in the digital world than the physical one. Rather than an office address, young people’s business cards list a slew of digital contacts: multiple email addresses and handles for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and others. In China, it’s just a QR code for WeChat, the mobile portal through which about 1 billion people organize most of their lives—real and virtual. In the age of the mobile entrepreneur, files are not stored in cabinets but in the cloud, payments are not made by check but through apps, management isn’t done around tables but on Slack, documents aren’t signed with ink but on DocuSign, and Webex and BlueJeans are the conference rooms. You don’t go to an office; you are the office—and you have one in a VR world as well. New Zealand’s fabled animation studio Weta Digital (which brought you Avengers: Endgame, Justice League, and other international hits) has partnered with California-based Magic Leap to create immersive AR environments and 3D telepresence systems for lifelike interaction and perpetual live streaming. Entire virtual cities have sprung up in cyberspace in which showrooms, embassies, pavilions, conferences, and other gatherings convene thousands of participants at a time. For many youth, the purpose of the real world is to enable maximum convenience for their online lives, which are increasingly spent inside this immersive “spatial web.”
But just because you can live anywhere (so long as the Internet speed is adequate), it doesn’t mean you will settle for just anywhere. Youth are attuned to the gap between where they are and where they want to be, so they keep moving. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), there are about 1.5 billion mobile workers who can do their jobs remotely, which amounts to nearly 40 percent of the global workforce. In the cat-and-mouse game of global taxation, the number of mice is rising substantially.
