One job dominates Yusuke Nakano’s time as mayor of Hamamatsu: how to stop one of Japan’s most important industrial centres running short of people.
With a population of 770,000, his city 250km west of Tokyo has spawned companies that have defined Japan to the outside world. Honda was created here. Suzuki is headquartered a few kilometres away. Yamaha, Kawai and Roland make this the global home of the piano.
But for years, Hamamatsu’s shrinking workforce has gnawed at city authorities and key employers, which fear for their ability to grow.
Nakano, offering what may prove a template for dozens of other cities around Japan, said Hamamatsu needed to do something Japan had often been hesitant to do: actively recruit immigrants to bolster its dwindling stock of residents and workers.
His bet is that doing so will help to create a more dynamic city that can also lure young Japanese back from Tokyo, while bolstering the competitiveness of Hamamatsu’s companies.
“The declining population is extremely damaging to the local economy. We are trying to do something about it,” Nakano said in an interview. “The key question will be how many people from abroad can we attract, and how gradually we can slow down this population decline.”
Hamamatsu mayor Yusuke Nakano predicts its population could fall by 10% by 2040 © Hamamatsu mayor’s office
If places such as Hamamatsu can draw in many more immigrants, it could point to a way forward for much of Japan as it wrestles with falling birth rates and a shrinking workforce.
Immigration in the country has grown substantially, with the government reporting the number of foreign workers was more than 2mn last year and the foreign population is now near 3 per cent of the total. But this is vastly behind numbers in many western countries.
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Hamamatsu, where Nakano predicts the population could fall by 10 per cent by 2040 based on current trends, wants to go further. About 30,000 of its population are foreigners.
“Hamamatsu is one of the most ‘advanced’ cities in terms of immigrant policy. If Hamamatsu actually tries to implement such a policy seriously, it is path-breaking,” said Shigeki Sato, a professor of social sciences at Hosei University.
Rare for Japan, the city has had a previous wave of migration. Japan’s “miracle” growth phase of the 1970s and 80s drew in thousands of non-Japanese to fill lower-end jobs in the automotive supply chain. So many Brazilians came to live in Hamamatsu that its cash machines offered services in Portuguese.
The number dropped after the 2008 global financial crisis when Japan’s government — in a panic that mass unemployment was about to afflict manufacturing — offered immigrant workers and their families pay-to-leave incentives to return home.
This time, the need for workers from outside is not to maintain white-hot industrial growth, but to offset a population decline and domestic migration to Tokyo that threatens businesses outside the capital.
Hamamatsu is looking for any workers willing to move, with Indian immigrants the fastest-growing proportion. The newcomers are also better educated and more highly skilled than in the previous immigration wave: engineers and software developers are as likely to be tempted to the city as those working in supply chains or hospitality.
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The town is deploying services and programmes to help immigrants and their families assimilate, including cultural outreach, funds to support foreign workers learning Japanese and increasing the use of interpreters. Language classes target the needs of daily life.
Japan’s central government is also making it easier for workers to stay long term, granting more and easier access to “skilled worker” visas, which open up a path to staying in the country indefinitely.
Bigger companies have their own reasons to want to bring in such workers.
Suzuki’s Hamamatsu headquarters has brought about 200 engineers from its Indian subsidiary to beef up its skills as technology transforms the car industry’s business models. It is also recruiting directly from Indian universities, such as Hyderabad.
“We had a lack of resources for new technology because we are too traditional. We only had mechanical engineers and no software engineers,” said Junya Kumataki, who is in charge of new mobility services at Suzuki in Hamamatsu. “We will also bring in young engineers and more Indian management . . . as business creation is critical but a weak area of Japanese [groups].”
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Still, too few of those brought to Japan seem ready to stay for the long term.
“Most of the people come here for a short time and don’t want to settle here. At least 80 per cent don’t have the intention to stay,” said Sumesh, a Kerala-born engineer standing near the gates of automaker Suzuki, who added that he had been in Japan for six years and in Hamamatsu for six months.
“It’s hard to say if we will stay here,” said Sundararaj Muthu Selvan, a 41-year-old from Tamil Nadu who has worked for a Suzuki contractor for the past two and a half years.
He noted that Hamamatsu lacked an international school for his two children. “If they have such institutions, then people will come here,” he said, holding a bag containing local eel-flavoured snacks gifted to him by a colleague. The city says it plans to open schools in the coming years.
Sundararaj Muthu Selvan from Tamil Nadu said there was a lack of international schools in Hamamatsu © David Keohane/FT
Increasing immigration has, in recent months, become more politically sensitive than many in the government had expected.
A July election for the upper house of parliament became a platform for several strongly anti-foreigner parties to voice concerns over rising numbers of immigrants.
“How Japanese society reacts to more immigrants in the coming years, including in Hamamatsu, depends on the economic situation. Right now, most Japanese people are welcoming because our labour shortage is so serious, but if the economic situation changes, that tendency could change too,” said Atsushi Kondo, a professor at Meijo University, Nagoya.
Hamamatsu’s other problem is retaining its existing workforce.
“The critical point in Hamamatsu is people leave Hamamatsu,” said Kumataki, particularly 18- to 22-year-old women. “They don’t feel they can have a proper job here.”
Uchiyama, a 19-year-old student, said his ex-girlfriend and older sister had gone to Tokyo for university and work, and were not coming back. He also planned to leave, and disliked the idea of shift work in factories.
“There’s nothing that draws people here,” he said.
Nakano is clear-eyed about the difficulty of competing with Tokyo and its bars, life and job opportunities. Instead, the Hamamatsu mayor paints his city as a place to return to, start a family and settle down.
“Young people go to Tokyo and learn various things, then come back and create new things from here,” he said. “We will develop this city by doing things that Tokyo cannot do.”
Video: Japan’s population crisis reaches tipping point | FT Film
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