“I will do my best,” promises the little white bear. “I will carry you,” it continues in the politest Japanese, “as though you were a princess.”
The bear’s sex is unclear, its voice falling in the range that overlaps tenor and contralto. From its gracefully tapered waist, suggestive of a female nurse, it bends forward over a man—far from a princess—who lies on a hospital bed in a large windowless room. The bright green floor is polished so highly that it reflects the bear’s round ears, big black eyes, crinkly smile, and smooth white skin.
It extends two slim paws. One forearm slides under the patient’s knees, while the other reaches under his back. Behind it, Susumu Sato, a young engineer with an unruly crew cut and black-rimmed glasses, reaches to touch a spot on the polar bear’s left triceps, and it moves closer. Three men who are watching audibly inhale. Gently, the bear lifts and straightens until the patient is suspended over the floor, cradled in its arms.
“Is it all right?” asks Sato. A silver ballpoint protrudes from a penholder on his left sleeve.
“Quite comfortable,” the man replies. To be snug against the bear’s well-padded chest is, in fact, oddly comforting.
The bear’s name is Riba II, meaning Robot for Interactive Body Assistance, Second Edition. According to its inventors, it is the world’s first robot that can lift a human in its arms. Now it pivots on rollers concealed in its wheeled base—no rear paws—and glides soundlessly over the shiny green floor to a waiting wheelchair. On its shoulders are tiny blinking green lights. “They’re just decorative,” says chief engineer Shijie Guo, who follows anxiously behind, his hair falling onto his forehead. Now comes the hard part, but RIBA II is the least nervous creature in the room—and it actually does seem like a creature, and not just in the Shinto sense that everything contains a spirit. Almost tenderly, the bear sets its human cargo onto the chair. Its right arm carefully lowers his legs, then slides away. Sato presses a rubber sensor on its left forearm. The bear straightens up.
“I’m finished,” it announces.
Everybody in the room exhales and claps. They are in the Nagoya Science Park, where RIBA II was built jointly by RIKEN, Japan’s oldest scientific research and development firm, and Tokai Rubber Industries. Since 1929, Tokai Rubber has mainly made automotive parts, such as hoses and wiper blades. But Japan is the first country to be facing the inevitable fate of other developed nations, and its industries are shifting accordingly. Already, more than 60 percent of the world’s industrial assembly robots are from Japan, and the reason is no accident.
Riba II and author, Nagoya Science Park, Aichi Prefecture, Japan
PHOTOGRAPH BY JUNKO TAKAHASHI
What the Ayatollah Khamenei fears for Iran is already happening in Japan: a country with below-replacement growth is now reaching the end of the momentum that kept its numbers rising for two generations after its fertility plummeted. In Japan’s case, however, there was no intentional program to curb runaway population growth. Like Iran, it had just suffered through a terrible war, albeit one of its own making.
In 1931, Japan, a mountainous country with only 15 percent of its land suitable for agriculture, found itself in an unprecedented situation: Its population had grown to 65 million, far more than it could feed. It was already importing soybeans from Manchuria, the Chinese region bordering Korea, which also had iron and coal that resource-poor Japan needed. With China weakened by internal strife during the early Mao years, the temptation to invade was irresistible.
As Germany would soon similarly conclude about its neighbor Poland, Japan saw thinly settled Manchuria as a place to move surplus population. But one invasion led to another, and by 1937, Japanese expansionism had pushed deeper into China. In 1941, bent on controlling the entire Asian Pacific, it attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.
Four years later, Japan’s dreams of empire were dead. Its defeated soldiers returned to their wives, and predictably, a baby boom followed. Unlike the victorious United States, whose armaments industry had pulled it out of the Depression, Japan’s economy was wrecked. Nevertheless, over the next five years its wartime population of 72 million spurted to 83 million.
The country that couldn’t feed itself two decades earlier now had millions on the verge of starvation. By the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Japanese mothers desperate to feed their children were seeking illegal abortions, with the usual percentage of unfortunate outcomes. Until then, legal abortions involved a complicated process to verify an emergency. Now, faced with a nationwide emergency, in 1948 Japan passed the Eugenic Protection Law, legalizing contraception, abortion, and sterilization for health reasons.
A year later, with the crisis unabated, the law was extended to permit abortions and family planning for economic reasons. Thus, Japan cut off its postwar baby boom. Birth rates soon hovered near replacement. The country’s economy struggled back. In the 1950s, the phrase “Made in Japan” was mocked by the victors across the Pacific as synonymous with cheap, but the victors kept buying. Gradually, Japan’s humble industries evolved into electronics and automobile manufacturing that earned billions and restored its respect. Wealth financed education, including for women, and fertility rates dropped further, to under 1.4 children per female.
Which is why RIKEN and Tokai Rubber are making robots—specifically, a nice white teddy bear robot that can carefully cradle elderly people in its padded arms, soothe them with courtesy and a secure embrace, and move them from bed to chair and ultimately to the most critical challenge: the bathroom.
“We have to do this,” says chief engineer Guo, “because there is a double problem to solve: Soon Japan will have many more old people who have trouble moving by themselves, and many fewer young people available to help them. There is already a shortage of geriatric nurses. It is hard to lift people forty times a day while working two shifts in twenty-four hours. Half of elderly caregivers complain of back pain. We’ll need robots for all the jobs people don’t want to do, because there will not be enough workers.”
So far, Riba II takes a minute and a half to pick people up from bed and deposit them in the wheelchair. “A human usually takes ten seconds. We have to get under a minute to be acceptable.” After lifting, nurses say that dealing with adult diapers is their hardest task. Guo took a class in how to clean up geriatric patients. “It’s a tough one,” he admits. Then there’s communication: much R&D has gone into what the robot should say to people. “It has to talk, to make the patient feel safe. This one can identify voices, but only recognizes some simple words. But we plan for it to greet people, to do therapeutic massage, even to sing to lonely old people.”
Whether technology can meet such human psychological needs remains to be seen, but something has to deal with the larger demographic dilemma that Riba II was invented to help solve. Western Europe is watching closely to see what will happen here, because Japan is the first to reach the end of its demographic transition—when high mortality and high birthrates both turn to low. Japan’s first shrunken generation—born in the late forties and early fifties, when Japanese severely curtailed their reproduction—is now entering retirement, and members of the generation before them are entering their final years.
With nearly the world’s highest life expectancy—until the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit Fukushima and surrounding prefectures killed twenty thousand people in one day, it was the highest—its elderly population will continue to boom. (Japan’s 79.4 years for men and 85.9 years for women is only slightly behind Hong Kong.) The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2040 there will one Japanese centenarian for every new Japanese baby. But long before that, as the large generation that preceded the demographic downsizing passes on, Japan’s numbers will suddenly plunge.
This demographic destiny cannot be reversed, and has already begun. In 2006, for the first time since World War II, Japan recorded more deaths than births. Its population peaked at just over 128 million. Since then, it has fallen each year; by 2012, it was at 126.5 million and dropping. Before 2060, even if life expectancy continues to rise, Japan will be back to around 86 million, which was its population in 1950.
There is a quick fix to looming labor problems like Japan’s, one that another country whose population is already declining—Cuba—is contemplating. Cuba’s 11 million are diminishing due both to emigration and to low fertility rates resulting from a high percentage of female university graduates, plus decades of economic difficulty, universal health coverage, and legal abortion to back up family planning. To shore up its contracting labor force, Cuba is considering wooing immigrants from nations with even less favorable economics, such as Haiti.
Likewise, immigrants should fill Europe’s labor breach in coming decades. Despite below-replacement birthrates, in 2012 Germany’s population actually grew by nine hundred thousand, mainly due to immigration from eastern Europe made possible by EU membership. But Germany’s first wave of immigrant labor—thousands of Turks, imported after the Berlin Wall cut off the supply of East German migrants—has been less easy to absorb. Today, there are 4 million Turks in Germany, a source of unresolved cultural tension and tightened immigration policies. In 2010, German chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of Christian Democratic Union Party youth, “At the start of the ’60s we invited the guest-workers to Germany. We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn’t stay, that one day they’d go home. That isn’t what happened. And of course the tendency was to say: let’s be multikulti and live next to each other and enjoy being together, [but] this concept has failed, failed utterly.”1
The Cold War that cleaved Germany shortened its postwar baby boom, and the advent of birth control pills nearly halved birthrates on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 only seemed to further depress fertility. Even tempting couples with €2,000 a year for having a second child hasn’t made a difference. German working mothers complain that with inadequate day care, school days that end as early as 1:00 p.m. make it even more complicated to have children. The result is rock-bottom birthrates, and a population aging as fast as Japan’s.
Should the rise of xenophobic political parties continue, European immigration rates could lower. But immigration so far has never been an option for Japan, which deeply values its largely homogeneous population: fewer than 2 percent of Japanese residents are foreign-born. One rationale offered for robot nurses is that they aren’t burdened with cultural differences or unpleasant wartime histories that elderly Japanese might associate with East Asian health-care workers. Although some Japanese accuse their country of racism, most agree that shared cultural values are why Japanese society functions so smoothly, why its cities are so orderly, and why crime in Japan is so low.
And now it will have a low population to match, making it a laboratory for the question we all will face if we decide—or if nature decides for us—that to reduce human impact for our safety and survival, we must reduce the number of people on the planet. If we were any other species, as long as our numbers didn’t drop low enough to endanger our gene pool, bringing our population into a more compatible balance with the rest of nature would be sufficient. But we are more complicated than that. We gather into societies, some as small as our own families, some as large as nations or multinational corporations, that thrive by trading with each other. Unlike nesting birds or pods of dolphins, however, we are not content with merely thriving. We always want more.
The measure of nearly every economy that humans have designed has been defined by whether or not it grows. The exceptions—potlatch societies of the Pacific Northwest; co-op communities—may have much to teach us, but they are so rare as to prove the rule. The business news judges how healthy the economy is by whether housing starts rose or fell this month: Never mind that each new house pushes sprawl ever farther, chews up landscape, and requires more resources to provide plumbing, sewers, electricity, and roads. That house represents profit for developers and real estate brokers, and jobs for carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, painters, carpet layers, landscapers, paving crews, and furnishers. Maintenance during its lifespan will create even more jobs. And the economy will grow on.
So what happens if there are fewer of us, needing fewer homes and fewer things? What happens during the transition to a smaller society, with fewer consumers every year—and fewer laborers paying into welfare coffers to support a surplus of unproductive, needy elderly people?
And what happens if we actually reach some optimum number of humans who can harvest and recycle resources at a replenishable pace, so that we achieve equilibrium with the planet that supports us? To maintain such an ideal level would mean never growing beyond it.
Can we do that? Can we have prosperity without growth?
Japan has no choice but to become the first modern society to try.
“Paradoxically,” says Akihiko Matsutani, “our shrinking situation could end up being beneficial. We have to change our business model. That usually takes a long time, but we can’t wait. This is the moment we have to change.”
Matsutani, professor emeritus at one of Japan’s premier economics schools, the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, has been saying things like this for years. Until recently, he’s gotten scant attention: No one has wanted to hear that Japan’s economy was demographically doomed to downsize. But now, events 180 miles north of his Tokyo institute have abruptly forced the entire nation to reconsider living beyond its means.
The moment Matsutani refers to is the aftermath of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11, 2011, off the Tohoku Peninsula in northeastern Japan, which pushed a tidal wave over the sea barriers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Three reactors exploded and melted down, and everyone living in a fifty-mile radius of the damaged facility had to evacuate.
That fifty-mile radius included some of Japan’s richest farmland: until the disaster, Fukushima was known as the Kingdom of Fruits. A bunch of Fukushima grapes would sell for ¥2,500—over US$30—that is, until they vanished from the market because no one would buy them. The same for its sweet akatsuki peaches and its apples, cucumbers, and turnips.
The tragedy also caused Japanese to ask if it was wise to build nuclear plants near seismic faults and coastlines—a description that applied to most of the fifty-four atomic reactors that provided nearly one-third of Japan’s electricity. In the building where Matsutani has his office, months later elevators were still off because of post-Fukushima energy restrictions, as were the air-conditioning and the electric toilet seats with their heated bidets, so beloved in Japan.
Akihiko Matsutani is shocked by the terrible losses his country has sustained, but not surprised. “People who keep saying that Japan should be like France, which gets most of its power from nuclear energy, forget that France isn’t in an earthquake zone. But now that this accident has happened, we have an opportunity to do something positive.” That something is learning to live within its limits, which both Fukushima and the shrinking Japanese population are forcing them to do. “This will actually be good for Japan,” he insists.
Matsutani is the author of a book whose title makes progrowth economists shudder: Shrinking-Population Economics: Lessons from Japan, a copy of which sits on his uncluttered desk. On a blank piece of paper he sketches the iconic symbol of demography: a pyramid, which he divides into three sections. “In most countries, the tip of the pyramid represents the elderly. The middle”—he shades this portion with his pen—“is the active portion of the population, the labor force. The base, the biggest portion, is the young people. Babies, children, students.”
Then he flips the drawing upside down. “This is Japan. Fewer children. Lots of elderly.” He points to the shaded middle zone. “As more of these move up, we’ll have fewer workers to replace them.”
Recently, a research group at Tohoku University warned that in a thousand years, Japan’s childbearing will cease—statistically anyway. They posted a simulated “Child Population Web Clock” showing that every one hundred seconds, the number of Japanese children drops by one—they’re not dying, but growing up, and fewer babies are replacing them. At that rate, they conclude, “Japan would have only one child in May 3011. By the next year, therefore, there would be no children in Japan.”
These kinds of horror stories about Japan’s subreplacement fertility are nonsense, says Matsutani. Japan is certainly top-heavy with old people, and becoming more so. But once the age bubble bursts with the old, high-fertility generations dying off, subsequent generations will even out, and the pyramid will become a cube as the number of children will be closer to the numbers who are passing on. People won’t stop having babies, and if fertility readjusts toward two children per couple—a reasonable outcome in a less-crowded world—population would stabilize.
However, he warns, reshaping demographic geometry from triangular to rectangular in a country with such long life spans takes at least a century. Either way, stable or shrinking, the population would not be growing, which raises a big question:
What happens to the economy?
Traditional economics preaches perpetual growth as a self-evident truth, even though nothing, save God or the universe, can possibly be perpetual—and there’s some doubt about the universe. But assuming an ever-expanding economy were possible, there are only two ways to achieve it: keep inventing more new products (or new versions of old ones) and keep finding new consumers.
Being endlessly creative is hard. Being endlessly competitive to win all the customers works only as long as there are still more customers left—unless, of course, a growing population keeps giving birth to more new consumers. This is one of two reasons why most economists traditionally favor population growth. The other is bigger labor pools: the more workers competing for jobs, the less companies have to pay them.
Unfortunately for those economists—and for us, as long as the system works their way—on a finite planet, an economy dependent on constant growth is no more perpetual than a chain letter or pyramid scheme, which always needs more people buying in. Eventually, there aren’t any more, and everything collapses. Or the raw stuff to make whatever’s being sold grows scarce, and the substitutes aren’t as good, or they run out, too.
Akihiko Matsutani is convinced that his shrinking country can and will have a viable economy, because Japan has no other choice. But it isn’t as simple as fewer people needing fewer things. Although Matsutani agrees that a smaller population means less pressure on resources and land, he cautions that the transition to fewer people will place different strains on the environment.
“Suppose you have a sewage treatment plant for a million people,” he says. It’s an example he knows well; along with his economics degrees, he has a doctorate in civil engineering. “Then suppose the population drops to nine hundred thousand. You can’t just remove 10 percent of the pipes. Even if population drops by half, you still have to maintain 100 percent of the infrastructure. That won’t be easy when we have fewer laborers.”
An economical alternative might be to abandon huge treatment facilities in favor of individual purification tanks for each house. “Centralized sewage treatment is probably better for the environment, but it will be impossible to maintain. So we may have to revise our standards, and accept a dirtier environment.”
But he’s encouraged that personal lifestyles need not suffer in a Japan with fewer people. A leaner economy, he says, will bring its own advantages.
“In the beginning, companies will try to save by cutting wages or workers, but they’ll soon realize that laborers will have become more valuable, and they’ll want to keep the ones they have. So lowering wages won’t work. What will work instead is higher pay, but fewer hours. Right now, we work long hours for lower pay. Laborers will be pleased to have more leisure time. Since World War II ended, we’ve been obsessed with gross domestic product. But GDP has no direct bearing on living standards in a shrinking population economy.”
The hope he sees is the chance to define prosperity by people’s quality of life rather than what money can buy. In this paradoxical nation, where the world’s most populous metropolitan area—Greater Tokyo, with 35 million people—coexists with the fastest-shrinking population, he sees a perfect opportunity for the country to decentralize.
“We’ll have to think in terms of smaller systems, not a big government taking care of everything with big infrastructure. Smaller cities will make more sense. When population grows, prosperity means going to Disneyland once a month, and buying too much and throwing away too much. When population shrinks, prosperity is going on picnics, or taking your children camping. You don’t throw things away—your values change from constant new things to things that last.”
What will inspire investors in a shrinking world? Before he started teaching, Matsutani spent twenty-seven years in Japan’s Finance Ministry. “Just like sewers, finance will get worse until we learn to adjust to a smaller scale. We will go to perpetual bonds—in a sense, we’re already doing it. Japan’s debt is trillions of yen. It’s impossible to repay, so we just pay the interest. Perpetual bonds would work like that. We won’t be as wealthy as when population was growing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have profit. Total productivity will be less with fewer workers, but per-capita productivity won’t change. The number of workers drops 10 percent, so do sales, and so do profits. But per person, it all remains the same.”
In fact, something that traditional economists have ignored—especially those in Europe wringing their hands over declining populations—is that both Japan’s and Germany’s economies began recovering from a decade of slump and recession in the early years of the new millennium, at the same time their populations began to contract. By 2010, Germany had record economic growth, more than twice the rest of the European Union.
In Russia, precipitously dropping numbers predating even Japan’s have panicked economic advisors to the Kremlin. Russia’s birthrate began its descent with the 1991 collapse of communism and the loss of the Soviet Union’s cradle-to-grave assurances of work, education, and shelter. Add to that Russia’s high divorce rate, and since the USSR dissolved, Russia’s population has dropped by 5 million. But even more significant than low fertility is the grim state of Russian health. Russia’s incidence of syphilis is several hundred times higher than in western Europe. Its HIV rates are the world’s fastest growing; by 2020, up to 10 percent of the population could be infected. Cardiovascular deaths are at epidemic levels, and the incidence of mortal violence and accidents is a dozen times higher than Britain’s. Both heart disease and fatal injuries are linked to the Russian addiction to vodka, a national rate of alcoholism unmatched anywhere, which has only worsened since communism ended. Russia’s life expectancy is about the same as Pakistan’s, which is lower than most of Africa’s.
At the same time, Russia’s economy, fueled by its vast oil and gas reserves, has grown vigorously in the new millennium, resulting in the curious anomaly of Moscow, capital of the country with, until recently, the world’s fastest-falling population, having the world’s highest population of billionaires.2
Such numbers confound the conventional wisdom that having fewer people spells doom for robust economies. Nevertheless, Akihiko Matsutani’s book about how shrinking Japan can remain prosperous has attracted scant attention from his country’s financial circles and other economists.
“They’d rather translate American and European books about how to generate growth. They talk about rebuilding the fishing ports destroyed in the typhoon—except it will take up to twenty years to do that, and in twenty years only a quarter of the fishermen will still be alive, so three-fourths of the port facilities won’t be necessary. Such simple discussion isn’t taking place. People don’t want to accept that things they know have changed. Some will say, okay, we can let more immigrant labor in. But at this point, we would need 24 million immigrants by 2030 to maintain our workforce at today’s size. That won’t happen.”
What will happen, he says, is what’s already happening. Not just to Japan, but to the world. “World population is still growing, but agricultural output isn’t. Output from the seas is shrinking. Add those two together, and we get famines.”
He looks at his glass-fronted bookshelves, filled with copies of his book. “In the animal world, when population exceeds its limits, species start reducing. Probably that is what will happen to us humans. Maybe we’re lucky here in Japan, because we’re not waiting until disaster reduces our population.”
In the island city-state of Singapore, one of the world’s most developed nations with one of the world’s lowest birthrates—1.1 children per fertile woman—August 9 is celebrated as National Day, marking independence. In 2012, Mentos Singapore, a division of the multinational mint manufacturer, launched a promotion declaring the evening of August 9 to be “National Night”—during which, televised commercials urged, men should “raise the flag” and married couples should “go all the way for Singapore.” Singapore had already sweetened this call to patriotic pillow duty with the world’s most lavish baby bonuses: $4,000 apiece for a couple’s first two children, and $6,000 each for the third and fourth. The government also matches, dollar for dollar, parental contributions to a child’s savings account, up to $6,000 apiece for the first and second child, $12,000 for the third and fourth child, and $18,0003 for each child thereafter.
During the 1970s, Singapore’s government, fearing that the city-state would become overcrowded, had tried to convince everyone to “Stop at Two.” That succeeded so well that by the mid-1980s they were trying to reverse it, and have been ever since. But to no avail: not even the extravagant baby bribes have tempted Singaporeans to have more children.
The Mentos campaign, set to a rap song—“it’s National Night, so let’s make fireworks ignite, let’s make Singapore’s birthrate right”—would have had even less chance in Japan. Each year, not only the number of babies but the number of Japanese marriages drops, further depressing childbirth in a culture where having a child out of wedlock is almost unknown. The falling marriage rates are often attributed to the disappearance of assured lifetime employment, once a staple with Japanese corporations. Without that security, fewer are willing to risk starting a family. Government projections now assume that 36 percent of the current generation of young Japanese women will never have children.
On the eighth floor of an apartment tower in Takanawa, a posh central Tokyo neighborhood, Keiko, a thirty-five-year-old mother of a two-year-old daughter, greets her visitors. Two are friends who have brought their own daughters for a playdate; the third, who is unmarried, is a Spanish-language court interpreter (the accused are mainly Latin American drug mules). Keiko, round-faced with short dark hair, wears a gray T-shirt, capri pants, and a platinum wedding ring; Nanako, her daughter, is a miniature of her mother.
It is a Monday afternoon; Keiko’s husband, an investment counselor at a finance company, left at 7:00 a.m. and won’t return until 10:00 p.m. Keiko also used to work there. They had been married ten years when Nanako was born. “We didn’t think we needed a child. We were having fun. Raising a kid is so much work, and none of my friends wanted the responsibility. But we decided to give our aging parents a grandchild.”
They have no regrets—nor any intention of having more, she says, hugging Nanako, who’s joined her on the charcoal gray couch. The apartment they own has maple floors and white shag rugs, but just two rooms, plus a compact kitchen. “It’s hard enough with three of us. The size of a house pretty much limits the number of children.” Most of her friends have just one. “A few have two. But more have none.”
She hands Nanako a rice ball from a bowl on the granite coffee table, sends her back to her playmates, and confesses the extreme form of birth control she and her husband use to assure that they don’t have another:
“Not having sex.”
It’s not as radical as it sounds, she says. “Frankly, Japanese people don’t have sex much anymore.”
That would definitely guarantee population decline. But surely there are other ways in Japan to prevent conception? “Of course,” says Junko, the court interpreter. “But not having sex is the most common. Women here don’t like Western medicine—I would never take pills, because of the side effects. And many women believe that an operation changes their hormones. Some use condoms, but young people don’t like to. So either they abort, or do without sex.”
“It’s more than that,” says Keiko. “Sex isn’t how to prove affection in a marriage. When we were dating, we needed to do it to confirm our love. But when people are married and become a family, they affirm their love just by living in the same house, eating the same food.”
All these women—young, healthy, and quite lovely—nod in agreement. “Westerners can’t believe it,” says Keiko. “My German girlfriend keeps asking how is it conceivable that we don’t have sex? But I don’t miss it. I don’t feel dried up, but I also don’t feel that desire when I see my husband or any other attractive man. I’m very satisfied with my life. It’s enough just for us to sleep together.”
Again, no one argues. “My male friends say sex is just a form of recreation,” says Junko. “Like going to a baseball game or the movies—in this case, to a bordello. Once a guy has a family, he doesn’t see his wife as a woman anymore. She’s family, like his mother or sister. Guys don’t have sex with them, either.”
A 2011 Japanese government survey showed that 36 percent of Japanese males aged sixteen to nineteen were either not interested in, or actually “despised,” sex. A term for young men more enamored of animated video games than live female humans is “herbivores”—the implication being that, by comparison, dynamic Japanese career women are “carnivores.”
“Japanese men are getting weak,” says Junko. She glances out the picture window, where Japan’s most blatant phallic symbol, the Eiffel-shaped Tokyo Tower, is spewing potent radio and TV signals. “And women don’t have as many needs as men.” More nods.
She laughs. “Our German girlfriend wouldn’t agree.”
Environmentally attuned Western economists have been mulling an economy of prosperity without growth for decades, especially since publication of The Limits to Growth and Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s work. To the University of Maryland’s Herman Daly, the dean of steady-state economists, it’s simply the law of diminishing returns: produce too many goods, and they’re not so good anymore.
“We then have uneconomic growth, producing ‘bads’ faster than goods—making us poorer, not richer,” Daly, a former senior economist at the World Bank, has written. “Once we pass the optimal scale, growth becomes stupid in the short run and impossible to maintain in the long run.”
Long before him, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith warned that economic growth, like everything else on Earth, was subject to resource limits. But identifying what doesn’t work is one thing; figuring out what will, and how to transition to it, is another.
There’s already an excellent model for the steady-state economy that Daly and his ecological economist colleagues have long espoused: the Earth itself. “Neither the surface nor the mass of the Earth is growing,” Daly continually reminds people. On Earth, inputs and outputs have always cycled and recycled ad infinitum, transforming one into the other. Things only got out of whack when one species—ours—started demanding more stuff than ever before, requiring more concentrated energy for that stuff’s manufacture than nature had ever accommodated all at once.
We’re not the first instance of that happening in the planet’s history. From time to time, there have been other exaggerated inputs—like the asteroid strike that knocked off the dinosaurs and nearly two-thirds of everything else alive. It took several million years for Earth to absorb its dust and spawn a new cast of characters to be fruitful and multiply. To avoid bringing something comparably drastic upon ourselves, the ecological economists propose we rethink the way we provision civilization—starting now.
It’s a big job. Today’s globalized economy literally means an economy the size of our planet—but as Daly points out, that also means there’s no more room to expand. The addition of more fuel reserves than we once thought we had—in the form of gas we free by shattering bedrock, oil we wring from sand and shale, and newly ice-free Arctic deposits—seems impressive from a short-term perspective, such as an election cycle. But the math reveals that they’ll buy us relatively little extra time, and may cost much more than they give. The techniques to harvest them make alarming messes, and burning them turns the skies even more uncontrollable and the oceans increasingly corrosive.
“The closer the economy approaches the scale of the Earth,” Daly told the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission in 2008, “the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior of the Earth.” In a steady-state economy, we wouldn’t be seeking more and dirtier ways to fuel the engine of growth, because we’d live within our planet’s means. But if an economy permanently stopped expanding, wouldn’t that mean it has failed?
No more, said Daly, than it means that the Earth is static—“a great deal of qualitative change can happen inside a steady state, and certainly has happened on Earth.” In a steady-state economy, the population would stay more or less constant at a livable, optimal level, and so would the consumer base. Same with the labor pool, which would make just enough stuff for the consumers to consume. Manufacturing wastes, and products that had passed their useful life, would be continually recycled. Like a terrarium, everything would be in balance…
… which is easier said than done. The transition alone will be daunting, because throughout human history, we’ve been doing exactly the opposite, and nearly everyone alive knows no other way. What worked fine for our ancestors—run out of game, pick up and move to new hunting grounds—doesn’t work when there’s nowhere else to go that we haven’t already picked over. But it’s hard for most of us to see that, because, like Alberta tar sands, we keep squeezing more out of soil and water. The fact that they give steadily less is mainly apparent to a growing fringe at the bottom of the human tapestry: more hungry people than the population of the entire human race before industrialization began blowing the lid off our numbers.
So how do we get those of us at the top of the food chain to comprehend, lest we join their ranks?
The 2008 global financial crisis created a whole new batch of recruits to the world’s chronic have-nots: growing numbers of underemployed and jobless, as the traditional economy fails them. University of Vermont economist Joshua Farley, coauthor of the 2010 book Ecological Economics with Herman Daly, has spent much time since that avalanche began thinking about something that few of us understand: monetary policy.
“That’s the problem: Most people don’t know where money comes from, nor how it’s created.”
Which, he believes, is the reason why our economy today resembles a chain letter based on the fiction of an infinite number of recipients, instead of a terrarium—such as Terra, the Earth itself. Farley, whose boyish looks are belied only by his shock of gray hair, has become adept at explaining it to policy makers who should already know it but don’t, and to college undergraduates.
“Take the United States. There are about 800 billion dollars in actual bills, but that’s a tiny fraction of the actual money we use.” The rest is money that banks magically create whenever checks are written, because a bank only has to keep a fraction—usually around one-fifth—of actual deposits at any time, based on the usually reliable assumption that its customers aren’t all going to simultaneously withdraw their savings.
This is the easy part: If a bank need only keep 20 percent of deposits on hand, it can lend out five times the amount of actual money it has. Which it does. Each time this happens, Farley explains, the economy has just grown again. “Banks virtually loan money into existence—and at interest.” Of the interest it earns, four-fifths gets loaned out again.
Now comes the hard part: “So when I went to the bank and took out a mortgage for $100,000,” says Farley, “the bank wrote me a check that essentially created that amount. As long as I haven’t paid it back, that money circulates through our economy and lubricates the whole economic process. Except it isn’t really money based on anything of value, except my promise to pay it back. It’s debt that they’ve created. All the money in our country right now is debt: about $50 trillion in total interest-bearing debt in the United States alone.”
In the days when money was backed by its face value in silver or gold, there were limits to how much wealth could flow around the world. Today, it’s virtual money that the bank lends into existence on a computer screen. “And unless the economy continually expands, there is no new flow of money to pay back that money, plus interest.” Hence the chain letter.
“As it stands now, if banks start loaning money more slowly than they collect debts, the quantity of money in the economy goes down, and it’s impossible to pay back debts. So we get defaults on houses, defaults on mortgages, defaults on loans. We get collapsing businesses. Our economy plunges into misery and unemployment. Under our current monetary system, the only alternative to that is endless growth. So one absolute thing we have to change is the whole nature of the monetary system.”
So how might we do that?
“It’s fairly simple. It’s a change that’s been proposed by economists for centuries. We deny banks the right to create money.”
Instead, Farley says, money creation would go back to where it used to be. “We restore that right to the government. It can spend money into existence on public goods, like rebuilding our infrastructure, our education systems, our sewage systems, and restoring our watersheds and forests. Or it can loan money into existence to state governments and local governments or to central industries, like renewable energy systems—but at zero interest. At zero percent interest, when it’s paid back, the money’s destroyed. So there’s no continual increase in the money supply.”
There’s a challenge with that solution, he admits. “You’re trying to take the right to create wealth away from some of the wealthiest people on the planet.”
That does present an obstacle. And it’s not simply confiscating Goldman Sachs’s or HSBC’s legal magic wands that allow them to conjure substance out of thin air by only maintaining fractional deposits: It also deprives them of vast interest income. The government would no longer have to borrow money, because it would literally create it by spending it on public goods and works. That also means no more needing to raise taxes in order to pay borrowed money back, plus interest.
The wealthiest 10 percent would appreciate the reduced tax part, but they wouldn’t much like the loss of interest. “Since the top 10 percent of the economy is who receives interest payments, and the bottom 90 percent pays them, interest payments today essentially redistribute wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent.”
In a steady-state economy, Farley says, the opposite would happen: Government would spend for things that benefit 100 percent of the people, creating jobs to build and maintain them, and redistributing money more equally throughout society. Taken globally, a fairer redistribution of wealth plus population reduction—either because we gracefully nudge our numbers toward some ecological balance, or because some unpleasant act of nature abruptly jerks us in that direction—are the inseparable sides of the new coin the human race must spend to afford the future.
It all makes sense, and sounds highly unlikely. Picture a world where economic decisions are made not to benefit the cleverest financial whizzes, nor the brawniest companies, nor the most powerful nations, but according to what’s best for the most people and for the planet that sustains us all. Lovely, right?
Now, picture all the interested parties letting it happen. Not so pretty.
The switch to a sustainable economy, wrote Herman Daly in Scientific American in 2005, “would entail an enormous change of mind and heart by economists, politicians, and voters. One might well be tempted to declare that such a project would be impossible. But the alternative to a sustainable economy—an ever-growing economy—is biophysically impossible. In choosing between tackling a political impossibility and a biophysical impossibility, I would judge the latter to be the more impossible, and take my chances with the former.”
To have a world where the majority enjoyed a life that most of us would accept—something like a European lifestyle: less consumptive and energy-intensive than in the United States or China; more secure than in Africa—would require fewer people dividing up the world’s goods, and leaving enough for nature to thrive. “Usually,” says Jon Erickson, Farley’s University of Vermont ecological economist colleague, “people presume that when economists talk about raising everyone’s material standard of living—be it to a European, Japanese, or American standard—they mean for all seven or nine billion people. But mathematically, that clearly won’t work. If we want a more affluent world, we have to drop population size. They go hand in hand.”
The world’s current, chronic economic crisis springs from everyone—from homeowners to entire nations—getting into more debt than we can possibly pay back. The idea of the whole world incurring even more debt just to pay off debts that can’t be met is Ponzi financing in the extreme. That’s where national economies—and even international, such as the European Union’s—approach the brink of collapse. Yet thus far, says Erickson, it’s the only kind of financing we’ve tried.
“We take on more debt, over and over again, assuming we’ll simply grow more in the future and pay it off later. The only way we can possibly pay down that debt without growing is by consuming less.”
There are only two ways to do that. “Either everybody on the average consumes less, or we have fewer people consuming.”
Or both. Getting people to want less sounds tough, though from Farley’s and Erickson’s vantage point, perhaps not impossible. The Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, where they teach, which began at Herman Daly’s school, the University of Maryland, moved to Vermont because, says Erickson, “at Maryland, it was like an outcast institute. Here, it’s more central to what this university, Burlington, and Vermont are about: a transition to a reasonable economy.”
Burlington, Vermont: whose last three mayors described themselves as either socialist or progressive, rather than Democrat or Republican. A city with a community land trust featuring a “ladder of affordability” for housing, offering everything from single rooms to co-op rentals, home ownership, and cohousing. A Lake Champlain waterfront converted mostly to public space. A supermarket-sized, city co-op grocery. Citywide composting. An electric utility that produces fifty megawatts from waste wood products.
Hard to get much more livable, boast patriotic residents. And yet, Erickson says, neither Burlington nor steady-state economics are radical. “It’s good old Vermont conservatism”—and quite similar, he adds, to Akihiko Matsutani’s prescription for Japan, which turns out to be very appealing for fiscal conservatives: If deficit spending is necessary to a growing society, in a shrinking society what’s needed is exactly the opposite. As populations start shrinking—“as they must,” Jon Erickson tells his students, “either by design or by default”—we will have to learn to live with balanced budgets.
Which, whether it likes it or not, Japan is en route to doing.
Yoshimi Kashitani, his khaki cargo pants tucked into black rubber boots, sloshes through the cold water cascading down his terraced wasabi patch. Bending, he inspects some one-year-old plants. “They are doing very well,” he tells Yoshio Takeya, his new helper, who’s watching closely from the next tier up.
Kashitani is a healthy, wiry man of eighty-three. He has been doing this right here all his life, as did his father before him. His wasabi grows high up a steep canyon above the village of Nosegawa in mountainous Nara Prefecture on south Honshu Island. Takeya, fifty years younger, is from Osaka, part of Japan’s Keihanshin metropolitan area that includes Kyoto and Kobe, together home to 18 million people.
Nosegawa has five hundred people and counting—down. In 1975, twenty-three hundred lived here, working in forestry, growing wasabi and shiitake mushrooms, making chopsticks, and hatching amago trout. But mechanization and reusable plastic killed their hand-carved chopstick industry, which employed dozens who scraped and planed standard chopsticks from sugi cedar and fancy chopsticks from hinoki cypress. Mostly, though, the numbers withered away as older generations died off and fewer young people took their place. Nearly half of Nosegawa’s residents are now over sixty-five.
It’s the same throughout the Japanese countryside: fields and farmhouses vacant, elementary and middle schools down to handfuls of students, and elderly farmers still working the land because there’s nobody else to do it. “Once we were fourteen wasabi farmers here,” says Yoshimi Kashitani, rain dripping from the bill of his cap. “Now just five of us are left.” He has three daughters, born right after World War II before the short-lived baby boom abruptly ended. They now live in Yokahama and Osaka, and aren’t coming back to grow wasabi. Only one of the five growers had a son, and he, too, left for the city. “So this young man is our only hope.”
In a town where young means fifty years old, Takeya, who’s dressed like his mentor except his rubber boots are white, is truly youthful at only thirty-three. After graduating from Osaka University in agriculture, he found few jobs awaiting in the dying countryside. But wasabi interested him. Despite all its soba and sushi eaters, Japan now mainly imports it from China, where, he says, the mass-produced, pesticided field wasabi barely resembles the native wasabi horseradish grown chemical-free in rivers like Mr. Kashitani’s. Takeya found this place on the Internet: the prefecture’s website described how the Nosegawans were using indigenous heirloom stock, hand gathering and nurturing their own seed. No one else he knew of still did that.
Wasabi growers, Nosegawa, Nara Prefecture, Japan
All around them, springs and waterfalls gush from the canyon walls. The mountain stream where Kashitani built sixteen stone terraces is lined with maple, beech, and Japanese oak, which retain water far better than the cypress and cedar that have replaced much of the native hardwoods in the mountains surrounding Nosegawa. Hinoki cypress and sugi cedar are also native, but in the postwar years the balance of Japan’s deciduous-conifer forests began to tip, as much of its hardwoods were clear-cut by the government to make way for faster-growing cypress and cedar for the construction and furniture industries.
The result is a national ecological snafu. As each of those species matures, it emits increasing amounts of pollen. By 2000, more than a quarter of the Japanese people were itching and sneezing from a hay fever pandemic, due to all the cypress and cedars their government had planted. Each year, with the trees’ advancing age, more eyes redden and more sinuses burn. During the peak month of April, half the country is wearing face masks—and complaining.
But in this cool canyon, too steep for timbering, the air is bracing and fragrant. Leaf detritus and droppings of bears, boar, deer, fox, and monkeys that drink here provide the nutrients for the shiny, heart-shaped wasabi leaves poking up from the terraced streambed. As the rain eases, morning clears the mountaintop fog. The trills of Japanese bush warblers echo off the bedrock, as overhead, a Japanese mountain hawk-eagle, whose own population fell along with the hardwoods that once supported its massive nests, circles on barred wings.
Nevertheless, as the number of people here declines, the numbers of animals have increased. Villagers must fence off potato and cucumber gardens from bears, and hang netting over the stacks of oak logs injected with shiitake mushroom spores to protect them from herons and macaques. To young Yoshio Takeya, his bowl-cut hair rain-plastered to his forehead, it only makes his future more beautiful. He and his girlfriend from agriculture school will soon take over one of Nosegawa’s abandoned wasabi patches for themselves.
As he sloshes his way to the next tier, a cloud of white butterflies circles his head. Their larvae eat wasabi leaves, but he doesn’t mind: the presence of insects is proof that the ton of wasabi this mountain produces each year is unadulterated and organic. His girlfriend is a bit concerned that this isolated village has no supermarket, but here they can have something of their own, and be able to marry and have a child.
Kashitani approves of his protégé’s plans: he and his colleagues, now in their eighties, are still strong enough to keep working for a while. “The air and water are so pure and good, we live longer here.” Yet his own wife’s recent death marked the first of their generation to go, and talk in the village has turned to wondering who will maintain their ancestors’ tombs for them when they’re all gone. For a while, their children will come back during the summer Obon festival to venerate them, but—“Unless more young people arrive, this village will disappear.” He nods at young Takeya. “Maybe now they will come.”
“They should,” says Takeya. “Most of our classmates couldn’t get jobs, because they wanted to stay near the cities, in agribusiness. They should spread out. This,” he says, indicating the river plunging through the green terraces, “is real.”
Which is exactly what economist Akihiko Matsutani, who sees prosperity in population reduction, expects more young people to realize. Right now, metro areas like Greater Tokyo and Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe are magnets for young people. But as today’s workforce ages and becomes less productive, the megalopoli themselves will age. A smaller workforce will be employed in fewer heavy Japanese industries requiring coastal harbors for imported raw materials. By 2030, Matsutani calculates, shrinking Tokyo would need more than 6 million immigrants from elsewhere in Japan to maintain today’s labor levels—an impossibility because, if for no other reason, they couldn’t afford the real estate.
Instead of laborers seeking heavy industries, more nimble industries making lighter consumer goods will go where laborers are, spreading opportunity more equitably across the land. Smaller, more localized markets will take on new appeal, and as prosperity is redefined around shorter working weeks and quality of life rather than relentless accumulation, the hinterlands will be ever more attractive places to live.
The transition to a smaller population with, at least for a while, a higher proportion of older people—a completely new experience in human history—won’t be painless.
“I wish we were wise enough to downsize gracefully and intelligently,” says Matsutani. “The longer people fail to face what is happening, the harsher the adjustment will be.” The part that makes most economists shiver is pensions, which have always been a way to share the fruits of economic growth across generations—“only fair,” Matsutani writes, “since the previous generation laid the economic foundation for the affluence of the following generation.” But in a shrinking, aging economy, when affluence is no longer growing, and with fewer workers paying into pension plans for all those long-lived seniors, people will have to save more for their own retirements, and make do on reduced income.
Like China’s Jiang Zhenghua, now charged with planning how his country will deal with its own aging populace, Akihiko Matsutani sees those savings helping to finance communal public housing, parks, and cultural facilities that seniors will need. He’s heard the scary rhetoric in Europe about how high payroll taxes must soar to meet the pension shortfall if populations fall, and how everyone should pump out more babies, lest their economies crumple beneath a mass of unproductive, gray-haired retirees. In reply, Matsutani reminds people that children, too, can be considered a burden on society, since they don’t work and require their own infrastructure. Smaller populations won’t need as many schools or subsidies for public and private universities. The size of government, too, will shrink along with the body politic: all representing savings that can be reallocated where they’re needed.
“It’s a more peaceful society when a large part of the population is aged,” observes Japanese senator Kuniko Inoguchi, who is also a demographer. “The aged won’t sacrifice health care for guns. Because of the graying populations in most democracies,” she says, “in the twenty-first century there’s hope for us to find a geriatric peace.”
And with less dependence on foreign imports to sustain frenetic levels of production, a country might be less inclined to spend billions defending access to resources overseas, as the United States has done at such great financial and human cost. Without resource wars, there would be that much more available for caring for the elderly, until ages come back into balance, leveling out with each passing generation to a smaller, leaner population, with more breathing room to savor life.
As a boy in the city of Matsumoto in central Japan, Keibo Oiwa would accompany his mother to Genchi no Ido, an artesian well in the middle of town that’s been used for thousands of years. He now teaches anthropology at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama, but following a Zen purification retreat in Matsumoto, he’s returned to the old wooden portico that shelters the well. Thirst quenched and ablutions completed, he bows before a statue of a standing Buddha holding an infant, with two other babies tugging at his robes. “Buddha as compassionate mother,” notes Oiwa.
Few Japanese mothers have three children anymore, but Oiwa’s actually headed to see one: his former student Mari Tokuhisa. Oiwa, lean and denim-clad, is the founder of The Sloth Club, a group that promotes the sustainable life he envisioned in his popular book Slow Is Beautiful. His friends Mari and her husband, Kin, recently found an old house in Shiga, a nearby farming village, where, like most of rural Japan, the median age is in the seventies and empty houses rent cheaply—in this case, for ¥10,000 a month, about US$130.
The half-hour drive there climbs through a cypress forest still ribboned with oak, beech, and camellia. Descending, the road crosses a narrow valley of terraced rice paddies, bisected by a small river. On the opposite side, Shiga’s wooden houses fill a mountain pass lined with red pines.
It is very quiet, because few live here now. Mari, in a peasant blouse and long skirt, and her three small boys, Kyusen, Gennosuke, and Yosei, await in front of their new home, the former village chief’s house. The town is now so small that legally it no longer exists.
“It’s beautiful here,” Oiwa says, greeting Mari with a hug.
“Hai.” With the same haircut as her sons, they resemble a family of pixies. The house, about a hundred years old, has curved Japanese eaves. Its interior, carpeted in woven straw mats, has a reed ceiling and window shades. Shoji screens that divide the large space into rooms are open so that afternoon light fills the house. A brick chimney is retrofitted with an iron woodstove made by Mari’s husband, who’s off building stage sets for a theater company. They met as students; disillusioned with the shaky Japanese job market after their first son was born, they escaped to Amami Oshima, a tiny island near Okinawa at the Japanese archipelago’s southern tip, to practice permaculture. So far from the big crowded islands, life there turns around families, which tend to be larger than the rest of Japan, and they soon had two more. “I still want more. My friend just had her fifth.”
Before becoming a mother, she worked in one of the slow food cafés that Keibo Oiwa has sponsored around Japan, which feature local ingredients prepared from scratch. When they decided to return to Honshu, they were committed to becoming as self-sufficient as possible, a decision underscored by the Fukushima earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011—known evermore in Japan as 3/11.
“Our life here is simple. We grow our food and make our furniture. Our sons’ nursery school meets outdoors. But if we’re not free from nuclear power, it’s not enough. So since 3/11, we’re heating our bathwater with firewood.”
Yes, it takes more time, she says. “But it’s also more fun. When we had a modern life in Yokohama, we would waste time. Now, by putting effort into making things, it’s like we’re regaining time.”
“Hai,” says Oiwa. “Exactly. That is the slow life. People think environmental living means being ascetic. But every culture has a huge storage of fun. Sure, there’s fun technology. But today we see so many sick, unhappy, empty people. Before 3/11, people gave thanks to nuclear power for allowing us to have our lives. But now, post-3/11, we realize that we all die. We who survived aren’t immortal; we’re in the palm of Buddha. Knowing that we die is the first wisdom of human beings, the beginning of philosophy. Every day I wake up still alive, that is happiness.”
They’re having tea around a table hewn by Mari’s husband from cypress slabs. “We humans have a proper speed, and when society speeds beyond our limit, we get social problems,” Oiwa says. “Psychological problems. Things break down. We’ve now contaminated much of this island, but they still say we need economic growth. They act like we’ll live forever. But if we can face the wisdom that everyone dies, we’ll see that we live not because of nuclear power, but because of the sun and the air. Once we realize that, maybe we can turn this around.”
They go next door to see Mari’s seventy-year-old neighbor, Michiko Takizawa. A widow early in life, she raised her two children by growing vegetables and rice and keeping cows, angora rabbits, and silkworms. With pleasure, Oiwa inspects her two-hundred-year-old house: traditional post-and-beam, strong enough to sustain a second story of thick, earthen walls. The main beam, fully a half-meter wide, is from a single Japanese red pine.
They kneel at a low round table, where Michiko-san sets bowls of sliced eggplant, zucchini, green beans, and plums she pickles in sugar and vinegar. “Take,” she says, handing a plum to Mari’s oldest, whose second-grade classroom has just four other students. “And that’s after they combined two schools. After we die”—other than Mari’s family, Michiko’s youngest neighbor is fifty-five—“all these houses will be empty.” Her unmarried son, who works construction, still lives nearby. “But women don’t want to marry men here. Women today would rather have a job than get married.” One man brought a Filipina bride, she says, “But she left. The culture was too different. She said she didn’t like wasabi.”
“Aren’t more city people moving here?” Keibo asks.
“More are still leaving than coming.” She looks sadly at Mari, who just smiles at her until she has to smile back.
“You will see,” Mari tells her. She and her husband have rented one of Michiko-san’s rice paddies, which they will cultivate organically. A discussion ensues about how to keep water in the paddy all winter, despite the snow, to control weeds.
Afterward, they end up in Michiko’s cornucopial vegetable patch. On her hands and knees, she harvests sweet peppers, eggplants, okra, and soybeans for her guests. Oiwa gazes raptly at her bountiful garden, bordered by lilies and filled with dusky blue butterflies. Beyond it are rice paddies latticed with channels of water borrowed from the river, the brilliant green stalks heavy with grains about to turn golden. Past them is a perfect triangular wedge of mountain covered with mixed forest—and farther, more cool mountains dissolving into fog.
This, Oiwa knows, is a blessed remnant of satoyama, the harmonious marriage of human and natural landscapes that for thousands of years defined the Japanese countryside. In these tranquil mosaics of cultivated lands, wildflower meadows, ponds, streams, orchards, and forests, Japanese culture was born. On islands where, since ancient times, humans have shaped and manicured all but the craggiest terrain, satoyama has been the salvation of Japanese biodiversity. For millennia, people dwelling in satoyama landscapes harvested firewood and charcoal, pastured animals, and grew crops with an aesthetic that invited and nurtured fish, frogs, dragonflies, butterflies, fireflies, grasshoppers, songbirds, ducks, storks, and falcons.
But in the 1960s, farmhouse chimneys gave way to oil burners. As synthetic fertilizer took over the fields, coppiced woodlands that once provided warmth, fodder, and leaf mulch for rice paddies were no longer visited daily. Pesticides banished the grasshoppers and caterpillars, and the herons, egrets, and majestic Oriental white storks that fed on them failed to return. Concrete lining for ditches to drain fields wiped out tadpoles, snails, and sludge worms. As cows and beef cattle switched from pasture to imported corn and soy feed, grasslands and meadows that once surrounded Japanese cities disappeared beneath housing developments and golf courses.
Within a half-century, Japan no longer resembled a timeless ink-on-silk painting. But as numbers recede, and as a smaller younger generation seeks alternatives to the corporate soldiering that came to define Japanese work, there is a chance for a slower life to return, along with landscapes to sustain it.
The last wild Oriental white stork in Japan was seen in 1971. In 1989, a stork hatchery at Toyooka, an hour from Kyoto in Hyogo Prefecture, successfully produced offspring using breeding pairs from Russia. But the local rice fields, soaked annually with organo-mercury pesticides, proved too toxic for the fledgling birds to be released. In 2004, a ten-year-old schoolgirl named Yuka Okada learned that storks like the caged birds in Toyooka’s now crowded hatchery had once filled the skies and nested on every chimney. After learning why they no longer did, she went to the mayor and demanded that Toyooka serve organic rice for school lunches.
To do that meant eliminating mercury, inviting back grasshoppers but also making the rice paddies safe for storks. The mayor, hearing the simple truth from a ten-year-old, could only agree. His city’s slogan became “An environment good for storks must be good for humans, too.” The next plantings were pesticide-free. A year later, the first stork was released, and today, wherever they nest, the rice is twice as valuable because the presence of storks guarantees its purity. An economy that had bottomed was rejuvenated, and today tourists flock to Toyooka to watch hundreds of storks do the same.
The value to be reaped from tourists and fancy organic rice is easy to quantify. Harder, but most critical, is calculating the value of nature—what conservation ecologists call natural capital. How much is a grasshopper worth, anyway, if nature always provided them for free? Trees in forests were free. Rivers and the atmosphere were free places to toss wastes. Free, but ultimately costly, when they vanish or can hold no more.
The accounting of nature’s capital has never been included in corporate balance sheets, but every prechemical farmer knew it well. In a Japan with far fewer Japanese, as Japan will inevitably become this century, there is a chance for natural capital to replenish, and for people to enjoy healthier, even happier lives.
The rice fields may yield less, if humans must share the grains with grasshoppers—but with fewer humans, that won’t be such a problem.