How Robot Laborers Could Restock Italy and Japan’s Dwindling Workforce

The Sci-Fi Scenario May Sound Ominous, but Droids Could Help Countries with Low Birth Rates

Ask experts about the future of Italy and Japan, and you won’t hear many hopeful opinions. One is destined to fall out of the Euro. The other is condemned to secular stagnation and more economic “lost decades.”

But the worst, we are told, is yet to come, because both countries have extremely low birth rates. Harvard sociologist Mary Brinton calls this “a demographic time bomb.” Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin says simply, “We are a dying country.”

Could all the experts be wrong?

Yes, and the reason is robots.

Conventional wisdom has long held …

By Jack Gill | December 20, 2017

What Losing a War Does to a Nation’s Psyche

70 Years After World War II, Japanese Elites Are Still Haunted by Despair and Shame

By Edgar A. Porter | October 17, 2017

In the spring of 1976, while visiting the Tokyo Zoo, I was confronted with the unforgettable sight of an aging former Japanese soldier, wearing a ragged army uniform and cap, …

The Attack on Pearl Harbor Didn’t Stop the Japanese from Dreaming of Hawaiian Vacations

In Postwar Japan, the Aloha State was—and Still Is—a Longed-For Paradise

By Philip Brasor and Masako Tsubuku | October 6, 2016

In August 1946, a year after Japan surrendered, a musical entitled “Hawaii no Hana” (“Hawaiian Flower”) opened at the Nichigeki Theater in Tokyo’s Ginza district. The city had barely started …

In Hawaii, an Immigrant Family that Bridged Japanese and American Worlds

How Siblings Torn Between Two Sides of the Pacific Forged Identities in the Aftermath of War

By Bernice Kiyo Glenn | October 6, 2016

I still remember them at the dining table after dinner each night in our Honolulu home. Three elegant sisters, styled out of Vogue magazine, their jet black hair in neat …

The Japanese-American Officer Who Helped Take Down and Then Rebuild Japan

Born in Seattle in 1920, Harry Fukuhara Was Fully Bicultural, Bilingual, and Binational

By Pamela Rotner Sakamoto | January 28, 2016

When I first met Harry Fukuhara, in 1994, he was orchestrating a Tokyo press conference for Japanese Foreign Ministry officials, former Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, and veterans of the …

Somersaulting into America

As a Top Japanese Gymnast, My Dad’s Future Was Laid Out for Him. He Opted for Adventure in the U.S. Instead.

by Erika Hayasaki | January 2, 2015

The letter that would change my father’s life—and eventually lead to his recent induction into the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame—arrived in 1964, at his high school in Nara, Japan. …

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