Japanese Migration: Kyushu is a Syphon for Fukuoka is a Syphon for Tokyo is a Syphon for Overseas

There is a revealing trend in the Japanese working population. More and more of them are looking at job opportunities overseas. This is especially true for the young (25~29 years old) (総務省「人口推計」). There are plenty of reasons of course, the economic malaise, increasing proportion of the aging population, impending collapse of the lifetime employment system, the dull economic reforms by the politicians, whatever it is, the outlook looks a little bleak. On the other hand, there seems to be an increasing number of people in the media suggesting alternatives to becoming a sarari-man — like living overseas (see here, here, here, here, here). Countries like South Korea and China have been already aggressively exporting their talent to the West (I don’t recall a day when I haven’t seen people from these two countries at my Univ.). You don’t see many Japanese undergraduates, but this could be that relatively speaking, conditions are good in Japan (only 20% of college graduates get full time jobs in South Korea). But as economic conditions worsen, inevitably, the Japanese are following in their footsteps.

Japan Research Institute (JRI) ran a study and showed that in addition to the reasons stated above, the major cities are in overcapacity and cannot handle a higher number of “immigrants” from within the country. They showed that from 2000 onward to late 2007, there was a massive migration towards Tokyo to find work. This isn’t surprising because the job to job seeker ratio is much higher for bigger cities. But from late 2007 to now, there was a precipitous drop in migrants to Tokyo, while there was an increase in people residing overseas (especially the young population). What’s also interesting, is that many people move towards a bigger city in proximity to look for work; but these mid-sized cities are getting overwhelmed, and eventually, people end up in Tokyo.

I decided it would be interesting to plot this data (総務省) in animation form. With code from Aoki Shigenobu (青木繁伸), the following is the cumulative migration of each Prefecture zeroed at 1991 1990 (with a couple transformations to make it work). The darker colors represent higher migration, and the lighter colors as negative migration (hope the vid works!).

Pausing it at 2009, we could easily see that the Prefectures with big cities attract the most workers. Much of the northeastern bloc hasn’t attracted much at all, whereas the Kyushu go to Fukuoka. I list the Prefectures with the highest number of imports below:

# [1] Tokyo Kanagawa Saitama Chiba Aichi Fukuoka
# [7] Shiga Ibaraki Hyougo Tochigi Mie Okinawa
#[13] Miyagi Yamanashi Nara Gunma Kagawa Tottori
#[19] Okayama Nagano Toyama Tokushima Ishikawa Kouchi
#[25] Fukui Saga Ooita Shimane Shizuoka Kumamoto
#[31] Wakayama Miyazaki Gifu Kagoshima Ehime Yamagata
#[37] Yamaguchi Kyoto Iwate Hiroshima Niigata Akita
#[43] Fukushima Aomori Nagasaki Hokkaido Osaka

The first four Prefectures are from the same region, and the fifth is Aichi, another big population center. Curiously, Osaka ranked last.

I also plotted the trend in Japanese people living in a foreign country (外務省). I plotted this as a bar plot, while showing the marginal change in population for Tokyo and non-Tokyo big cities. Sorry the axes for the bar plot and line plot don’t match up properly (bad software!).

As was reported by JRI, we see a monotonically increasing population that is going overseas. Tokyo shows a massive export of its population in the 90s, but imports a massive amount subsequently. The other big cities have a vaguely similar trend, but the absolute amount of migrations pales in comparison to Tokyo. The 2009 foreign residents data is still missing, but it is expected to increase relative to 2008.

When people are leaving their native areas, it is because it’s more advantageous to live somewhere else. In this case, a population movement towards the big cities and subsequently(?) out of the country, it evidences less than optimal conditions. We saw the rise of a bunch of recruiting/employment agencies during the late 90s to accommodate an unstable workforce. Similarly, there will probably be a rise in agencies to deploy people to work overseas. Will the rising trend continue? Would it be ultimately be beneficial to socially diversify the population? Would the economy just shrink due to unattractive opportunities domestically? We will see.

Refs:

1. 日本総合研究所(Japan Research Institute) 調査部　ビジネス戦略研究センター。新たな成長地域を求める、わが国の人口流動 －人口流動の「停滞」を超えて 。2009年11月10日 。
2. 外務省。平成20年の海外在留邦人数調査統計。
3. 総務省。住民基本台帳人口移動報告 平成21年結果（統計表）－移動者数の状況－。

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