Now the Keidanren, the association of big, dyed-in-the-wool manufacturers, is shifting its position. This autumn it called for a more active immigration policy to bring in highly skilled foreign workers, whose present number the Keidanren puts at a mere 180,000.

It also called for a revamp of Japan’s three-year training programmes, a big source of foreign workers. These are supposed to involve a year’s training and then two years’ on-the-job experience. In practice, they provide cheap labour (mainly from Asia) for the garment industry, farming and fish-processing. Workers, says Tsuyoshi Hirabayashi of the justice ministry, are often abused by employers demanding long hours and paying much less than the legal minimum wage. Meanwhile, foreigners coming to the end of the scheme often leave the country to return illegally. Mr Sakanaka calls for the training programme to be abolished.

Japanese conservatives, and many others, point to the South Americans of Japanese descent as a failed experiment. Even with Japanese names, they say, the incomers still stand out. Yet in Nishi-Koizumi in Gunma prefecture, just north of Tokyo, a town dominated by a Sanyo electronics plant, the picture is different. In the family-owned factory of Kazuya Sakamoto, which for decades has supplied parts to Sanyo, three-fifths of the 300 workers are foreigners, mainly Japanese-Brazilians.

The town is certainly down at heel by comparison with the nearby capital, though it has a mildly exotic flavour in other respects, including five tattoo parlours on the main street. Yet without foreigners, says Mr Sakamoto, it is very hard to imagine there would be a town — or his family company — at all. His father was the first to recruit foreigners, and the town changed the hospitals and the local schools to suit: there are special classes in Portuguese to bring overseas children up to speed in some subjects. The result, says Mr Sakamoto, is that foreign workers send word home about the opportunities, and other good workers follow. In future, he thinks, the country should be much more welcoming to young people from around Asia.

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