As it peers into an uncertain future, Japan's biggest problems can be summed up in a number: 250.
Add a percentage sign and that's how much debt the nation owes relative to its economic output. Add three zeroes, making it 250,000, and you get the rough number by which Japan's population shrank in 2013. It was a record slide, and one that got Shinzo Abe's attention. To counter the trend, Japan's prime minister wants to import 200,000 foreign workers a year. They would buttress a shrinking workforce and pump dynamism into an insular business culture.
The proposal could be a nonstarter; many Japanese still revel in a homogeneity that they believe fosters cohesion and limits crime and other social ills. Also, Abe has shown zero political will to push through other structural changes, so why expect him to fight to open the demographic equivalent of a Pandora's Box? But there's another reason why casting open the immigration floodgates would be a risky gambit: The move might work at cross-purposes with Abe's push to get companies to up wages — which are critical to his revival plans.