An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and The Chronology of the Future

ABSTRACT

How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan’s national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• Japan
• demographic crisis
• future
• chronology

Introduction

What does it mean to say a nation-state is ‘shrinking’? The referent is rarely the erosion of physical territory; rather, shrinking is a term that points to demographic change and population loss (Matanle and Rausch, 2011; Seth 2012; Steinvorth, 2016; Vogel, 2018). And yet, barring catastrophic events, national population decline is generally a gradual and uneven process, and one often influenced by rural-urban discrepancies. To conceive of a nation as shrinking entails abstract, future-oriented imagining, objectification, and temporalisation. It requires the capacity to picture the nation as possessing a statistically discernible and foreseeable future trajectory. In other words, for nationals to fully perceive a nation as shrinking, abstract and hypothesised futures must assume a seemingly legible reality, one often supplied in the form of figures, numbers, graphs, and projections. Correspondingly, my interest in the term ‘shrinking’ is not in its accuracy as a descriptor of purported demographic trends, but as an object of analysis, one whose investigation sheds further light on the forms nationalist discourses can take and the ways in which nations themselves are imagined and experienced.

Scholarship has primarily followed the gaze of nationalism as it looks back to imagine its past and paid comparably less attention to how it imagines its future. Scholars have demonstrated that constructing collective continuity in and with the past is an unending nationalist project. What, however, are we to make of the ways nationalism looks towards its future, especially when the future is perceived as one of impending decline, where the very continuity of the nation is understood as under challenge?

This article aims to broaden our theoretical understandings of nationalism by highlighting how projections of the consequences of ‘national shrinking’ illuminate the role of the future within nationalist imaginings. To be clear, this article is not about the future per se, nor it does intend to endorse or contest particular predictions of demographic trends. Instead, it interrogates how a specific form of futurism ideologically produces knowledge about, and visions of a shrinking yet bounded, national future. Thus, my main focus is on how a national future is imagined and the ways such an imagined shrinking national future is felt and experienced in the present (see, Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009; Ringel, 2016).

Japan provides an interesting case as its imagined national future has changed drastically in the last half-century. After having undergone the upward trajectory of its post-war recovery and economic boom years, today, anxieties about its future have assumed a central role in official and popular discourses (Allison, 2013). In addition to continuing economic stagnation, Japan’s ageing population and low fertility rate have come to assume central roles in social and political discussions of Japan’s future trajectory. In short, the dominant perception is that Japan is shrinking (chijimu) (Oi, chijimu nihon nomirai [Ageing and sharing Japan’s future], 2019). Moreover, Japanese ‘ethno-nationalism’ (Liu-Farr, 2020) – rooted in myths of monoethnic nationhood – renders migration a widely unimaginable solution, at least at present.

In this context, a new genre of future-oriented books has emerged. Possibly foremost among these is the best-selling book titled Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] (Kawai, 2017) by the author and journalist, Masashi Kawai (b.1963). Since its publication, over 880,000 copies have been sold (as of 2020) (Kawai, 2020). A sequel by the same author, Mirai no nenpyō 2 (2018) quickly followed. These were subsequently supplemented with a manga version of the original title (2019) as well as a further updated volume with more visuals and graphs (2019). Numerous politicians and public figures have drawn upon these books to establish the credibility of their own political claims in settings such as parliamentary meetings and popular forums.¹

Demographic change has become an increasingly prominent lens through which scholars have approached and analysed Japan’s structural and economic developments (Coulmas, 2007; Kingston, 2013; Traphagan & Knight, 2003). In particular, demographic decline is predicted to result in ever greater labour and care shortages and threaten the stability of the Japanese pension system. However, the forthcoming catastrophes Kawai foretells in The chronology of the future go far beyond this. Kawai heralds the possible demise of the Japanese nation-state and even the potential extinction of the ‘Japanese ethnic group’ (Kawai, 2017: 9). Kawai presents, for instance, a graph [Figure 1] in which he extends a population projection trendline calculated by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in 2017 out to the year 3000. The resulting prognostication forecasts that the population of Japan in the year 3000 will consist of only 2000 people. Kawai thus claims that ‘a nation-state called Japan would not exist anymore’ (Kawai 2017:6); in this view, the very continuity of the nation-state is in question.

Figure 1. The population graph created by Kawai by extending the projection calculated by the National Institute of population and Social Security Research in 2027 (the IPSS does not produce this graph). Kawai (2017, 8). Copyright Kodansha, reproduced with permission.

Instead of approaching demographic change as a variable with an impact on Japan’s economic or social structures, my goal here is to analyse how projected demographic trendlines are deployed with the intention to create ideological and emotional effects in the present. In particular, my objective is to examine how the gloomy future of Japan’s predicted population decline is visualised, narrated, and disseminated as a national crisis. As I will show, it is not demographic change per se that Kawai’s books are trying to showcase. Rather they are advancing a particular way for Japanese nationals to interpret and narrate these changes. Their core premise is that if only Japanese nationals could correctly appreciate demographic facts, they would be driven by emotional urgency to act. Therefore, their aim is to provide an ideological and educational platform to mobilise co-nationals emotionally and spur them to action. In the process, they mobilise a nationalism that is rooted in fear of the future loss of the national everyday.

To theorise this phenomenon, I expand upon two key concepts from the literature on nationalism. First, I draw on Benedict Anderson’s notion of the imagined community (2006[1983]) – precisely, that the nation is an imagined community which is limited and sovereign, and importantly carries emotional legitimacy. I further extend this to argue that emotional attachments and national belonging can be imagined not only in relation to the present imagined community but also to one of the future. Instead of fostering a nationalism in which one dies for the nation, the form of nationalism I will explore below evokes peril to everyday routines. By urging individuals to imagine and feel the shrinking nation as a personal matter, the propagators of such discourses hope to transform co-nationals into self-aware neoliberal subjects of their own imminent everyday life, one which is inextricably bound to the nation’s near and far distant future.

Second, this form of nationalism also entails an element of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995). As Billig argues, within established nations, a banal, mundane, and a taken-for-granted form of nationalism is reproduced through quotidian practices. While seconding the significance of the mundane for reproducing nationalism, I further argue that such everyday normality can also be rendered nationalistic. That is, taken for granted elements of daily lived experience, such as the idea that trains come on time, are not in themselves necessarily associated with nationhood. But such pieces of everyday life can be discursively rendered as symbols that evoke national sentiments. In contrast to banal nationalism, which reinscribes nationalist ideology in a seemingly imperceptible manner, rendering the banal national ‘everyday’ noticeable can also serve nationalist ends.

Hence, within the imagined shrinking community, individual imaginings intersect with the collective ones of the nation. Nationals are mobilised to care about individual everyday routines in a manner that speaks to neoliberal values and simultaneously stands in for national ideals. Indeed, whereas nationalism and neoliberalism may appear to be at odds in terms of the values they promote, they are not totally mutually exclusive. For instance, David Harvey claims that Margaret Thatcher promoted neoliberal reforms by playing the nationalism card (2005: 79), justifying neoliberal economic reforms by recourse to nationalist values. The case of Japan, however, offers a reverse example. In Japan, nationalist appeals – and pronatalistic appeals in particular – on the whole carry negative connotations due to associations with practices from Japan’s militaristic and imperialist past. A key legacy of wartime propaganda advocating self-sacrifice and reproduction for the sake of the nation (Goodman, 2002; Uno, 1999: 16) is that such appeals would now face social opprobrium. Consequently, we see pronatalist nationalist discourses taking a different approach, seeking to mobilise neoliberal subjects through fear for the future of their own everyday lives.

At the same time, while dependent on mobilising nationals as neoliberal subjects, the discourse of the imagined shrinking community attempts to do so with visions of a future that are thoroughly nationalised: bounded, essentialized, singularised, and portrayed as existing separately from global developments and intercourse. It focuses visions of imagined personal futures through the lens of the isolated shrinking nation-state.

In what follows, I first discuss how scholarship on nationalism has frequently overlooked the importance of the future. Second, I outline how the future has been imagined within Japanese nationalist discourses, focusing on how the influential the chronology of the future series deploys negative images of the national future. Third, I introduce the concept of the imagined shrinking community, examining how it foretells, personalises, and visualises a shrinking Japan, respectively. I seek to show how the tactical visualisation and personalisation of new and old knowledge, numbers, and maps of the shrinking nation aim to provoke emotional effects (Masco, 2014). Finally, I will also posit that while The chronology of the future aims to mobilise nationals, there is not much left for nationals to do at this stage other than to become attentive national subjects.

The arguments below are based on an analysis of widely circulating narratives and visual images in Japan. While I mainly concentrate on the chronology of the future series written by Kawai, it is important to note that it is representative of a larger growing genre in Japan. Where relevant, I also draw from works by other Japanese authors on Japan’s future to supplement my analysis.²

The Nation and Time

A number of scholars have observed that while conceptions of the past, tradition, or memory have received much critical attention, imaginings of the future have often been overlooked as an object of analysis (Munn, 1992: Persoon and van East, 2000; Valentine & Hassoun, 2019; Pels 2015). For instance, Bryant and Knight write that the discipline of anthropology has ‘periodically and sporadically concerned itself with time and temporality while almost always shortchanging the future’ (2019: 7). They also claim that how the future is imagined or understood (that is, climate change projections) play crucial roles in shaping how people act and how social space is configured in the present (2019: 7). Moreover, Persoon, van Est and van Beek write, ‘what is of interest, and what is more urgently needed, is an understanding of how conceptions of the future or utopian worldviews function in present-day life, how they influence and direct human behaviour one way or the other’ (2000: 22). As the future can always and only be imagined (even though remembering the past is also often only another form of imagining), how an imagined future is shaped by, and also shapes, the present and the present’s understanding of the past constitutes an extremely important site for anthropological analysis.

In particular, studies of nationalism have largely been preoccupied with the collective past and issues of ancestry, memory, and tradition (Eley & Suny, 1996: 22–23; Hroch, 1996 [1993]: 61; Smith, 1989: 109–110). Whereas the putative continuity of the nation is often a central fixation of nationalism and, correspondingly, analytical engagement therewith, analysis of nationalist discourses of continuity largely begin with the past and stop at the present.³ For instance, as Ernest Renan wrote: ‘A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and those that one is prepared to make in the future’ (1990: 53). While the desire for an eternal nation is addressed in his work, the conception of the nation relies on a legacy of memories and present-day consent (1990: 52). Establishing a continuity from the past to the present takes precedence over continuity from the present into the future.

This bias is evident even in works that focus on future oriented discourses. Richard Handler (1988) observes that negative visions of the nation – such as the ones he observes in Quebecois discourses of potential national disintegration and disappearance – play an ideological role for nationalism. Handler argues that, along with boundedness and homogeneity, continuity is one of the key elements that define the nation. However, in his analysis the negative vision of the nation serves primarily as a tool to invigorate efforts to re-establish a historically bounded culture or historical roots. He writes, ‘History, then, is the lifeblood, conscience, and foundation of the nation, and it is celebrated accordingly’ (1988: 17). Concerns about the future and the potential demise of the nation thus primarily act as an impetus for re-establishing the collective past.

Conceptualisations of the nation can also entail perceptions of timelessness. That is, the nation is produced and reproduced not only by its collective past, but also by the perceived static essence of its national culture. Partha Chatterjee (1993), for instance, notes that the nationalist project in the non-West maintains the material/spiritual distinction. As he observes, while non-western nations might recognize themselves as inferior to the west in material terms, they nevertheless view themselves as spiritually superior. He wrote,

The material domain, argued nationalist writers, lies outside us – a mere external that influences us, conditions us, and forces us to adjust to it. Ultimately, it is unimportant. The spiritual, which lies within, is our true self; it is that which is genuinely essential. (Chatterjee, 1993: 120)

In such a nationalist project, some domains, particularly the spiritual, are viewed as constituting a timeless and unchangeable core regardless of external forces. Such timeless notions of nationalism are also observable in already established nation-states. Examining post-war Japanese nationalism, Kosaku Yoshino observes a ‘secondary nationalism’ which acted to preserve and enhance national identity in an already long-established nation-state (1992: 5). Yoshino claims that ‘cultural nationalism is concerned with the distinctiveness of the cultural community as the essence of a nation’ (1992: 1). Such cultural distinctiveness is assumed to be unchanging and timeless.

Additionally, some scholars have highlighted the role of the always-unfolding present for nationalism. Anderson claims that simultaneity, or temporal coincidence measured by the clock and calendar, made it ‘possible to “think” the nation’ (2006[1983]). Print capitalism, in particular newspapers, created a new conception of time in which the readers imagine and confirm, although privately, the solidarity of a single national community. He writes,

An American will never meet or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000-odd fellow Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. (Anderson, 2006 [1983]: 26)

The conception of time through clock and calendar presumes simultaneity and continuity; that is, there is no end to such time.

The ways in which nationalism is reproduced in everyday life in the present is also observed by scholars who discuss banal nationalism (Billig, 1995; also see Billig, 2017; Hammett, 2021; Koch & Paasi, 2016). Billig (1995, 2017) argues that nationalism in established nations is being reproduced in unnoticed ways on daily basis, such as in practices involving the national flag or even postage stamps. Thus, while nationalist markers and reminders are ever present, individuals generally overlook such signs as they are taken for granted and familiar. Affixing a stamp that pictures a national flag does not generally evoke strong nationalist sentiments, for instance. Within the context of such banal nationalism, national symbols generally go unnoticed, and being unrecognised there is no concern that such national symbols are endangered by a perilous future.

In short, various concepts of time – the past, the present, and the timeless – have been invoked within studies of nationalism. In contrast, at best the future has been viewed as something into which nations progress, a site into which the present carries forward with the national collective past in tow, should the latter have been properly preserved and maintained. But the future has not been approached as a crucial factor in engendering present national belonging. Consequently, this article seeks bring to light the ways in which imagined futures work to produce and reinforce belonging to, as well as the boundaries of, the nation-state. Imagined national futures are not only geared towards their pasts – tradition, heritage, history. Rather, as I will show below, imagined futures can also work to reintegrate individuals into an imagined community by invoking a timeless sense of national belonging and their everyday life.

Notably, when elaborated within an unfolding chronology, the predicted future of the nation becomes a collective singular future. As the nation seeks one collective past (Duara, 1996; Anagnost, 1997), national chronology also follows a collective singular trajectory forward. Stefan Tanaka observes that chronology played a role in making a collective singular history in modern Japan (2004). He wrote, ‘chronology domesticates pasts, or those heterogeneous times, by placing select events, things, or ideas into a series of prior moments of the present’ (2004: 113; also see Yamaguchi, 2005).⁴ While chronology is usually applied to the past, the chronologies of the future play a similar role, domesticating the future for political purposes. Nevertheless, the futurism being explored here is not the one which projects singular progress, improvement, and a better tomorrow. Instead, this futurism presents the opposite: a singular degraded, pessimistic, and struggling tomorrow.

Imagining a National Future

Arjun Appadurai notes, ‘it is in culture that ideas of the future, as much as of those about the past, are embedded and nurtured’ (2013: 179). Indeed, the capacity to imagine a particular future is inextricable from the social, historical, political, and economic contexts within which it is imagined. Visions of what might be possible, imaginable, and how to get there are not the product of isolated minds. The future as collectively imagined by a society changes over time. For instance, during the post-war period of economic growth (1954–) and subsequent boom years (1986–1991), many within Japan believed and imagined that the future trajectory was one which was to become ever better and better. Japanese businesses relied on faith in the ‘linear growth of the market’ (Miyazaki, 2013: 59) also see Miyazaki 2006. Anne Allison also notes that during Japan’s era of high economic growth, ‘the feeling of moving forward and progressively improving (as a nation, a family, and an individual) infused the national ethos and hopes of the times’ (2013: 23). Many workers during this era worked longer hours with few immediate benefits in return; their labour was understood as an investment in a more promising, better future.

However, the Japanese economic bubble burst in the early 1990s and with it collapsed the widespread faith that Japan’s trajectory would continue upward. While Japan’s GPD still ranks highly globally,⁵ the contrast to pre-1990s optimism is stark. Within contemporary Japan, the prevailing perception is that there is no sense of, or faith in, the future, no belief that life will improve, and many assume that things will only get worse (Allison, 2013). David Leheny states that,

It was not simply that conditions were bad, although they clearly were for some, but rather the sense that the Japan that had emerged in the 1990s and 2000s was not the future Japan imagined back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when people were encouraged to believe that Japan’s future would be better, richer, and more successful than its past. (Leheny, 2018: 12)

Importantly, the conceptions of the future feeding these anxieties are nationally bounded. Underpinning this gloomy future is a Japan whose boundaries are extraordinarily rigid; neither immigrants may enter in any way that makes a difference, nor Japanese nationals leave for elsewhere. It is also critical to note that such anxieties about a dismal future presume stability, continuity, and even normalcy before or still in the present (see, Valentine & Hassoun, 2019). There is thus a double imagining at work here – a foreboding future paired with a halcyon past and even present. That said, while it may well be that many Japanese previously shared a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) infused with the perception that their efforts would bring a better tomorrow, this does not mean it was evenly shared. Even when Japan was at the height of its economic growth, there were those in Japanese society who were excluded, left behind, or facing decline (Reitan, 2012). Nonetheless, what I want to highlight is not how Japanese society has changed, although it has, but how the discourses of future decline reconstitute and romanticise the putative attractiveness of the past and present. And, importantly, this juxtaposition is meant to spur the national community to action. Precisely, what is being presented is a future that is familiar enough for those in the present to feel some sense of affinity – Japan in the future is still recognisable as Japan – but different enough to provoke an emotional urgency to act, to prevent Japan from ending up as predicted.

Foretelling a Shrinking Japan

Although The chronology of the future starts with a dramatic opening predicting the demise of the Japanese as an ethnic group, it subsequently offers more granular forecasts of what will happen in each year from 2016 to 2065, and then discusses in broader strokes developments after 2065.

In 2017 (the year the book was published), Kawai states that Japan will already have become ‘a Grandma Nation’, a state in which one in three women are over the age of 65. In 2018, he predicts many national universities will face the risk of bankruptcy. The year 2019 will bring a shortage of IT engineers, and Japan will lose its status as a technological superpower. By 2020, one in two women will be over the age of 50, and thus the number of women capable of reproduction will have drastically decreased. In 2021, he predicts a large number of people will have to leave their jobs to assume care duties for elderly at home. The year 2022 will see more than one out of three households being composed of a single individual, signalling an increasing risk to the existence of families as the basic social unit. In 2023, the labour force will decrease by 3,000,000, while those in senior positions will receive higher salaries. As a result, many companies will suffer financially, and society at large will fail to function properly. By 2024, one in three nationals will be over 65, and Japan will have become a ‘Super Ageing Country’. Mortality figures will be more than double the number of new-born babies. Consequently, the elderly in Japan will face the difficult burden of caring for the ‘super elderly’. In 2025, the population of Tokyo will finally also begin to decrease. In 2026, the number of people suffering from dementia in Japan will be more than 7,000,000; dementia will become a ‘national disease’. As a result, individuals with dementia might need to care for others with dementia. In 2027, there will be a shortage of blood for transfusions. Current expectations that people can receive treatment upon arrival at a hospital will no longer be sustainable; there simply will not be enough medical personnel to provide care. In short, what is normal now will soon become impossible.

The chronology of the future continues further. The year 2042 marks the height of the crisis, as it is the year in which Japan’s elderly population will peak, at approximately 40,000,000 (see Figure 2). To make matters worse, the poverty rate among the elderly population will also increase. By 2045, even in Tokyo one in three people will be over the age of 65 (Figure 3). The world population will reach ten billion in 2050. Remarkably, only in 2050 does the book mention the population of the world for the first time. From 2065 onward, at a point when Japan has become partially emptied, the book predicts that more than 20% of the available residential space in Japan will be occupied by non-Japanese. Prior to this point, Kawai barely mentions Japan’s non-Japanese population. Yet notably, for Kawai, these non-Japanese immigrants are not the main threat to Japan. Their presence is the result of a shrinking Japan, not the cause of it.

Figure 2. The map of Japan shows a decrease in young women (20–39) by more than 50% in 2040. Kawai (2017., 112). Copyright Kodansha, reproduced with permission.

Figure 3. The map of the National Capital Region shows the increase in the number of people aged 65 and over from 2005 to 2035. The darkest colour indicates that 40% of the population is over 65. Kawai (2017, 128). Copyright Kodansha, reproduced with permission.

Kawai makes clear that he is basing his arguments on official governmental data, referencing statistics and graphs created and published by national research centers and the government. Although certainly such data can also be manipulated (Gupta, 2012; Scott, 1999), data published by the government is generally viewed as scientific and objective knowledge (Foucault et al. 1980). The reverence the Japanese educational system seeks to instil for ‘science’ and ‘facts’ (Goodman, 2002) arguably contributes to audience receptivity. Kawai is a respected journalist, specialising in issues of population and social welfare policy in Japan, and has served on several government committees. The chronology of the future was originally published in monthly columns in one of the major national newspapers, Sankei, starting in 2011. The credibility of the books has been buttressed by the fact they are published by Kodansha, one of the long-established publishers in Japan.

That said, as noted above, because this data already exists in the public realm, Kawai is not necessarily offering any new information per se. Rather, what he has done is gather relevant data, organise, personalise, and visualise it according to a timeline with clear implications, and thereby affectively bring into relief the ‘crisis-ness’ of impending demographic changes to readers’ everyday life. In his telling, Japan is experiencing an extremely peculiar chapter within its perceived history, one unique even in world history. Whether or not this account is accurate is another question; however, what he suggests is that due to demographic change Japan is today facing a crisis, proceeding forward in a situation exceptional for a nation-state.

This is a view shared by many public intellectuals and popular authors in Japan. For instance, Inagawa Hidekazu, Professor of Sociology at Toyo University claims that ‘the current demographic crisis is the country’s greatest challenge since the start of the Meiji Restoration in 1868’ (2018: 1). He continues,

Should the current birth rate remain unchanged, Japan’s population, which stood at nearly 50 million people 100 years ago, will shrink once again to 50 million by the end of this century. Moreover, this will not be a country overflowing with youth as during the Meiji Era (1867–1912). Japan will instead be an old country where the elderly account for 40% of that 50 million … If this occurs, there is a strong chance that Japan’s social vitality and the vital forces of the state will be debilitated, jealous political rivalries will be unleashed, and people will lose confidence and become trapped in a spiral of pessimism and nihilism. No longer will Japan be able to maintain the culture and traditions it has nurtured over the centuries. This must not happen. It must not be allowed to happen. (Inagawa, 2018: 1)

Thus, according to him, the predicted country of 50 million people is not the same as the vigorous rising country of a century ago. This time, it will be a shrunken, ‘decrepit’ (yoboyobo) Japan (Kawai, 2017: 145). Even Japan’s former Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo, described in 2019 the demographic developments Japan is facing as ‘a national disaster’ (koku nan).⁶

All the same, Kawai claims that both Japanese politicians and citizens do not fully understand the gravity of what will happen in the future. Simply calling coming developments a disaster is insufficient; greater mobilisation for action is required. It needs to be truly felt as a crisis, for as Masco observes, ‘crisis is, in the first instance, an affect-generating idiom, one that seeks to mobilise radical endangerment to foment collective attention and action’ (Masco, 2017: s65). Kawai is seeking to instil this. As Masco writes, ‘perceptions of the future are affectively laden, as well as tied to expert judgment and information’ (Masco, 2014: 14). Discussing counterterrorism, he explains,

in the realm of esoteric military technologies – weapons of mass destruction, for example – the general public has no expert knowledge to draw on and must instead be educated to think and feel a particular way about technological capacities and worse-case outcomes. (Masco, 2014: 14, emphasis in original)

Similarly, according to The chronology of the future, simply hearing about or acknowledging Japanese population decline is not enough. Japanese citizens need to be educated as to how to read the data correctly, with the understanding that this will induce an emotional reaction spurring action to alter the current trajectory of the nation. Masco argues that the goal of counterterrorist education is to create a citizen subject who responds to official warnings and hence, ‘An individual’s response to this kind of emotional call (in either the affirmative or negative) reveals his or her membership in a national community’ (Masco 2014: 18). The chronology of the future operates according to a similar logic. It seeks to educate Japanese nationals so as to elicit the emotional drive for its desired actions.

Personalising a Shrinking Japan

In The chronology of the future II, which was published only a year after the first title, Kawai goes further in vividly describing Japan’s future, focusing on the details of individual everyday life to make his account appear more realistic and relatable (2018: 6). He states, ‘People need to use their imagination to replace the large numbers and abstract changes of the low-fertility rate and shrinking population with the tangible changes that would happen in their everyday lives’ (2018: 9). Accordingly, this second volume uses the fictional device of describing the daily lives of members of a family named Shoshi. Each imagined day for the family showcases the key points of the book.

The Shoshi family consists of a father (50), a mother (48), a son (16), a daughter (22) who lives by herself, and a grandmother (80) who also lives by herself. Their experiences are presented in simultaneously unfolding increments at various times of the day. Here is an excerpt:

8:00: Taisaku, the father, is late for a meeting, as he had forgotten that the number of commuter trains had been reduced. At the same time, Hatsue, the mother, awakens due to noise coming from their neighbour’s flat, which after having been untenanted for a period has recently been transformed into an inn. Akira, the son, is running late to high school because several older people in wheelchairs needed extra time to board his bus causing delays. Tome, the grandmother, is watching her neighbour with dementia attempting to and failing to open an auto-locked door. Kanae, the daughter, is still asleep.

10:00: At his company, Taisaku is busy answering phones, as there are no younger employees to do the job. Hatsue, having just heard that the local bank might collapse soon, is rushing to close her account. Kanae just narrowly avoids being hit by a car. Behind the wheel is an elderly driver, who is driving erratically and had ignored the red traffic signal. Akira’s classmate is confessing to him that, at age 16, he has already developed diabetes.

Noon: While having lunch near her university, Kanae is attacked by the bees nesting in an unoccupied house nearby. Akira, who had decided to go for lunch at a popular buffet, finds the restaurant has closed. The elderly owner is sick, and there is no younger successor available to maintain the business. Tome, shopping at a supermarket, witnesses an elderly woman being arrested for pickpocketing. As the woman is escorted away, she screams, ‘Better to be in prison than stuck in poverty!’

14:00: Taisaku tries to book an airline ticket for his business trip and finds the flight he always used has been discontinued. Hatsue, visiting old friends in the city, is surprised to find so many abandoned houses. At Akira’s school, trouble breaks out over which school song his baseball team should sing. The team is one cobbled together from players from seven different schools, a measure necessary to reach sufficient numbers.

16:00: Hatsue hears from a co-worker how her parents’ funeral had been delayed for ten days following their cremation due to a shortage of available monks. Working part-time at an electronics shop, Kanae is struggling to communicate with an elderly customer who cannot understand Kanae’s repeated explanations. Akira is suffering from thirst on his way home; the vending machines are empty due to a shortage of delivery workers. Tome is teaching ikebana to her friends.

18:00: Hatsue is struggling with what to make for dinner given that vegetables have become so expensive. Kanae learns that her boyfriend is being transferred to another city for work; this triggers in her anxiety concerning her future chances for marriage and having children. Akira eats a dinner without vegetables, while Tome goes out to vote nearby at a mobile polling station.

20:00: Taisaku is being forced to listen to his superior, who is drunk, rant about never being promoted. Kanae is hearing from college alumna that even those who have enjoyed full-time life employment will find life after retirement difficult. Akira turns the television off, as all the shows are focused on health and medicine, given that older people are their target audience.

22:00: Hatsue is rethinking her plans for retirement. Kanae is waiting in vain for the clothing she had ordered online, which was supposed to arrive that day. Akira is reading The chronology of the future – recommended reading at his school – and has been left speechless. Tome slips in the bathroom and hits her head but manages to call emergency services.

24:00: Taisaku and Hatsue are trying to sleep while shivering under thick blankets; as all the gas stations in their neighbourhood have gone bankrupt, they have no gas for heating. Akira is asleep, but Kanae is awake and in a panic, having just heard an announcement that the mountain forest behind her flat is on the brink of a rockslide. Meanwhile, Tome is still waiting for an ambulance as there is a shortage of paramedics. The day is over. (Kawai, 2018: introductory appendix)

The scenarios above repeatedly emphasise several specific themes. First, confused elderly people will be a constant source of disruption to public life. Second, an imbalanced population will upend life planning, particularly plans for retirement. Moreover, work and service provision will suffer due to a shortage of workers; normal expectations – such as that an ambulance will come when it is called – will no longer be tenable in the future. Notably, The chronology of the future II does not specify the year in which the above imaginary day in the life of the Shoshi family is unfolding. Instead, it is deliberately vague in order to highlight the fact that the reader could experience such scenarios at any time in their future. In this manner, the shrinking nation is projected onto nationals’ lived immediacy (Goswami, 2020). The idea is not to depict a future for the reader to gaze upon from a distance, but rather to situate the reader in that everyday life of the future (see Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009).

These scenarios, I claim, work to elicit ‘anticipation’ – a collective way of stepping into the future or trying to transform one’s future (Bryant & Knight, 2019: 42–43) – as well as performing what Louis Althusser describes as ‘ideological hailing’ (1971: 86). Althusser argues,

ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits all of them), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: Hey, you there! (1971: 86)

If the scenarios envisaged by The chronology of the future should actually come to pass, today’s readers of the series will most likely be either dead or elderly themselves. Nonetheless, the series is encouraging them to identify with the members of this family that are of equivalent age. Readers are to see themselves not as the elderly causing delays and disrupting daily life, but rather as those suffering from the troubles or annoyances the legions of elderly will cause. However, regardless of which family member the readers identify with, the over-riding aim of these narratives is to recruit and transform the readers into attuned subjects who care about their everyday routine. Yet ultimately, their disrupted everyday life is inseparable from its encasement within a shrinking and bounded Japan. At the same time, this Japan and life within it maintains certain recognisable continuities with the present. The father went out for a drink after work. The mother was responsible for cooking dinner at home and caring for the family’s health (compare Masco, 2008; Robertson, 2018; 2014).⁷ Despite being asked to imagine a future different from today, certain aspects remain beyond reimagination, among them stereotypical, gendered expectations and the overall composition of the daily routine.

In the face of such a massive breakdown in the basic infrastructure of everyday life, one might wonder if Japanese would not just consider leaving for elsewhere. Indeed, Oishi and Hamada (2019) note that the total number of Japanese nationals overseas reached a record of over 1.3 million in 2017. Certainly, if people find living overseas more attractive than living in Japan, this number could continue to increase. Nonetheless, within these pessimistic forecasts the option to emigrate is completely absent. Although the chronology of the future series claims to paint statistically supported scenarios there are thus limits to what it can imagine; because it is not simply personal welfare and daily routine that are at stake, but the very survival of the bounded Japanese nation state, some options lie beyond consideration. So, while attempting to motivate action for the survival of the nation by personalising demographic trends in the form of impending crises for everyday life, it still needs individuals to remain tied to the nation.⁸

Visualising a Shrinking Japan

How are Japanese nationals supposed to react to these predictions? Here, I look at how visualisation works as a powerful tool to render intangible and imperceptible facts imaginable. Visual images, naturally, are not limited to pictures or illustrations. Importantly, numbers can also be visualised by placing them into proper graphs or presenting them as arrayed statistics. Indeed, numbers, such as those that compose population data, are often meaningless in and by themselves. For instance, a population decline to 50 million in the future is portrayed as a crisis in Japan, but this is only so when placed in comparison to the current population (approximately 120 million) in 2020. The population of Japan one hundred years ago, at a time when it was broadly perceived to have been a vigorous, growing nation, was only 50 million. Thus, these numbers only attain significance relatively.

Moreover, the population is not visible in a way we can observe objectively; it needs be rendered in a census or statistics (compare Anderson, 2006[1983]: 166). Yet, when these numbers are objectified visually, they can become the external reality (compare Chow, 2006; Mitchell, 1991). That is, on the one hand, the fact that the population of Japan is following a decreasing trend is now undoubtedly prevailing knowledge. However, when such knowledge, sometimes intangible in everyday life, is visualised in dramatic graphs, images, or maps, the very idea of shrinking becomes a catastrophic reality.

Joseph Masco has analysed how images of a United State ruined by nuclear destruction can have emotional and ideological effects (2008). The production and circulation of visualised nuclear ruins, he argues, works as ‘the lasting effects of nation-building’ (2008: 362), to emotionally manage citizens. Notably, while images of ruin have the psychological effects of generating and normalising fear, the fear needs to be productive. That is, such fear needs to shock its citizens into action without paralysing them. The mobilisation of the citizenry is the ultimate goal of this nation-(re)building project.

When we look at the chronologies of the future circulating within Japan, this ‘fall’ in the population is not a neutral portrayal; the graphs and statistics are laden with emotional connotations. Such emotional readings of graphs are also observable beyond this series. For instance, the NHK book (based on a documentary), Shukushō Nippon no shōgeki [The shock of a shrinking Japan] (2017) displays a population graph with the following accompanying text,

the point where we are standing now is a little past the top of soaring uphill. [We are having] a spooky silent interval which presages the incredible plunge that is approaching. Ahead of us, a dizzy cliff is waiting [for us]. (NHK, 4)

In this description, the line connecting the dots is described as a mountain. The graph does not simply represent a transformation, the line is not just a line. The curve symbolises how the Japanese people have climbed uphill since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Now, the Japanese people are falling down the hill, something which no one has witnessed before. Indeed, who is not scared when you are heading toward the edge of the cliff?

The manga version, Manga de wakaru mirai no nenpyō [the chronology of the future in manga] (2019) further seeks an intensified emotional response. It provides a graph showing that around 2040, Japan will experience peak mortality, which it labels ‘an era of massive death’ (2019: 80). It illustrates this with examples on an individual level, for instance with the scenario of how when a man dies around the year 2040, he dies alone in a bathroom, only be found a month later. With no family members to claim his remains, he ends up in an unmarked grave. Simple projections of the likely number of unclaimed remains in the future cannot be compared with the images it offers of a dying man screaming in panic, misery, and desperation in the face of a solitary and pitiful demise (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Manga suggests that many deceased elders might not have relatives to claim their remains. In such cases, they would be buried in a collective unmarked grave. The dead elderly man desperately wants to be buried in his ancestor’s grave. Kawai (2019, 85). Copyright Kodansha, reproduced with permission.

Unlike the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the impending threats of population decline do not appear in a sudden explosion. It is a gradual change, like an environmental change (Masco, 2017). Moreover, similar to the crisis constituted by climate change, population decline is a phenomenon whose consequences will be felt more by future generations than those alive today. And the aim of those who would seek to mobilise action is to arrest and even reverse that decline. To prompt action for future generations, however, some form of emotional attachment is necessary. Whereas climate change operates at a global level, Japan’s demographic crisis is nationally bounded. It is the crisis of a shrinking Japan; one that is unfolding despite the general trend of population growth globally.

Nevertheless, the chronology of the future series is different from the propaganda of wartime patriotic education which urged Japanese women to bear more babies for the nation and Japanese subjects to die for it. Instead, its explicitly stated aims are to convey facts, to urge a collective understanding of said facts, and encourage Japanese to viscerally and tangibly feel the implications of what is coming.⁹ It focuses on their individual everyday lives and routines. The nationals care about the future of the nation, but also their lived immediacy and the imagined effects these changes will have for imagined versions of themselves in a future.

In a way, this is a type of banal nationalism – the mundanity of the nation plays a role in reproducing national belonging and sentiment. However, it is not that citizens are being surrounded by inconspicuous and unobtrusive signs of nationalism. Instead, mundane things are being discursively rendered as explicit signs of nationalism. That is, things such as the punctuality of trains or the functioning vending machines are being ‘nationalised’ as symbols of Japanese life in narratives of decline.

Consequently, the discourses of the imagined shrinking community seek to make the banal highly conspicuous. It is intended to be visible – even shocking – and commandeer people’s conscious attention. Thus, rather than mundane rituals (compare Kumar, 2018),¹⁰ this crisis of the imagined shrinking community works to ‘hail’ (and remake national subjects into those who care, fear, and act on behalf of the future of the nation by being mobilised through ties to mundane everyday life).

Shrink Wisely and Strategically

Notably, albeit a very small minority, of scholars and public figures (Hiroi, 2019; Ochiai, 2019) have advanced positive narratives highlighting future possibilities.¹¹ These claim Japanese should approach their shrinking nation as presenting a chance to rethink and rebuild their society and nation more generally. Such narratives, however, do not suggest that Japan can avoid shrinking. Instead, they claim that Japanese should use this crisis as an opportunity for positive change, such as by increasing the efficiency of single workers, using AI more widely, changing existing work ethics, or eliminating certain distortions within society (for instance Liberal Democratic Party website, 2016). Thus, for these positive narratives, action is still required to change the crisis into an opportunity.

Many books in the genre of the chronologies of the future also offer potential antidotes to their grim projections. Some of them use the language of ‘prescriptions’, medicalising their remedies as if Japan is sick (Kawai, 2017: 162). Of course, the first step in all cases to betterment is acknowledging the illness; only then will one seek treatment and remedy. All the same, the proportion of space that many of these works devote to such prescriptions is relatively small. For instance, The shock (Yamamoto, 2017) only addresses possible remedies in the last three pages, stating, ‘the government, local governments, and we the nationals should face these severe problems, and not procrastinate’ (196). In The chronology of the future, the last 60 pages of what is a 200-page book are devoted to prescriptions. First, it asserts the limited potential of immigrants, AI, and the inclusion of women in the work force to act as solutions. It claims that if the population of Japan is maintained by relying on immigrants and their children, ‘Japanese’ will end up being a minority in their own country, and Japan will be a different nation from what it is now (154). Instead, its proposed solutions utilise what Japan has now. For example, it proposes raising the age at which individuals are defined as ‘elderly people’ from 65 to 75 and defining children as those under the age of 19 (instead of 14),¹² shifting upwards the age of the productive labour force of the county; weening Japan away from being a society that is open 24 hours a day and has high expectations for service, and so on.

Ironically, while seeking to emotionally mobilise nationals, what many of these accounts offer in terms of what such individuals can practically do as individuals is quite limited apart from being attuned subjects of their national future. In fact, many of the books in this genre also take it for granted that it is impossible for Japan not to shrink. Thus, the solutions they propose do not involve finding ways to increase the population but rather shrink strategically and wisely. Their alternatives are thus to imagine a nation that shrinks without the consequences being catastrophic, while keeping Japan as Japan.

Conclusion

Within contemporary Japan there are circulating narratives and visualisations of the future which act to create an imagined shrinking community. Like imagined communities more generally, the imagined shrinking community in The chronology of the future seeks to arouse deep affective attachments (Goswami 2020) for fellow co-nationals in the present as well as in the future. While such attachments are ultimately intended to serve the nation-state, the felt urgency roused in the works examined here emerges from endangered lived immediacies, threats to the individualised everyday life of the present, which is portrayed as the national essence.

Importantly, these anxieties over a shrinking nation presume the nation-state had a glorious past and has existed in a state of normalcy and continuity prior to this impending ‘crisis’. This is a narrative that glosses much uncertainty, discontinuity, and disruption experienced in the past, particularly by those in more marginal social positions. In other words, the narrative of a common positive futurism in the past is not simply an objective historical description of a shared national experience (although many might have felt that way) but instead is a past reconstituted by the present as counterpart to a future of decline (compare Valentine & Hassoun, 2019). The memories of the glory of the economic boom years, the quotidian normalcy of the present – these form the basis for perceiving the future as one of shocking bleakness. The imagined shrinking nation, in The chronology of the future, simultaneously reconstitutes the meanings of the past, present, and future in and for the present.¹³

Assuming Japan as a geographic space – a set of islands – does not disappear in the future, the idea that there might not be enough Japanese nationals to survive as a nation-state carries with it the implication that the non-ethnic Japanese may come to occupy that space. While some people argue that that is already happening, large-scale immigration has not been embraced as a solution by Kawai or the Japanese government. For many of the authors cited above, if ethnic Japanese are not the majority, Japan will cease to truly be Japan. Thus, putative others do exist for the imagined shrunken community. However, compared with other countries facing similar demographic changes, Japanese public discourse has not framed such understandings of decline vis-à-vis the perceived growth of migrant populations (compare Italy, Singapore). Instead, it is seen as a domestic crisis in which the real threat is the decline from within. The presence of non-Japanese in Japan is viewed more as an outcome, rather than a cause, of Japan’s shrinking national population. It is not a threat to the boundaries of the nation-state, but rather a threat unfolding within its essence – a core that is quantitatively decreasing and ultimately qualitatively deteriorating by itself. The tactics by which Kawai and others seek to instil an impending sense of crisis surrounding the imagined shrinking community brings into sharp relief the role the future can play in creating the nation and national subjects in the present.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Roger Goodman, Takehiko Kariya, Ruben Andersson and Todd Hall for reading the entire manuscript and giving me very helpful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Oxford John Fell Fund under Grant [0008250].

Notes

¹ For instance, in the Minutes of the Diet 3 April 2020, 27 February 2019, 5 December 2018, 5 June 2018, 6 March 2018, and 8 February 2018, The chronology of the future was refereed by politicians to ask how the government is going to deal with those future events (for instance, Ishiba and Kawai (2020).

² As many of such works draw on the same official data sets, their predictions concerning population decline, the demise of local communities, and the increasing numbers of unoccupied houses are very similar. For instance, Japan’s chronology of future (2017), written by several experts, posits that in 2040, Japan will lose its status as a developed country; in 2045 all cars will be self-driven; in 2050, AI will surpass humans; and finally, in 2117, 600,000 people will relocate to Mars. Another book, Astonishment! Japan’s chronology of the future (2017) also outlines a very similar timeline for the future. Another book also claims that by 2100, the population of Japan will be one third of the current population (Kito 2016, also see Watanabe et al., 2017).

³ Miroslav Hroch wrote, ‘a memory of some common past, treated as a “destiny” of the group – or at least of its core constituents’ (1996 [1993]: 61) as one of the irreplaceable elements of nation-building. While memory (past) and destiny (future) are crucial, memory and history have been a priority for national movements.

⁴ Tomomi Yamaguchi (2005) also notes that timelines are not neutral products. She shows that the Women’s Action Group created a long timeline to represent their political relevance, challenging existing narratives of feminism in Japan.

⁵ Third as of 2022 (The World Bank, 2022).

⁶ Abe stated, ‘this is a dreadful situation called a national disaster’ (NHK website, 2019).

⁷ Jennifer Robertson critically read the Japanese Former Prime Minister, Abe’s futuristic vision of Japanese society and argues that his imagined future is ‘an improved and improvised version of the past’ (2018: 79, also 2014).

⁸ Yoshino, (1992) for instance argues that a genre of the literature called nihonjinron (theories of Japanese uniqueness) is an ideology, and just not simply an attempt to describe the nature of Japanese people and society. The chronology of the future is in a way a form of nihonjinron, yet one which paradoxically depends on negative images of Japan.

⁹ Educating nationals to become attuned subjects has been observable in other issues in contemporary Japan, such as ‘teaching the appropriate age for reproduction’ (Yui, 2021; Nishiyama & Tsuge, 2017), teaching the fact of ovarian ageing (Kawai 2013), educating people to change their lifestyle (Borovoy, 2017) to ultimately promote the healthy population of the nation.

¹⁰ Drawing on Joseph Masco and Michael Billig’s conception of banal nationalism (1995), Deepa Kumar argues that the ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign in the US constitutes a daily nationalist ritual. She further claims that these routinised and repetitive performances of security practices, which generate automatic responses, constitute a cohesive image of a national community and a sense of national belonging (2018).

¹¹ See also, Jinkō genshō wo chansu ni kaeru ni wa (2022), and ‘Shrinking society is a hope: The future of us living in a mature society’ (Hiroi, 2020).

¹² Legally, the definition of child (jido) comes in several different versions with varying age categories in Japan. Most likely, the definition of child used by Kawai refers to the age stated in the Labour Standards Law. In other places, such as the Child Welfare Law, a child is defined as those under the age of 18.

¹³ Whether these narratives are actually effective in motivating Japanese people to act is an important question. To answer this, however, requires more conceptual and methodological discussion. For instance, what counts as action? Is imagining itself included (compare., Appadurai 1996)? Moreover, to answer this will require extensive ethnographic research and interviews. Accordingly, while this question is beyond the scope of this article, it is one I hope to tackle in future research.