Korea, Japan Face Demographic Crisis

Japan embarked on its second national rebuilding campaign, the first having taken place after World War II, and this time to recover from a triple whammy of disasters: an earthquake, a tsunami and nuclear crisis. Tokyo University political science professor Takashi Mikuriya, who is on a government-led panel in charge of coming up with a framework for post-disaster reconstruction, called for a national restoration on the scale of the Meiji Restoration, the turning point for Japan’s industrialization and modernization in the 19th century. He proclaimed that the latest calamities underscored the hard fact that the country’s post-war political, economic and social model is no longer viable, and he recommended an entirely new paradigm to bring the country out of the crisis.