It has been nearly half a century since the release of Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. Many predicted that the 21st century would not only be the Pacific Century, but also one dominated by the Land of the Rising Sun.

The years since have been humbling. Following a decade of negative economic growth, episodes of stagflation and living with a banking system teetering on zombie loans, the triple disaster of 2011 – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown – cost the country some 20,000 lives and $600 billion.

Japan had hoped to get its mojo back with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. But Covid-19 crashed the party, compelling a year-long postponement and then a subdued event that enforced a no-clapping rule for the few mask-clad observers permitted to attend. Gilding this poisonous lily, another series of earthquakes struck Ishikawa Prefecture in 2024, killing over 600.

Alas, new challenges always await. Japan is famously energy-poor, and a stable Persian Gulf is thus a foreign policy priority – though Tokyo has little say about how that stability is maintained. Meanwhile, geopolitical anxiety, inherent in being tucked uncomfortably between the Chinese colossus, a nuclear North Korea and a no-love-lost South Korea is compounded by an unsought trade war with the Trump administration.

Shōtarō Yachi, formerly in charge of security and defense policy, recently argued that Japan shouldn’t fall back on the decades-old tactic of buying more military hardware from the U.S. in order to parry trade demands. Japan, Yachi asserted, should only “purchase items Japan needs.”

And what does Japan really need? His suggestion was more allies: Japan could no longer solely rely on the United States.

Japan may not need more F-35 fighter jets or JASSM-ER cruise missiles, but it plainly does need more childcare, more workforce support – in short, a sustainable demographic future in a country with a birthrate far below the numbers needed to prevent rapid population decline. Fewer than 700,000 babies were born in 2024 – an unwelcome milestone that the government hadn’t predicted would happen until 2039. Frankly, the country does feel emptier since my last visit in 2019, except for the visitors who have returned in force to Kyoto and other jaw-dropping tourist sights.

Whereas other parts of the world are just beginning to grapple with the implications of a declining birthrate, Japan has been agonizing over its consequences – economic, cultural and political – since the 1990s. The handwringing makes one waver between congratulating the new parents one occasionally sees on the streets and thanking them for their service to the nation. Indeed, the latest cliché on the lips of media talking heads is that Japan has more dogs in strollers than babies. That one, incidentally, replaced the glum quip that adult diapers were outselling baby nappies.

The numbers of foreign residents in Japan surged by 10 percent in 2024, marking a notable demographic shift. Immigration from less affluent countries had long seemed a big part of the answer to Japan’s demographic stress – but one policymakers were loath to broach for fear of triggering latent xenophobia. Now, the dam seems to be cracking a bit with Eastern Europeans on construction sites, South Asians behind convenience store counters and non-Japanese families taking advantage of Tokyo parks.

One hot job suited perfectly for the times? J-vlogging – young foreign influencers showcasing Japan’s “quirks” on social media. (“Can you believe showering before entering a shared public bath?”) But the U.S. election and the Trump administration’s war on the undocumented have exacerbated chronic fears in Japan that immigration would similarly bring political volatility and unrest.

Lots of Japanese are still wearing face masks. It’s not because of Covid-19, I’m told – many urban Japanese wore masks in public before the pandemic to prevent the spread of other microbes, and even to lessen the effects of hay fever. But why are so many people wearing them on quiet streets and in their cars? Allergies may be worsening, but a deeper anxiety seems to be setting in.

In addition to population decline, there is a new complaint: inflation that ticked up during the pandemic and hasn’t retreated. One explanation is white-collar pay, which was pretty dismal a few years back and now seems frozen in amber. One 58-year-old Tokyo-based friend, a reasonably successful securities trader, earns $75,000 annually and insists that’s “decent.” His mother (age 89), wife (61) and daughter (24) all live with him and work full-time, with none of the others earning over $25,000.

I returned to Tohoku, the northern slice of Honshu ravaged by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear contamination in 2011, for my first look in a decade. What qualifies as recovery and progress are still contested issues. Infrastructure has been rebuilt, the displaced rehoused. There are more restaurants, more shops. But the region feels sterilized. Instead of restoring a sense of life, the massive reconstruction effort has seemed to erase it.

Japan’s broad population decline has been especially damaging to the region because young people had been leaving Tohoku for big cities long before Fukushima. Today, half the population is over 55.

I talked with a few younger residents about why they were here. I asked one man in his 40s, working at a massive seaside hotel left over from the Asset Bubble Era of the late 1980s, if he was a local. “They’ve been waiting for you,” I said. He chuckled.

The hope had long been that young people would come back with families after realizing Tokyo’s rapid pace and sky-high rents weren’t for them. I met a young entrepreneur who has opened an izakaya – a workers’ pub – in the city of Morioka. On a street meant for nightlife, he lamented, only his friends filled the tables. A woman who had retired from an administrative job opened a restaurant nearby, but I was her only customer.

Anxiety about collective aging has morphed into an embrace of robots. At the 2011 disaster memorial hall in the town of Rikuzentakata, the lawns were maintained by robotic mowers. A visitor pointed out their docking stages: robots “resting” after work. My Tokyo friend enjoys texts from his Roomba, which sends greetings and reports on the state of his mother’s room. Wall-E, it seems, is more than a movie.

In March 2025, 11 towns near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that had been evacuated after the accident reopened to the public. Gone were the black plastic bags of contaminated soil that had been stripped from every open patch of ground. In their place, solar farms stretched to the horizon. And newly planted rice paddies were evident where fields had been left fallow due to fear of contamination. Japan now welcomes cultivation in this forbidden place since it would help restore a sense of normality – and maybe even help stabilize rice prices. But will people eat food grown near the meltdown site?

From the road it was hard to tell which homes in tiny Futaba were inhabited and which were waiting for people to return. A few businesses seemed intact, but it was hard to tell if they were operational. Farm animals that had been abandoned to roam the streets were now gone. But the parking lot of Futaba’s low-stakes pachinko gambling parlor was still overrun with weeds.

Wall murals in Futaba depict smiling faces celebrating residents’ endurance, but few such faces were to be seen on the streets. The only traffic I spotted consisted of white government sedans carrying stone-faced men heading back to temporary dorm rooms – not to family dinners.

The Fukushima Innovation Coast Promotion Organization, supported by Japan’s government and the OECD, are pitching the decommissioning of the Daiichi plant as a growth industry – “a rare window of opportunity.” FIPO’s website features a video with young women excitedly talking about all the possibilities for innovation (inobe) that Fukushima now offers. As they chat in a pub, the promised future seems bright: drones, robots, recycling, agroforestry and fishing, and more to revitalize Fukushima. Local high schools and vocational schools are adapting their curriculum to reinforce FIPO’s priorities.

The lemons-to-lemonade OECD report reminds policymakers that attracting and keeping a young, educated workforce requires not only attractive salaries but a high quality of life. Can Fukushima offer that? Successful revitalization, the OECD says, depends on the upskilling of the local workforce. Given that the share of the population under the age of 17 has decreased by one-third since the disaster, and that the number of working-age adults has dropped by 11 percent, something must change or there won’t be many candidates to upskill.

As I drove by the Fukushima Robot Test Field, one of many initiatives that developers are dangling to attract the young, I didn’t see anything that reminded me of Star Wars. There is, however, a massive new facility in the nearby port of Soma for the storage of liquid natural gas. The port used to share space with fishery enterprises, but Fukushima’s fishing boats are blocked from coastal waters. Their struggle continues as they have been protesting the dumping of contaminated water.

Proceeding up the reconstructed coast, you reach formerly devastated towns that have now become memorials to the disaster – urban mausoleums punctuated by concrete walls and manicured lawns. Each town has its own commemoration hall decorated with charts showing the destructive course of the waves and explanations as to why tsunamis follow earthquakes. Some displays include contemporary art installations, but cold abstraction does little to suggest how the towns will find a new place in the world.

That’s a recurring theme: reconstruction plans have dedicated these devastated towns on the altar of memory. It is important to remember March 11, 2011, to “educate future generations,” as nearly every plaque and memorial wall reminds visitors. The only people visiting, however, were the elderly.

As 3/11 becomes more remote in the collective memory, presumably even fewer tourists will be interested in the disaster. And local people, save the few who accompany visitors like me as guides, certainly do not go. (“Do you see the dots on the wall of the building? They represent all the lives lost in this town.”)

The reconstructed coastline is often described as a prison because of its omnipresent sea wall. Sometimes the wall is flanked by a line of pine trees that stall erosion, buffering skate parks, children’s playgrounds, walking trails and beaches. In most parks, though, I saw no children, only the occasional older man with fishing gear.

Driving north on the highway, the seawall towers on your right, so you could be totally unaware that you are driving along the ocean. To see the water, you must park and climb four flights to stand on top of the wall. Slightly out of breath from the climb (at least I was), you can view the sea along with a couple of active fishing boats and some seaweed and oyster farms. On the land side of the wall, you rarely see any houses; almost all new construction is on higher ground.

Some of the harbor towns are livelier than others. In Kesennuma, with no wall to block the view, businesses, restaurants and community centers have sprung up. When I stopped there, kids were running around while adults were sitting on terraces drinking beer in new outdoor restaurants. Why are there five-story high walls to the north and south of Kesennuma, where there is no longer business to protect, but I was free to watch the sun go down over the little sheltered bay of Kesennuma with my legs dangling a few feet above the water?

Glad you asked. After wrestling with city planning for several years, Kesennuma residents chose to “live with the sea.” Multiple town meetings were contentious and some ended in tears. But the conflict produced compromise: there are a few spots with walls and a few without.

Other towns that rebuilt fast – with seawalls and without community debate – were the first to reopen. But they are now haunted by what many acknowledge as unfortunate planning choices. Most of the coastline must now live with walls of a scale that cannot be fully understood in photographs. Perhaps tearing down the sea walls, a daunting engineering prospect, will present another economic opportunity in the years to come. Japan, after all, is famous for building “bridges to nowhere” – great white elephants prized for nothing but the jobs they created in construction.

Tokyo, by coincidence, seems to be in a parallel loop of construction, destruction and reconstruction that has become an opportunity for development: the highways built for the 1964 Olympics that dwarf a 17th-century bridge – Nihonbashi – are to be torn down as part of a historical overhaul. Perhaps innovation in Tohoku will eventually mean reversing the mistakes of the past rather than further burdening the local culture.

Actually, the triple disaster of 14 years ago and the subsequent construction of sea walls that have transformed the region into what feels like a geriatric ghetto may not be the most enduring challenge to the region. Long before the 2011 tsunami, the warming of the ocean along the coastline was eroding the fishing industry, which was the economic mainstay of the region.

Multiple fishery facilities have been rebuilt behind the seawall. However, the water is too warm for cultivating the best oysters, which had been the prime product along 200 miles of coastline. “You can’t eat them raw anymore,” I was told. Mackerel, another prized catch, have moved north, also thanks to the inhospitality of rapidly warming coastal waters.

Local fishermen are left with squid (though fewer, thanks to the warmer water) and seaweed (ditto), and are forced to travel further for a piece of the declining tuna catch. When I speculated that the sun might be reflecting off the concrete walls to create a bathtub effect as well, I was met with shrugs and rueful grins implying that nothing bad would surprise them.

To be fair, the region has taken environmental sustainability to heart since the meltdown. The air conditioning in both public and private spaces is no longer routinely set to arctic. Convenience stores now ask if you want a plastic bag instead of automatically stowing your purchases in one. And there are charging stations everywhere for electric vehicles. “We’re trying to be more careful,” one friend explained.

About some matters environmental, but not all. I was served whale in several restaurants’ set-course menus – the first time I’ve been served the stuff in 30 years of visiting Japan. Though legal ways to hunt whale exist, international law is geared toward conserving them.” Japan is marketing itself as making amends for the 2011 brush with nuclear Armageddon by making peace with nature. But what I observed was more of a complicated dance – a battle to duck natural forces so they no longer cause pain and loss. Alas, it’s a pretty safe bet which side will win.