[maxglute]

>only way they can handle their rapidly aging population

There's always the unspoken option, which is to not handle geriatric care well at all. Old people have been dying neglected and alone in JP for a while. When shit critically hits the fan, geriatric population will be either too senile to vote, or if they can vote, too weak to protest, and thus can be easily ignored as a bloc. Goal of cycling through disposable migrants to do shit jobs locals don't want to do is to keep value positive sectors crunching. IMO different dynamic when it's coming out of pockets of already squeezed tax base to take care of boomers. There'sgoing to be a lot of, you lived a long life, so sad, too bad, because good luck convincing ethnocentric youth to take another L for the team by treating migrants better, the only social prestige pressed these days is knowing outsiders have it worse. Societies have no problem finding a way to be callous to poor, kids, women, minorities etc, they'll find a way to rationalize being incredibly callous to elders.

[alephnerd]

> which is to not handle geriatric care well at all

There is a recent Japanese Sci-Fi movie that came out at Cannes recently called Plan 75 [0] that touches on that option

Ofc, Japan is a democracy and old people vote.

Even if the LDP ruled for much of Japan's democratic history, it's still vulnerable to losing power due to public anger (eg. Kishida's corruption scandal).

Imagine how angrier Japanese voters would be with horrible geriatric care.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-at2w5ORFfE

[maxglute]

I went to viewing of this during TIFF last year. But unfortunately ZZZ through most of it, no fault of the film which I enjoyed for the parts I was up.

>Japan is a democracy and old people vote

I think when non-working gerontocratic voting block interests confronts with interests of tax paying workforce trying to keep head above water, the elderly are going to lose. When under 50 year olds have to decide between their reduction in their QoL / services vs neglecting the old, including their own kin, they're going to eventually chose to throw their kin under the bus. If problem is just structurally not resolvable (which IMO it's not), LDP will claw their way back from whoever the next DPJ upstart is after they fail. Which is to say, I can imagine JP getting some robots going, and some migrant worker for elderly care, but if neither is enough, I think more likely politics will over promise and underdeliver until elderly accept their lot because you can only push the young so much. It's going to take a few political cycles for people to accept the "normal", but if any "democracy" can rig the system to survive that process, it's LDP/Japan.