America may be lacking in a lot of things these days--political unity, any sense of shame with regard to skyrocketing CEO pay and rampant poverty alike, money in the Treasury over the long term--but what we do have plenty of is land and the now-idle capability to develop it. Japan, on the other hand, has lots of productive, dutiful, highly educated citizens but an acute-on-chronic lack of land, with the acute exacerbation due to the recent fallout (literally speaking) from the Fukushima reactor meltdowns.
I lack the expertise to properly analyze the issue, but I bet the US of A would come out the net beneficiary by far if it'd offer up a modern "homesteading" program to the Japanese. This program, as I envision it, would allow for Japanese who wished to leave their now-low-level-irradiated homeland to set up anew in the vast, currently empty American west with governmental assistance. Call it 新日本 (New Japan), if you will.
Of course, there's no way that such a plan would fly in today's reality, with immigration restrictions (even for "wanted immigrants"), the requirement of an initial outlay on our government's part in exchange for a potential vast future windfall of productivity and development, and the current parcelization and split ownership of these empty lands, but it's a thought. (I also bet a substantial portion of Japanese would be too bound by their loyalty to their country, even as it fails them quite clearly in these times, to leave.)
Inspiration for this came from this article in today's NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/world/asia/01radiation.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I lack the expertise to properly analyze the issue, but I bet the US of A would come out the net beneficiary by far if it'd offer up a modern "homesteading" program to the Japanese. This program, as I envision it, would allow for Japanese who wished to leave their now-low-level-irradiated homeland to set up anew in the vast, currently empty American west with governmental assistance. Call it 新日本 (New Japan), if you will.
Of course, there's no way that such a plan would fly in today's reality, with immigration restrictions (even for "wanted immigrants"), the requirement of an initial outlay on our government's part in exchange for a potential vast future windfall of productivity and development, and the current parcelization and split ownership of these empty lands, but it's a thought. (I also bet a substantial portion of Japanese would be too bound by their loyalty to their country, even as it fails them quite clearly in these times, to leave.)
Inspiration for this came from this article in today's NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/world/asia/01radiation.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
