Tokyo — A minor political party with outsized ambitions has stepped into Japan's most contested domestic policy debate with a claim that stops well short of a concrete proposal: artificial intelligence and robotics will make mass immigration unnecessary.
Team Mirai — whose name invokes 未来, the Japanese character for "future" — published a position paper this week arguing that accelerating AI deployment across labour-intensive sectors could eliminate the structural workforce shortfalls that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has cited as justification for expanded foreign worker programmes. The paper, reported by The Japan Times on Monday, does not quantify the timeline for AI substitution or specify which sectors could be automated and by when.
The party's position is not without political logic. Japan's immigration debate is, at its core, a demographic argument — and demographic arguments make uncomfortable reading. The country's total fertility rate fell to 1.20 in 2023, the lowest recorded figure, and the working-age population is projected to shrink by roughly 12 million by 2040. Those numbers generate relentless pressure on policymakers. AI optimism, whatever its empirical merits, offers an alternative frame: instead of confronting the data on population decline, one can postulate a technological solution and defer the harder political choices.
Can AI actually staff a care home?
The question is not hypothetical. Japan's nursing and elder care sector faces a shortage of approximately 320,000 workers by 2025, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare — a figure that rises to over 690,000 by 2040 under current projections. The government has already authorised humanoid care robots for limited deployment in facilities, and AI-assisted monitoring systems are active in dozens of elder care centres across Osaka and Kanagawa prefectures.
But robotics researchers and labour economists who study the sector consistently draw a line between what automation can assist with and what it can replace. Bathing, physical repositioning, emotional support, nuanced communication with patients experiencing dementia — these tasks involve a density of physical and social intelligence that current robotics cannot reproduce at scale, at cost, or with the reliability that institutional elder care demands.
"The sectors that Japan actually needs workers for right now — nursing, construction, food processing, seasonal agriculture — are precisely the sectors where automation is hardest and most expensive," said one labour economist who studies Japan's workforce transition, speaking on background. "AI replacing a factory assembly-line worker in 2026 is a different proposition from AI replacing a care worker who needs to communicate comfort to an 88-year-old patient with Alzheimer's."
Japan's construction industry faces a parallel challenge. The country is in the middle of significant infrastructure investment ahead of ongoing disaster-preparedness projects and the continued build-out of high-speed rail links. The Construction Workers Union has repeatedly warned that automation timelines projected by technology vendors consistently overshoot what is deployable on active construction sites.
The political framing, not the technical case
What makes Team Mirai's position worth taking seriously — even where its technical premises are contestable — is the political function it serves. The LDP has long faced internal tension between its business-aligned faction, which wants more foreign workers to keep labour costs manageable, and a nativist flank that opposes immigration on cultural and national identity grounds. Team Mirai's AI argument offers an exit ramp from that tension: embrace technology, avoid the culture war.
It is a framing choice, and framing choices in Japanese politics carry weight. The word 外国人 (gaikokujin, "foreigner") carries distinct social resonance in a country where 98.5 percent of the registered population holds Japanese citizenship. The landmark 2019 immigration reform — which created the "Specified Skilled Worker" visa categories — was itself packaged not as an immigration policy but as a "labour policy," a rhetorical choice that was deliberate and widely noted at the time.
Team Mirai's argument that AI can sidestep the immigration question follows the same logic: avoid naming the trade-off by proposing a technical solution that makes it disappear. The difficulty is that the technical solution does not yet exist at the scale or in the sectors where it would need to operate.
The LDP has not formally responded to Team Mirai's paper. A government spokesperson told reporters Monday that immigration and technology policy were both "ongoing areas of examination" — a formulation that in Japanese political language signals no near-term action is intended.
Watch what they do, not what they say. In East Asian diplomacy — and in domestic Japanese politics — the subtext is the text. Team Mirai is not principally making a technology argument. It is making a political argument about what kind of future Japan should want to imagine, and deferring the demographic reckoning that the data insists upon.
