Japan, an ethnically homogenous country with a long history of isolation and no immigration, values highly its ethnic homogeneity, while the U.S., an ethnically heterogeneous country almost all of whose citizens are the descendants of modern immigrants, has no ethnic homogeneity to value. Instead, Japan’s dilemma is that it suffers from widely acknowledged problems that other countries mitigate by means of immigration, but that Japan hasn’t figured out how to solve without resorting to immigration.
