Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

Each colony adopted a different railroad gauge (track separation), ranging from 3 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 3 inches, with the result that trains could not run directly from one colony into another. Like independent countries, the colonies erected protective tariff barriers against one another and maintained customs houses to collect import duties at colonial borders. In 1864 New South Wales and Victoria came close to an armed confrontation at their border. As a result, the six colonies did not become united into a single nation of Australia until 1901, 113 years after the First Fleet.

Australians debating the federal constitution argued about many matters but were unanimous about excluding all non-white races from Australia.

The act barred the immigration of prostitutes, the insane, people suffering from loathsome diseases, and criminals (despite Australia’s origin as a dumping ground for criminals). The act also provided that no blacks or Asians would be admitted, and that Australians should be “one people, and remain one people without the admixture of other races.”

But Australia’s main contribution to World War One was to contribute a huge volunteer force—400,000 soldiers, constituting more than half of all Australian men eligible to serve, out of a total Australian population under 5 million—to defend British interests half-way around the world from Australia, in France and the Mideast. More than 300,000 were sent overseas, of whom two-thirds ended up wounded or killed. Almost every small rural Australian town still has a cenotaph in the town center, listing the names of local men killed in the war.

The ANZAC troops landed on April 25, 1915, suffered high casualties because of incompetent leadership by the British general commanding the operation, and were withdrawn in 1916 when Britain concluded that the operation was a failure. Ever since then, ANZAC Day (April 25), the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, has been Australia’s most important and most emotional national holiday. To a non-Australian, the emphasis on ANZAC Day as the Australian national holiday is beyond comprehension. Why should any country celebrate the slaughter of its young men, betrayed by British leadership, half-way around the world, on a peninsula that rivals the Sudan in its irrelevance to Australia’s national interests?

The explanation is that nothing illustrated better the willingness of Australians to die for their British mother country than did the slaughter of young Australians at Gallipoli.

That self-identification was re-emphasized in 1923, when a conference of British Empire member countries agreed that British dominions could henceforth appoint their own ambassadors or diplomatic representatives to foreign countries, instead of being represented by the British ambassador. Canada, South Africa, and Ireland promptly did appoint their own diplomatic representatives. But Australia did not, on the grounds that there was no public enthusiasm in Australia for seeking visible signs of national independence from Britain.

The surrender of Britain’s big naval base at Singapore to Japanese troops is often regarded as a turning point in the evolution of Australia’s self-image.

Australia abolished the draft in 1930 and built only a small air force and navy. The latter included no aircraft carriers, battleships, or warships larger than light cruisers, hopelessly inadequate to protect Australia and its international sea connections against Japanese attack.

The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried to reassure Australians by promising that Britain and its fleet would use Singapore to protect Australia against Japanese invasion, and against any Japanese fleet that might appear in Australian waters. As events proved, those promises had no basis in reality.

Japan did attack the U.S., Britain, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies beginning on December 7, 1941. On December 10, just the third day after Japan’s declaration of war, Japanese bombers sank Britain’s only two large warships available in the Far East to defend Australia, the battleship Prince of Wales (Plate 7.6) and the battle cruiser Repulse. On February 15, 1942, the British general in command at Singapore surrendered to the Japanese army, sending 100,000 British and Empire troops into prisoner-of-war camps—the most severe military defeat that Britain has suffered in its history (Plate 7.7). Sadly, those troops surrendering included 2,000 Australian soldiers who had arrived in Singapore only three weeks earlier, on January 24, in order to serve in the hopeless task of its defense. In the absence of British ships to protect Australia, the same Japanese aircraft carriers that had bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor heavily bombed the Australian city of Darwin on February 19, 1942 (Plate 7.8). That was the first of more than 60 Japanese air raids on Australia, in addition to an attempted raid on Sydney Harbor by a Japanese submarine.

Australia had been guilty of neglecting its own defense. Nevertheless, Australian bitterness against Britain has persisted for a long time.

But it was clear that any defense of Australia against landings would have been by the U.S., not by Britain.

After World War Two there unfolded a gradual loosening of Australia’s ties to Britain and a shift in Australians’ self-identification as “loyal British in Australia,” resulting in a dismantling of the White Australia policy.

Australia’s minister for immigration from 1945 to 1949, Arthur Calwell, was an outspoken racist. He even refused to allow Australian men who had been so unpatriotic as to marry Japanese, Chinese, or Indonesian women to bring their war-brides or children into Australia. Calwell wrote, “No Japanese women, or any half-castes either, will be admitted to Australia; they are simply not wanted and are permanently undesirable… a mongrel Australia is impossible.”

The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Britain failed to topple President Nasser of Egypt and was forced to yield to U.S. economic pressure, laid bare Britain’s military and economic weakness. To the shock of Australians, in 1967 Britain announced its intent to withdraw all of its military forces east of the Suez Canal. That marked the official end to Britain’s long-standing role as Australia’s protector.

A rapid rise in Australian trade with Japan began with Australia’s overcoming its racist and World-War-Two–driven hostility to Japan to sign a trade agreement with Japan in 1957, and then in 1960 lifting its ban on exporting iron ore to Japan. By the 1980’s Australia’s leading trade partner was—Japan!—followed by the U.S., with Britain far behind.

Britain’s 1968 Immigration Act barred automatic right of entry into Britain for all FOREIGNERS (Australians were now declared to be foreigners!) without at least one British-born grandparent, thereby excluding a large fraction of Australians at that time. In 1972 Britain declared Australians to be ALIENS (!). What an insult! In short, it wasn’t the case that Australian sons and daughters of the British motherland were declaring their independence. Instead, the motherland was declaring its own independence, loosening its ties with the Commonwealth,

1972, when Australia’s Labour Party under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam came to power for the first time in 23 years. In his first 19 days in office, even before he had appointed a new cabinet, Whitlam and his deputy embarked on a crash program of selective change in Australia, for which there are few parallels in the modern world in its speed and comprehensiveness. The changes introduced in those 19 days included: end of the military draft (national conscription); withdrawal of all Australian troops from Vietnam; recognition of the People’s Republic of China; announced independence for Papua New Guinea, which Australia had been administering for over half-a-century under a mandate from the League of Nations and then from the United Nations; banning visits by racially selected overseas athletic teams (a rule aimed especially at all-white South African teams); abolishing the nomination of Australians for Britain’s system of honors (knighthoods, OBEs, KCMGs, and so on) and replacing them with a new system of Australian honors; and—officially repudiating the White Australia policy. Once Whitlam’s whole cabinet had been approved, it then adopted more steps in the crash program: reduction of the voting age to 18; increase in the minimum wage; giving representation to both the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory in the federal Senate; granting legislative councils to both of those territories; requiring environmental impact statements for industrial developmen...

Whitlam correctly described his reforms as a “recognition of what has already happened” rather than as a revolution arising out of nothing. In fact, Australia’s British identity had been gradually decreasing. The fall of Singapore in 1942 had been a first big shock, the 1951 ANZUS Security Treaty an early recognition, communist threats in Eastern Europe and Vietnam warning signs.

In 1954 the first visit to Australia by a reigning British monarch, Queen Elizabeth, was greeted by an enormous outpouring of pro-British sentiment: over 75% of all Australians turned out on the streets to cheer her (Plate 7.9). But—by the time that Queen Elizabeth visited Australia again in 1963, two years after Britain’s first EEC application, Australians were much less interested in her and in Britain.

In 1986 Australia ended the right of final appeal to Britain’s Privy Council, thereby abolishing the last real trace of British sovereignty and making Australia fully independent at last. In 1999 Australia’s High Court declared Britain to be a “foreign country.”

Australians have reluctantly recognized that Britain, their former closest trade partner, is now just a minor trade partner, that their former worst enemy of Japan is now their most important trade partner, and that it is no longer a viable strategy for Australia to operate as a white British outpost on the periphery of Asia.

Australian society still has an unmistakably Australian flavor, such as a dedication to sports: especially to the Australian sport of Australian-rules football (invented in Australia and played nowhere else), along with swimming, plus the British sports of cricket and rugby.

In most countries that make many selective changes, different changes are made independently over many years. But one of the few examples of a unified program consisting of many changes launched simultaneously is the 19-day whirlwind of Australia’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from December 1 to December 19 of 1972.

Within a decade or two, it is likely that Asians will constitute over 15% of Australia’s population and its legislators, and over 50% of the students in top Australian universities. Sooner or later, Australia will elect an Asian as its prime minister. (At the moment that I write this sentence, a Vietnamese immigrant is already governor of South Australia.)

In relative terms, Japan’s proportion of its gross domestic product (abbreviated GDP) that it devotes to R & D, 3.5%, is nearly double that of the U.S. (only 1.8%), and still considerably higher than that of two other countries known for their R & D investments, Germany (2.9%) and China (2.0%).

The reasons for Japan’s high ranking include two obvious to lay visitors: Japan’s excellent infrastructure and transport net, such as the world’s best railroads; and its healthy, well-educated workforce especially proficient in math and science (more of that in the next section).

The socio-economic inequality that limits opportunities for a large fraction of Americans is greatly reduced in Japan: Japan is the world’s third-most egalitarian nation in its distribution of income, behind only Denmark and Sweden. That’s partly a result of Japanese government school policies: schools in socio-economically disadvantaged areas have smaller classes (more favorable teacher-to-student ratios) than do schools in richer areas, thereby making it easier for children of poorer citizens to catch up. (In contrast, the American school system tends to perpetuate inequality by packing more students into classrooms in poor areas.)

Literacy and attained educational levels in Japan are close to the highest in the world. Enrollment of Japanese children in both kindergarten and secondary school is almost universal, although neither is compulsory.

As a result of all those environmental advantages, Japan was unusual in the ancient world in that, already at least 10,000 years before the adoption of agriculture, Japanese hunter-gatherers had settled down in villages and made pottery, rather than living as nomads with few material possessions. Until Japan’s population explosion within the last century-and-a-half, Japan was self-sufficient in food.

Japan’s government debt is comparable to that of the entire eurozone of 17 countries, whose aggregate population is triple that of Japan.

Why didn’t the Japanese government collapse or default long ago under this burden? First, most of the debt is not owed to foreign creditors, but to bond-holding Japanese individuals, Japanese businesses and pension funds (many of them owned by the government itself), and the Bank of Japan, none of which play tough with the Japanese government. In contrast, much of Greece’s debt is owed to foreign creditors, who do play tough and press Greece to change its fiscal policies.

But nobody knows how much higher the debt can rise before Japan’s creditors lose confidence and the government has to default.

Japan’s debt in effect represents payments by younger Japanese to older Japanese, constituting an inter-generational conflict and a mortgage on Japan’s future. That mortgage is growing, because Japan’s young population is shrinking while its older population is growing

Many Japanese wives today swear that they will be the last generation of Japanese women to be saddled with those responsibilities.

In practice, virtually all Japanese fathers and most Japanese mothers don’t take that leave to which they are entitled. Instead, 70% of Japanese working women quit work upon the birth of their first child, and most of them don’t return to work for many years, if ever.

Japanese companies invest heavily in training an employee, expect to offer a lifetime job, and expect in return that the employee will work long hours and will remain for life. Companies are reluctant to hire and train women, because they may want to take off time to have children, may not want to work long hours, and may not return to work after giving birth to a child. Hence women tend not to be offered, and tend not to accept if offered, full-time high-level jobs with Japanese companies.

Hence underemployment of Japanese women constitutes for Japan the loss of half of its human capital.

Low and dropping birth rates prevail throughout the First World. But Japan has nearly the world’s lowest birth rate: 7 births per year per 1,000 people, compared to 13 in the U.S., 19 averaged over the whole world, and more than 40 in some African countries.

An alternative way of expressing births is by what’s called the total fertility rate: i.e., the total number of babies born to an average woman over her lifetime. For the whole world that number averages 2.5 babies; for the First World countries with the biggest economies, it varies between 1.3 and 2.0 babies (e.g., 1.9 for the U.S.). The number for Japan is only 1.27 babies, at the low end of the spectrum; South Korea and Poland are among the few countries with lower values. But the average number of babies that a woman has to bear in order for the population to remain stable—the so-called replacement rate—is slightly more than 2.

Japan along with some other First World countries has an average total fertility rate below that replacement rate. For other First World countries, that’s not a problem, because immigration keeps the population size constant or even growing despite low fertility. However, Japan’s near-absence of immigration means that Japan’s population is actually declining, as we’ll discuss. Part of the reason for Japan’s falling birth rate is that Japan’s age of first marriage has been rising: it’s now around 30 for both men and women. That means fewer pre-menopausal years in which a woman can conceive children. A bigger reason for the falling birth rate is that the rate of marriage itself (i.e., the number of marriages per 1,000 people per year) is falling rapidly in Japan. One might object that the marriage rate is also falling in most other developed countries without causing the catastrophic drop in the birth rate that Japan is experiencing, because so many births are to unwed mothers: 40% of all births in the U.S., 50% in France, and 66% in Iceland. But that mitigation doesn’t apply to Japan, where unwed mothers account for a negligible proportion of births: only 2%.

Especially for women, marriage and motherhood can be economically catastrophic by making it difficult for them to obtain or retain a job. Another reason offered is the freedom of being single, a consideration especially for women who don’t want to end up shouldering the responsibility of the household, husband, child care, their own elderly parents, and their husband’s elderly parents. Still another reason is that many modern Japanese, both men and women in equal proportions, consider marriage “unnecessary” to a fulfilling life.

Still, it was a shock when census figures confirmed that that dreaded moment had actually arrived. After the five-year 2010 census had shown a population of 128,057,352, the 2015 census yielded 127,110,000, a decline of nearly 1 million.

The consequences of Japan’s falling population and its shift from rural to urban are already visible. Japan is closing schools at a rate of about 500 per year. Rural depopulation is causing villages and small towns to be abandoned.

Already now, 23% of Japan’s population is over 65, and 6% is over 80. By the year 2050 those numbers are projected to be nearly 40% and 16%, respectively. (The corresponding numbers for the African country of Mali are only 3% and 0.1%.) At that point, Japanese people over the age of 80 will outnumber kids under 14, and people over 65 will outnumber those kids by more than 3 to 1.

Japan is, and prides itself on being, the most ethnically homogenous affluent or populous country in the world. It doesn’t welcome immigrants, makes it difficult for anyone who wants to immigrate to do so, and makes it even more difficult for anyone who has succeeded in immigrating to receive Japanese citizenship. As a percentage of a country’s total population, immigrants and their children constitute 28% of Australia’s population, 21% of Canada’s, 16% of Sweden’s, and 14% of the U.S.’s, but only 1.9% of Japan’s. Among refugees seeking asylum, Sweden accepts 92%, Germany 70%, Canada 48%, but Japan only 0.2%. (For instance, Japan accepted only six and eleven refugees in the years 2013 and 2014, respectively.)

The only significant immigration to Japan in modern times was of several million Koreans before and during World War Two, when Korea was a Japanese colony. However, many or most of those Koreans were involuntary immigrants imported as slave labor. For instance, it is not widely known that 10% of the victims killed at Hiroshima by the first atomic bomb were Korean laborers working there.

The percentage of Japanese opposed to increasing the number of foreign residents is 63%; 72% agree that immigrants increase crime rates; and 80% deny that immigrants improve society by introducing new ideas, unlike the 57%–75% of Americans, Canadians, and Australians who do believe that immigrants improve society.

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.