Opening the country to a surge of immigrants makes sense, but Japan is not about to become an American-style melting pot, and this solution alone would be inadequate to the scale of the demographic challenge. Foreigners make up less than 2% of Japan’s population, and a United Nations report from 2001 found that Japan would need inflows averaging 609,000 immigrants per year until 2050 to maintain the percentage of its working-age population.