ability. when you have a population growing older and older and you lose your i don t think it s coming back. you have to liberalize your immigration laws. they won t do it. japanese won t do it. an homogenous nation. my son born in japan doesn t have a japanese passport. my three children born in america have a japanese passport. the japanese won t let you become a they may have to. they may just have to. we count on japan and china buying our debt. japan is not going to be in a position to buy a lot of our debt right now. what will that mean? china is now looking at changing their economy and they may not want to buy as much of our debt. i think that does affect us in terms of what will happen in the market of our debt, it will be more expensive for us. before we go to a break, there is positive news.
of this. we do know it s one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. it is. at the same time, japan is educati educationally advanced. disaster preparedness is part of japanese culture more than any other credit in the world, i would estimate. if there was a society prepared for something like this, it would be japan at the same time, we see despite all the preparations they ve made, they ve reached out for help as shay should. the world has responded. china has responded very constructively, i would say. the japanese political culture before the earthquake very bickering and not making progress on key issues has unified from the national to local level. that s been very important to see. in the words of the american president saying the america will be with japan until this is dealt with was very reassuring for the japanese people. what s the short and long term impact. you had a very weak government
states, china won t be. there is such an ov over there was an overreaction to japan. and to the japanese coming and buying key america land. that worried people a lot. it s the same thing with china. we re overreacting. then is going to undergo many of the same growing pains. they re not going to be able to grow at the clip they re growing. i m not saying we don t have to get our economic house in order- to use the chinese example to say we have to invest in education. japan is the oldest country on earth. its median age in 1960 starting up was 25 years old. it was a young country. its median age is 45, going up to 55 by 2050. it s going to lose 20 million people in this decade and 6 million people in the decade after that. it is aging, shrinking and dying because of the population. they have enormous ingenuity and
level. the swiss alps. even the swiss alps, if the generators had been up higher, even on the fourth or fifth floor, none of this would have happened. people need to understand, it s a lot like new orleans and katrina. it wasn t the actual hurricane that caused the damage. it couldn t have been in a worse place unless it was in tokyo bay. it s right off the coast. the earthquake didn t kill most of those people. the thousands pulled out to sea was the tsunami and you have the fukushima plants right there, so you have a triple hit on this thing. yeah. which is unusual, it can happen. you can t give up nuclear, you have coal with problems, oil, gas, hydroelectric power and we have our power and all of them have problems. and growing need. a growing need. a growing need with china stuking up so much of our energy
there, this has to be a country that obviously is in mourning because of what is happening right now. this is a horrific tragedy. there has been a dark cloud over this country for a decade. the other question is will we have another dark cloud. the nikkei lost 10% yesterday. people use the argument about japan to say that china is not a threat. i ve heard people even in the administration say we all said japan was going to be the threat and then we all said the soviet union was going to be the threat and america has remained strong. there is a big difference between japan and china. china is a far bigger country with a huge population, a billion people. japan is a much smaller population. you can see the chinese have so much room for economic expansion. i think it s sometimes misguided to say just because japan was not the big threat to the united