Four years ago, Japan’s powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry floated the idea of exporting a new commodity to the United States and other countries.

But for a change the Japanese found no ready market for the export, which was not a fancy new television or camcorder or car. Rather, it was Japanese retirees. Faced with criticism at home and abroad that Japan was advocating the separation of families and attempting to dump responsibility for its aged onto other lands, MITI soon deep-sixed the proposal.

At a recent forum here, a San Francisco Bay Area developer suggested that the idea might be coming back around, given that Japan must soon figure out how to deal with its rapidly growing pool of elderly.

So what makes him think that retirement communities in the United States might be in the offing?


“Shrewd Japanese investors . . . are buying golf courses with excess land to develop housing,” said William H. C. Chang, 33, president of Westlake Builders, a San Mateo, Calif., developer of retirement facilities.

“It would be a relatively easy transformation to convert such land into retirement villages,” said Chang, who was born in Japan of a Japanese mother and a Chinese father.

Indeed, Japanese interests have snapped up a number of premium golf properties in the past few years, including the Riviera Country Club & Golf Course in Pacific Palisades (for $108 million) and Napa County’s Silverado Country Club & Resort.

Ostensibly, the Japanese seem to be taking advantage of their awesome spending power to pick up prestigious properties, partly to provide an alternative to Japanese clubs, where million-dollar memberships are common.


But Chang contends that golf, a sport the Japanese love, isn’t their only interest.

His late-afternoon comments roused a roomful of drowsy participants at a recent Pacific Rim real estate conference sponsored by the law firm of Baker & McKenzie at San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko.

“It sounds like an excellent idea,” said John A. Lisanti, president of American International Golf Resorts in Greenbrae, Calif., a company that puts together golf course deals for Japanese investors.

To him, maybe. But many other real estate developers--both Japanese and U.S.--contend that Japanese traditions and culture would prevent the idea from ever getting off the ground.


When the notion was first proposed in 1986 “it got such rave reviews that somebody almost got his throat slashed,” said an executive of a U.S. company that operates nursing homes and retirement centers.

The idea received a flurry of publicity when it was advanced by a Japanese government official who had returned from a posting in Spain, where he saw how far European retirees’ money could go. Under the “Silver Columbia Plan,” as it was called, private companies were to develop retirement communities, or “silver towns,” by 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in America.

Besides Spain, countries mentioned as possible sites included the United States, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, various Asian nations and Australia.

The plan quickly drew criticism from many of those countries, which envisioned having to provide medical care and other age-related services to hordes of expatriate Japanese. And in Japan, where the elderly traditionally have been cared for at home by family members, officials also took heat. MITI abandoned the effort.


“There was a cultural abhorrence of this,” said Barry Robinson, associate editor of Ageing International magazine in Washington. “It was very un-Japanese.”

Asked about Chang’s thesis, however, Robinson noted that, even though the government-sponsored effort has been shot down, private Japanese developers might yet consider building such communities overseas.

Clearly, the rapid aging of densely packed Japan cries out for solutions. Because of a falling birth rate and longer life expectancies, the country is aging far more quickly than most others.

Revised statistics from the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare indicate a cloud in the “silver” lining. Whereas a year ago it was estimated that Japan would have 20 million people over age 65 by the year 2000, the new numbers show an even higher figure: 21.3 million, or 16.6% of the population, according to researchers at the East-West Center in Honolulu who analyzed the data.


The elderly population will peak in 2020, when nearly 24% will be part of the “silver” crowd and Japan will have one of the oldest populations on Earth.

It is customary in Japan for sons and daughters to take in aging parents. But as more Japanese women enter the work force, the Confucian belief in “filial piety” is losing ground, observers say. At the same time, land is becoming scarcer and prohibitively expensive.

And that raises the question: Where will all those elderly live?

Sanford R. Goodkin, a San Diego real estate consultant, figures that it is inevitable that some will end up in overseas retirement communities.


“The Japanese have been pursuing expertise in this area for eight or nine years,” said Goodkin, executive director of the Peat Marwick Main/Goodkin Real Estate Consulting Group.

For example, a subsidiary of Nisshin Steel Co. of Japan is investing in a joint venture with the LeisureCare division of Leisure Technology Inc., a Los Angeles-based developer of retirement communities, to build 44 retirement centers in North America over the next 15 years.

However, the Japanese are “a long way off” from building anything overseas targeted strictly to Japanese elderly, said Jerry Falcon, president of LeisureCare, based in Northbrook, Ill.

To be sure, many affluent Japanese have been buying winter homes in such sunny spots as Hawaii, San Diego and Australia’s Gold Coast. But many observers see a massive shift of Japanese old people overseas as highly unlikely.


“Most Japanese are not very comfortable in spending old age in other countries where they don’t understand the language and the culture,” said Yukuo Takenaka, president and chief executive of Takenaka & Co., a Los Angeles investment banking firm.

Japanese companies, in fact, are involved in joint ventures with U.S. firms to develop retirement communities on their home turf. They include centers along waterfronts and in rural areas, to get the elderly away from congested cities.

Another idea under study in Japan is “silver manpower centers,” where the elderly could live and work, said Richard K. C. Lee, a retiree who works part time as a specialist on aging at the East-West Center’s Population Institute.

The Japanese government, meanwhile, is encouraging other governments to grant extended visa privileges to older Japanese tourists to enable them to stay overseas a few months at a time, rather than the few days’ visits that are now the norm, according to Kazuo Hoshino, a MITI official.


The plan, he said, would enable Japanese to experience life overseas without living “abroad for good.”

Chang remains convinced that Japanese “silver towns” are a likelihood. By 2000, he said, technological advances such as supersonic travel will make overseas retirement feasible.

And golf course purchases, he added, “are just the tip of the iceberg.”