According to a recent article in The New York Times, Japan is running out of engineers and scientists.

After decades of eminence in the fields that made it a world leader in technology, Japan now finds itself worrying over its future, as its young people flock to professions in other areas. Japanese educators have even given the trend a name: rikei banare (or "flight from science").

By one estimate from the nation's ministry of internal affairs, there is a shortfall of almost half a million engineers available to Japan's industrial infrastructure.

Much like American youngsters, Japanese students increasingly are choosing career paths in more lucrative or glamorous sectors such as finance or the arts. The drop-off in those studying math, science, and engineering has become so severe, the Times reports, that Japanese industrial firms have begun advertising campaigns designed to make these pursuits "look sexy and cool."

More pragmatically perhaps, Japanese business planners have initiated programs to invite young engineers and scientists to their shores to fill in the looming gaps--as well as to send high-tech assignments overseas to where the talent pool is potentially deeper, such as India and Malaysia.

So far, these efforts have failed to turn the tide in terms of meeting the country's enormous future needs for brain power, according to the Times.

"Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb," Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University, told the U.S. newspaper. "An explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it."

If it sounds like a familiar refrain to many in Western industrial nations, it's because Japan is hardly alone. The more prosperous a nation becomes, the more it tends to squander the very source of its own prosperity.