A future for Japanese interpretation

This is the first time I was asked blank and clear whether Japanese was a potential for work in the future from a young lad very much in love with languages and considering interpretation as a career. I told him blank and clear that race was a factor you could not turn around. That at equal competence, the odds that a non-japanese for the Japanese-French pair be called upon was starkly low. Every other single example that proves the equation to be wrong is just an exception that tells nothing more than when the circumstances are ripe, not only the non-japanese can of course deliver as anyone else, and that the Japanese side ends up satisfied. The cases I know about are invariably linked with situations of scarcity or hyper-specialization, but here, I am referring to cases of the Japanese-English pair where non-Japanese have been in-house translators/interpreters, or independent interpreters in the legal domain. Otherwise, the standard freelancer stands no chance with Japanese clients who are certainly the majority to require services. I told him that the future was probably with European languages.