Japan Is Opening Up to Immigration – But Is It Welcoming Immigrants?

For hundreds of years, Japan was notorious for being closed off to foreigners.

But over the past decade the country has been forced to start opening up to immigration, in need of foreign workers to plug the labour shortages caused by its plummeting birth rates and ageing population.

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The “yokoso” (welcome) sign at Tokyo’s Narita Airport is “clearly provisional and time-limited”, said Philip Patrick in The Spectator. Japan puts “social cohesion and societal harmony well ahead of any desire for diversity”.

But there has been a “major shift in policy“. In the past few years, “radical” changes to visa and work-permit requirements have amounted to “a door being flung open and a tatami welcome mat being rolled out to the world”. Why? “Japan has no choice.”

Japan is still “often painted as hostile, if not downright xenophobic”, said The Japan Times. But the number of overseas workers has “more than doubled” over the past decade, The foreign community, including students, has increased 50%. In 2023, then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expanded the visa allowing foreign workers and their families to stay in Japan indefinitely, from just two industries to 11. Now, foreigners account for about 2.4% of the population.

These reforms have not sparked “the populist backlash seen in European countries experiencing shrinking populations”, said the Harvard International Review. So far, most Japanese people “appear content” with the changes.

Foreign workers are mostly permitted in industries like agriculture and nursing care, fields in which the Japanese generally aren’t keen to work. But the country has “prioritised immigrants based on their usefulness”, and focussed less on their integration – “leaving newcomers to face language, cultural, and social barriers alone”.

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