[ryan_lane]

Japan now has Kimi Onoda as Minister in Charge of Foreign Nationals and Immigration, and she's an immigrant herself, but her stance on immigrants is pretty hardline.

These people aren't anti-immigrant because of issues with immigration. They're anti-immigrant because they're hateful.

[johnnyanmac]

Japan is truly impressive on taking an anti-immigration stance because they have numbers already that would be the dream of other countries pushing such perspectives. Off the top of my head there's 0.3% immigration.

It's truly saddening that such a stance can still work when it's likely the average citizen will not encounter an immigrant in their day to day life. a million immigrants is not threatening the jobs of 300m Japanese people.

[mitthrowaway2]

In Japan, the popular sentiment on immigration tends to be grouped together with tourists and temporary foreign workers as a single category: foreigners. This is perhaps understandable but unfortunate, because tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations. Bad experiences with tourists creates hostility towards immigrants, who are few and mostly do work hard to integrate and behave well.

[C6JEsQeQa5fCjE]

> tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations

Tourists are short-term visitors who are there exclusively to spend their money in Japan and leave it with its citizens. If the Japanese do not want that because the tourists don't come fully prepared for living in Japan, then you should just deny tourist entries to the country. It would be win-win for everyone, because there are plenty of other countries who would gladly take those tourists instead.

[mitthrowaway2]

I'm sure the Sanseito party would be happy to add your proposal to their platform. I doubt the people who work in the tourism industry are voting for them anyway, and the people who benefit indirectly from tourism probably aren't aware enough of the dependency to care about it.

[goykasi]

That is mostly correct; immigrants account for about 3% of a total 123mil population. Your point does stand, but we are quite visible in Japan -- especially in Tokyo.

You are correct that we do not threaten jobs either. A large majority of the foreign population is working low/unskilled jobs. Generally, the native population is not wanting those jobs.

[wahnfrieden]

Those undesirable jobs can also be highly visible. Maybe the most frequent place Japanese notice visible minority immigrants is at convenience stores. So maybe it makes the population feel overrepresented. I see RWers post frequently about convenience store workers at least.

[snickerbockers]

Does the 0.3% figure include the massive US military presence? IDK if they count as "immigrants" under the strict definition of the term but most people would consider them immigrants and that might be where a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment comes from. I would be very surprised if the total amount of immigrants in Japan when including foreign armed services and their family members is a mere 3/10 of a percent.

They get blamed for a lot of crime; idk if that's true or not but it probably is, in part because American culture has less respect for authority, in part because American culture has more respect for individual liberties, and in part because any time you have a large enclave of foreigners (regardless of where they come from or which host nation they're in) they always end up committing more crime than the native population. They also get blamed for driving up prices in the real-estate market (this is definitely true, the US Navy owns 20% of Okinawa).

Blaming "immigrants" instead of specifically blaming the US military is also very convenient for both the US and Japanese government because both governments are largely in-favor of continuing the status quo so it's not surprising that politicians would obfuscate the source of the problem by blaming immigrants as a whole.

[khuey]

The entire US military presence in Japan (service members, dependents, and contractors) is around 100k people, or roughly 0.08% of Japan's population.

[totetsu]

Rather than necessarily hateful (but not excluding that), whats happening here seems like brazen discursive manipulation for gain of political power at expense of a minority of the population. Power in Japanese society is in large part built on calculating and self serving behaviour, without any real integral morals or values.. so politicians are seeing this stuff work overseas, and know they can get away with it too now.

[JuniperMesos]

Seems like Onoda's situation is that she was born in the United States to a white American father and a Japanese mother, and the father abandoned the family and the mother moved back to Japan when Onoda was extremely young. So she has almost entirely grown up in Japan but technically had US citizenship because of US birthright citizenship laws until she deliberately gave it up; and of course is visibly half-white. It wouldn't surprise me if part of her personal anti-immigration stance was grounded in anger and sadness about her non-Japanese father abandoning her and her mom.

[enieslobby]

Please provide evidence for Kimi Onoda being "hateful". She is 100% culturally Japanese, and even speaks English with an accent. This is different from immigrants who don't know the basic cultural norms of a country and have integration issues.

[forgotoldacc]

She had American citizenship until recently. She's overcompensating by larping as a native when she isn't. She was intentionally picked to be a token foreigner to lead the anti-immigration policy of the new administration, just like the US's regime can say "You can't call us far right! That Stephen Miller guy's Jewish!" They love their token minorities since it's an easy counterpoint that they think proves they're angels with good intentions, and unfortunately, half of any given country will completely believe a government that uses minorities for that purpose.

[snickerbockers]

So what's your point? Should minorities be excluded from government? Are individual members of minority groups not entitled to their own opinions? And are "far right" jews really that big of an anomaly?

There is definitely a phenomenon of people sometimes supporting candidates on the basis that their ethnicity won't be used to criticize their policies but they're addressing a complaint that would be made otherwise. It also denies the agency of minorities by requiring them to be monolithic entities wherein all members agree with whatever you think their opinions should be. Would you really be satisfied if the entire trump administration was white Christian males over the age of 40?

One of the criticisms of the pro-life side of the abortion debate has always been that men are over-represented in the US federal government yet they're able to regulate an issue in which they are not directly effected. I don't know if you agree with this specific criticism or not but a lot of people do and I don't think it's fair to then complain about "tokenism" when somebody like Amy Coney Barrett who is immune to this argument gets appointed.

[forgotoldacc]

My point was pretty clear.

Bad people aren't limited to one race or anything. But far end politicians love propping up a minority on TV because then they can have an excuse whenever they're compared to historically bad political movements.

You're the only one bringing up white Christian males here, which kind of proves my point. You seem to think that for some reason I care if a politician is white or Christian. Extremist Islamic parties love propping up Christian minorities on TV and saying they'll defend them (they won't). Right wing western parties really, really love propping up a Jewish party member because they can say "we're not Nazis!!! All Nazis hated Jews and we love them!!!" Because the average person really thinks nazism was really only about killing Jewish people, when the reality was they only got around to that after several years of other awful stuff.

The LDP is propping up their 100% foreign born, foreign citizenship politician so they can say "see? We can't be anti-foreigner because the lady controlling this is a foreigner." The optics are transparent and it's even what they're astroturfing their message on social media as. Japanese politics are all about image. They don't pick a foreigner who illegally held dual citizenship to head anti-foreigner policies by accident.

[khuey]

> and she's an immigrant herself

Not really. Her mother is Japanese and they moved back when she was one year old.

[Fnoord]

We had Dilan Yeşilgöz here in NL, minister of justice and leader of the liberal party VVD (right wing). She's an immigrant, born in Ankara, of Kurdish ancestry. She lied about immigrant subsequent travelers (which she is herself!) being a huge issue, and the government fell because of this issue. Turns out it is 400 people per year. I don't know what it is. Self-hate? Rules for thee, not for me?