I started looking deeply into Japan’s immigration policy because I realized the subject had become too politically flammable for me to trust surface-level impressions.
Immigration used to feel like a relatively technical policy discussion in Japan: labor shortages, visas, technical interns, language education, permanent residency. Increasingly, it has become emotional. That is true not only among Japanese voters, but even among foreigners who have lived here for years, speak Japanese, and can follow the nuance of the political debate.
Depending on what you read, Japan is either being overwhelmed by foreigners or descending into xenophobia. Neither description seemed particularly useful to me.
So I wanted to go back to the data and ask a simpler set of questions. How much has immigration actually increased? Who is coming? Has Japan really become more open? What problems are supported by evidence, and which ones are exaggerated? Why has public opinion shifted so quickly? And, perhaps most importantly, where is policy actually going?
This is also impossible for me to view as a purely academic question.
I am a foreigner who grew up in Japan and has spent most of my life here. Japan is my home. I have built two companies here and invested in more than 100 others. Companies I have helped build or back now employ thousands of people.
That creates a tension I suspect many long-term foreign residents feel.
On one hand, after going through the evidence, I understand some of the recent backlash better than I did before. The foreign population really is increasing rapidly. Japan has allowed migration to expand faster than some of its integration and enforcement infrastructure. There are genuine cases of abuse, noncompliance and community friction that should not simply be dismissed as xenophobia.
At the same time, I cannot pretend the changing tone does not make me uncomfortable. When political discussions increasingly refer to “foreigners” as a problem to be controlled, it is hard not to wonder what that means over the long term for people like me who have built their lives here.
What I found is more complicated, but also more reassuring, than most of the rhetoric.
Japan is simultaneously becoming a larger immigration country and a stricter immigration state.
Those two trends are not contradictory, and will likely define Japanese immigration policy for the next decade.
Japan has been quietly liberalizing immigration for 30 years
Japan famously does not like to describe itself as an immigration country.
But if you ignore the terminology and look at what the government has actually done, the direction over the past three decades is quite clear. Japan has progressively created more ways for foreigners to live and work here.
At the end of 2025, Japan had 4.125 million foreign residents, a record and the first time the number exceeded four million. According to the Immigration Services Agency’s year-end statistics, that was an increase of 9.5% in a single year.
For perspective, Japan had roughly 2.23 million foreign residents in 2015, based on the Immigration Services Agency’s historical statistics. The foreign-resident population has therefore grown by roughly 85% in just a decade and has roughly tripled since the mid-1990s.
This did not happen through one sweeping immigration reform. Japan opened incrementally.
One early shift came around 1990, when immigration rules were changed in ways that facilitated the arrival of second- and third-generation Japanese descendants, particularly from Brazil and Peru.
The Technical Intern Training Program was established in 1993. Officially, its purpose was international skills transfer. Over time, however, it became heavily intertwined with Japan’s need for workers in labor-short industries. The Immigration Services Agency now acknowledges that the existing system developed a significant gap between its stated purpose and how it was actually used.
Japan then opened more explicitly to skilled professionals.
A points-based Highly Skilled Professional system began operating in 2012 and offered immigration advantages to people meeting thresholds based on education, professional experience and income. The details of the system are laid out by the Immigration Services Agency.
In 2023, Japan introduced J-Skip and J-Find, creating additional pathways for exceptionally qualified professionals and graduates of leading overseas universities. The J-Skip system, for example, provides preferential treatment to high-income professionals who meet certain career criteria.
Startup-visa programs also created pathways for overseas entrepreneurs to spend time in Japan preparing new businesses. Under METI’s Startup Visa framework, qualifying founders can receive up to two years to prepare their businesses before transitioning to a longer-term residence status.
But the real conceptual break came in 2019, with the creation of the Specified Skilled Worker system.
For the first time, Japan was effectively saying openly: we have industries that cannot find enough workers domestically, so we will admit foreigners to fill those jobs.
That is very different from calling them “trainees.”
The transition becomes even clearer in April 2027, when the Technical Intern Training Program begins being replaced by the new Employment for Skill Development system (育成就労). The Immigration Services Agency explicitly describes the new system as one intended both to develop workers and to secure labor for industries facing shortages.
In other words, Japan spent much of the last 30 years building an immigration system while avoiding the political vocabulary of immigration.
But that distinction is becoming harder to maintain.
The composition of immigration has changed just as much as the size
The image many Japanese people have of foreigners in Japan is several decades out of date.
In an earlier era, the foreign population was heavily associated with Koreans with deep historical roots in Japan, Chinese migrants, Western expatriates, and the large wave of Brazilian and Peruvian residents of Japanese descent.
Today, marginal growth is coming overwhelmingly from Asia, particularly Southeast and South Asia.
According to the Immigration Services Agency’s 2025 nationality data, the largest foreign communities included roughly 930,000 Chinese, 681,000 Vietnamese and 407,000 Koreans, followed by large Filipino, Nepalese and Indonesian communities.
Vietnam is perhaps the most striking example. A community that was comparatively small fifteen years ago is now Japan’s second-largest foreign nationality. Nepal and Indonesia are growing particularly rapidly as well.
The labor figures make the shift even more obvious.
Japan had 2.571 million foreign workers as of October 2025, another record and an increase of 11.7% in one year, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Vietnam accounted for 605,906 workers, followed by China at 431,949 and the Philippines at 260,869.
But treating those 2.6 million people as one category called “foreign workers” doesn’t tell the whole story.
The same MHLW data show that professional and technical residence statuses are now the largest broad category, with about 866,000 workers. Another roughly 646,000 are people with residence statuses such as permanent residency or Japanese spouses that allow relatively unrestricted employment. Around 499,000 are technical interns, while roughly 449,000 are people such as students working under permission to engage in activities outside their principal status.
A Vietnamese factory trainee, a Nepalese language-school student working part-time, an American software engineer, a Brazilian permanent resident and a Chinese executive are all counted somewhere within Japan’s “foreign population.”
Their reasons for being here, economic circumstances and likelihood of settling permanently are completely different.
That matters because political debate increasingly compresses all of these categories, along with tourists and illegal residents, into the single word “gaikokujin” (外国人).
Why the backlash has become so much stronger
The backlash is real.
A University of Tokyo panel survey released in August 2026 found that the percentage of respondents opposed to accepting additional foreigners increased from 35.6% in 2024 to 56.3% in 2026. The increase occurred across genders and generations and was particularly pronounced among younger respondents.
A separate Waseda University survey found that 73% of respondents in 2025 worried that an increase in foreigners would worsen public safety or social order. Among respondents who frequently used social media for political and social information, the figure was 84%, compared with 67% among those who rarely used it. That is an association, not proof that social media caused the change.
The political response has followed.
Sanseito’s 2026 policy catalog calls for numerical limits on foreign inflows, tighter permanent-residence and family-reunification conditions, tougher Japanese-language requirements and restrictions on lower-skilled migration. It even proposes foreign-resident ratio targets at the municipal level.
Japan Innovation Party’s current platform also moves toward explicit quantitative management. It proposes considering a cap on the foreign-resident share, expanding quantitative controls to additional residence categories, and adding Japanese-language requirements to permanent residence and family accompaniment.
The LDP has moved toward a stronger emphasis on enforcement, social-insurance compliance, illegal residence, land ownership, Japanese-language learning and what it calls “orderly coexistence.” Its current direction is laid out in the party’s 2026 foreign-resident policy proposal.
But I think focusing purely on nationalism misses much of what is happening.
There are at least five forces interacting.
The first is simply speed.
A 9% or 10% annual increase in the foreign population is noticeable. It is fundamentally different from a community growing 1% or 2% per year over decades.
The second is visibility.
Foreign workers are increasingly present in ordinary Japanese life: convenience stores, restaurants, hotels, factories, construction sites, delivery networks and nursing-care facilities.
The third is the extraordinary growth of tourism, which is routinely conflated with immigration. I think this factor is much bigger than most appreciate. Over the last 15 years, inbound tourism has gone from 8.61 million to 42.68 million, an increase of five-fold!
Crowding in Kyoto, bad tourist behavior, short-term rental disputes and residents’ frustration with overtourism are genuine issues. But these issues are caused by foreigners who are here temporarily for tourism, and often don’t understand local culture and norms. Yet, their offenses are magnified on social media, creating an exaggerated narrative that groups innocent gaijin bystanders as part of the “foreigner problem.”
But a tourist blocking a street in Kyoto, an Indonesian technical worker in rural Japan and an American engineer living in Tokyo are three completely different policy questions.
Public discourse often treats them as one.
Fourth, Japan expanded foreign admissions much faster than it built a coherent national integration system.
Language education, housing, schooling for foreign children, social-insurance enrollment, labor protections and community integration have historically been fragmented among ministries and municipalities.
That is beginning to change. The Cabinet Secretariat now has a dedicated Office for a Society of Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals, and in 2026 the government began formal working groups on both the future framework for foreign admissions and a national Japanese-language and daily-life learning program.
Finally, there is political propaganda.
Once politicians discover that anxiety about foreigners attracts votes, incentives change. Every anecdote involving a foreign offender, unpaid insurance premium or local dispute becomes politically useful.
That does not mean the underlying problems are imaginary. But it does mean they become amplified.
Which criticisms are actually supported by the data?
This was probably the part of the research where I wanted to be careful not to let my own biases taint the research.
Some concerns I had assumed were largely rhetorical have a real factual basis. Others fall apart fairly quickly once you look at denominators and historical comparisons.
Crime is worth dwelling on because it illustrates the problem with almost every immigration statistic.
Foreign-related crime has increased recently; I can’t pretend otherwise.
But the historical context dramatically changes the interpretation. The Ministry of Justice’s long-run crime data show that foreign-related criminal cases were materially higher in the mid-2000s than they are today.
That does not prove immigration has no effect on crime. But it does show that the simplistic narrative that record immigration has produced record foreign crime is false.
The correct conclusion is more mundane. Certain forms of crime involving foreigners have increased and deserve focused policing, but Japan is not experiencing some historically unprecedented foreign-crime wave.
The same care is necessary with social insurance.
There are genuine collection problems. The government is strengthening information sharing between social-insurance systems and immigration authorities as part of its new foreign-resident policy framework.
That is a legitimate policy response, but the issue frequently becomes transformed online into much broader claims that foreigners are consuming enormous amounts of Japanese healthcare or welfare without contributing.
Some of the most viral claims are demonstrably false.
In July 2025, Health Minister Takamaro Fukuoka publicly rejected claims that foreigners leave ¥400 billion of National Health Insurance premiums unpaid each year. According to the Health Ministry’s own figures, unpaid premiums for the entire system, Japanese and foreign residents combined, were about ¥145.7 billion in FY2022.
The ministry also rejected the claim that Chinese welfare recipients had doubled over five years. Its figures showed 9,471 people in households headed by a Chinese national in FY2023, compared with 9,059 five years earlier.
This is an area where I think both sides of the political debate make mistakes.
It is unhelpful to respond to every concern about foreign residents by saying it is xenophobic. And it is equally unhelpful to take every anecdote about a foreign resident and infer a national crisis.
Japan’s government has clearly heard the backlash
What has changed since 2025 is not that Japan has decided it no longer wants foreigners. The opposite is true in important parts of the economy.
What has changed is that the government increasingly wants more control over who comes, under what conditions, and how they behave after arriving.
In January 2026, the government adopted a broad package called the “Comprehensive Measures for Acceptance of Foreign Nationals and Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence.” The broader policy process and supporting materials are available through the Cabinet Secretariat.
Policy is moving beyond attracting labor and toward enforcing tax and social-insurance compliance, reducing illegal stays, strengthening immigration screening, reviewing settlement policies and improving coordination between national and local government.
The government has also started something more fundamental.
In August 2026, it convened a working group specifically to examine the basic framework for how Japan should accept foreigners in the future. It also launched a working group on a national Japanese-language and daily-life learning program. Both sit within the Cabinet Secretariat’s foreign-national policy process.
This could matter more than any individual visa reform.
Japan’s traditional system was essentially bottom-up. A labor shortage appeared. A new category was created or expanded. Employers used it.
Immigration policy is becoming more quantitative, more centralized and more compliance-driven.
The politics are moving right, but not uniformly toward closing the border
One of the most important things I took away from looking at party positions is that the Japanese political argument is increasingly not about immigration versus no immigration.
The argument is becoming: how much immigration, which immigrants, how permanent should it be, and what obligations should come with it?
Sanseito occupies the clearest restrictionist position among nationally relevant parties. Its 2026 platform calls for numerical limits on foreign inflows, stricter language and settlement conditions, limits on lower-skilled migration and explicit local foreign-resident ratio targets.
Japan Innovation Party has also moved clearly toward quantitative restriction. Its current policy platform proposes considering an upper limit on the foreign-resident share and expanding quantitative management to additional immigration categories. At the same time, it supports actively attracting highly skilled and technical talent that contributes to innovation.
The LDP’s position is less absolutist. It increasingly combines two ideas: Japan needs foreign workers and residents, but admission, integration and enforcement need to become much more deliberate. Its 2026 proposals emphasize tighter residence management, stronger action against illegal stays, Japanese-language education, social-insurance compliance and a national debate over the appropriate scale of future admissions.
Komeito places greater emphasis on multicultural coexistence and rights protection while also backing strict action against illegal residence, nonpayment of social insurance and abuse of immigration rules.
The Constitutional Democratic Party sits significantly further toward the integration side of the debate. Its policy platform proposes a basic law on multicultural coexistence, a centralized multicultural-coexistence agency, stronger rights protections for foreign workers and a much more explicit national framework for integrating foreign residents.
The Democratic Party for the People occupies something closer to the center. It supports accepting foreign workers where needed, but argues that the new Employment for Skill Development system should not become a mechanism for importing permanently cheap labor. It also emphasizes Japanese-language education and support for foreign families and children.
There are substantial differences between these positions. But very few parties with serious responsibility for the Japanese economy are proposing that Japan can simply eliminate foreign labor.
Demographics put a floor under how restrictive Japan can realistically become
Japan can make immigration rules stricter, but it cannot easily make its demographics disappear.
Nursing care, construction, hospitality, agriculture, manufacturing and transportation all face structural labor shortages.
More than 2.5 million foreign workers are already embedded in the Japanese economy, according to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.
Removing them would not restore some earlier economic equilibrium. It would leave jobs unfilled. That means the most likely outcome is not a reversal of immigration. It is controlled expansion.
Japan will continue accepting more foreigners where employers and the economy need them, while becoming stricter about compliance, integration and settlement.
I would expect more explicit numerical planning, greater use of Japanese-language requirements, stronger linkage of visa decisions to taxes and social-insurance records, tougher enforcement against overstayers and greater scrutiny before permanent settlement.
At the same time, highly skilled workers will probably continue receiving preferential treatment.
Japan’s Highly Skilled Professional system already provides immigration advantages for people who meet education, experience and income thresholds. J-Skip goes further for exceptionally qualified professionals.
Japan does not want fewer AI researchers, engineers or global executives. It just wants to become more selective.
There is one area where the policy could hurt Japan’s startup ambitions
For startups, the direction of policy is surprisingly bifurcated.
Japan is making it relatively easier to bring in some highly skilled people while making it significantly harder for some foreign entrepreneurs to establish companies.
The clearest example is the Business Manager residence status. From October 16, 2025, the rules became dramatically stricter.
Under the Immigration Services Agency’s revised criteria, a new applicant generally needs at least ¥30 million in capital or equivalent business assets, at least one qualifying full-time employee, and someone with Japanese-language capability at the required level (JLPT N2). The reform also introduced tougher experience or educational requirements.
I understand what policymakers are trying to solve. Japan has had cases where nominal businesses were created primarily to obtain residence status. Raising the requirements makes those structures more difficult.
And by one measure, the reform has been extraordinarily effective.
According to Immigration Services Agency data reported by The Japan Times, Japan received an average of roughly 1,700 Business Manager applications per month before the new requirements took effect. After the reform, that fell to roughly 70 per month.
That is a decline of approximately 96%.
The government has viewed the sharp decline positively because one of the reform’s objectives was to reduce the use of the status primarily as a route to residency.
But there is a much harder question: is a 96% reduction actually a good outcome for Japan?
We simply do not know.
Some portion of those disappearing applications were almost certainly low-substance businesses or attempts to secure residency through nominal companies. Preventing those applications is a benefit.
But the same requirements can also screen out legitimate founders who do not have ¥30 million of initial capital or who have no reason to employ a full-time worker at the earliest stage of a company.
A two-person AI startup may require almost no physical capital. A talented founder may deliberately avoid hiring until achieving product-market fit. That company could eventually create hundreds of high-paying jobs.
Meanwhile, a capital-intensive but low-growth business may satisfy the immigration test much more easily.
In other words, the regulation partly selects for capital availability rather than entrepreneurial potential.
The data tell us that Japan has become extremely effective at reducing Business Manager applications.
They do not tell us whether the applicants deterred by the new rules would have ultimately been a cost or a benefit to Japan.
That distinction matters because entrepreneurship has an unusually skewed payoff distribution. Most new companies stay small or fail. A tiny number become enormously valuable and create large amounts of employment, tax revenue and technological spillovers. It’s a world of Power Law.
A policy can therefore look highly successful on conventional compliance metrics while still producing a meaningful economic opportunity cost.
And that opportunity cost is almost impossible to measure.
Japan can count questionable businesses that no longer receive visas, but it cannot count the companies that were never founded here because their founders chose Singapore, the United States or somewhere else instead.
That does not mean the previous ¥5 million threshold was necessarily right.
It means “applications fell 96%” is evidence that the policy is extremely restrictive. It is not, by itself, evidence that the policy is successful.
Japan’s Startup Visa provides some relief by allowing qualifying foreign founders to spend up to two years preparing a company. But the Business Manager requirements eventually become relevant for many founders who want to remain and operate their companies in Japan.
If Japan genuinely wants to attract international entrepreneurs, I suspect this policy will eventually need refinement.
The reality is that Immigration policy is instrumental to industrial policy.
Countries increasingly compete not merely for labor, but for particular kinds of people: researchers, engineers, founders, investors and highly productive workers.
If Japan isn’t more thoughtful, it may risk alienating the very people it seeks to attract.
Where I think Japan is going
My base case is that the number of foreigners living in Japan will continue rising substantially over the next decade. However, the political bargain surrounding that growth will change.
Japan will probably become more comfortable saying that foreign workers are structurally necessary. It will become less comfortable with loose administration.
The period from roughly 1990 to 2018 was one of quiet liberalization through side doors.
The period beginning in 2019 marked the emergence of explicit labor migration.
The period beginning around 2025 increasingly looks like a third phase: managed immigration.
- More foreign workers.
- Harder eligibility in some categories.
- More numerical planning.
- More enforcement.
- More integration requirements.
- More pressure to learn Japanese.
- More linkage between immigration status and compliance with taxes and social insurance.
- More scrutiny before permanent settlement.
- And probably more differentiation between foreigners Japan actively wants to attract and foreigners it believes impose greater social or administrative costs.
That is politically much more sustainable than either extreme.
Japan is unlikely to become Canada or Australia, countries that openly use large-scale immigration as a population strategy.
But it is equally unlikely to return to a model where foreign residents remain a marginal part of Japanese society. We’re well passed that point.
The real choice is not immigration or no immigration
After going through the history and data, I have more sympathy for some of the recent concerns about immigration than I did when I started.
Japan should enforce its laws.
People who live here should pay their taxes and social-insurance premiums. Employers should not exploit foreign workers. Visa programs should not be abused. Communities experiencing unusually rapid demographic change deserve support. Serious crimes should be investigated and prosecuted regardless of the nationality of the offender.
None of those positions strike me as anti-immigrant.
But the opposite is also true.
Japan should be careful not to allow legitimate concerns to turn into blanket suspicion of millions of people simply because they are foreign. The evidence does not support many of the more dramatic claims circulating online. Tourists and immigrants are not interchangeable populations.
More fundamentally, Japan increasingly needs foreign residents.
The convenience-store worker, the engineer, the caregiver, the factory technician, the researcher and the entrepreneur are becoming part of the infrastructure of the Japanese economy.
The question is no longer whether Japan becomes a country with immigration. It already is one. The real question is whether it manages that transition well.
For someone like me, that is both an intellectual and deeply personal question.
Japan is home. I understand the desire to protect the qualities that make the country safe, cohesive and unusually functional. In fact, those are many of the same reasons people like me choose to build our lives here.
I also hope Japan can preserve those qualities without creating a society in which people who have spent decades contributing here are permanently made to feel conditional or suspect.
Those objectives should not be in conflict.
A successful immigration policy should be able to say two things at the same time:
Japan welcomes people who contribute to the country and want to be part of its society.
And Japan expects those people to respect its laws, institutions and communities.
That seems to me a much stronger foundation for the next 30 years than either denying that Japan needs immigration or denying that immigration creates real challenges.
Japan’s choice is not between immigration and no immigration. It is between managing immigration well and managing it badly. Navigating that fine-line well will lead to a more prosperous Japan.
