I just find it odd so many non-Japanese media and commentators weigh in on this.
Japan is not a multicultural country. You can't become Japanese through paperwork. It is very much through blood heritage, your language and cultural proficiency.
The bar to be Japanese is much higher than say Canadian or French. So why shouldn't they create laws that is aimed at benefiting themselves and their country without depending on foreigners?
Also if you have a business and you don't have $125,000 you are not going to make it in Canada or America either.
My ancestors were dirt farmers with absolutely nothing despite their health and work ethic that moved here in the 1930s. Do we think Canada is better than then?
We really, really under value the impact of low income, low education immigrants imo.
Eg. The railway that created this country was built by low income Chinese workers that probably didn't even speak English.
Canada doesn't exist without the effort of low income, low education people.
It feels normal in a globalized world for commentators around the globe to observe and weigh in on the decisions of any country, especially one of such economic importance and cultural significance as Japan.
That being said, I wholeheartedly agree on your points regarding Japan not being a multi-cultural country. And this, indeed, is rarely (if ever) mentioned in articles such as the one posted here.
Japan is an island. It has always been and not just from a geographical perspective. Its very culture and history are ones of isolation. The restrictions are not new, the perspective "Japan first" is not new - these have always been there, they are at the very core of the nation.
> Japan is an island. It has always been and not just from a geographical perspective. Its very culture and history are ones of isolation. The restrictions are not new, the perspective "Japan first" is not new - these have always been there, they are at the very core of the nation.
That's not at accurate from what I know of Japanese history. You seem to be over-indexing on the (relatively) brief Tokugawa-era sakoku policy and ignoring the thousands of years surrounding it where Japan was an active importer of culture.
Kanji, government structure, Buddhism, law, art and more were all imported from China and hugely influential in Japanese history. After the the Meiji Restoration, Japan explicitly set out to Westernize and went abroad to study European and American institutions, invited Westerners in to help build European-style banking systems and government systems, adopted Western clothing, architecture, military organization, legal codes, etc. etc.
If anything the Japanese are masters at importing the things they like of foreign culture and then modifying to make it their own. They have always been importers of culture.
Japan used to not have control over Okinawa or Hokkaido. Those were separate peoples that Japan invaded and colonized, along with Korea. They would have gotten to keep Korea too if it wasn't for those damned meddling Americans and their nuclear weapons, but there are still Koreans who have been living in Japan for generations. Even though Japan themselves said "you will never be like us, you will always be lesser, now grovel and grow us our cheap rice". This is multiculturalism, you just don't recognize it because you don't know what an Ainu is.
Also, Japanese is basically permanently welded to the Chinese writing system. Japan considered removing kanji and kana in favor of romaji at one point during the Meiji era - which would have been a disaster on par with English spelling reform. But, even then, Japanese is like 10% English by weight and growing, with no actual attempt by anyone to stop this from happening.
So Japan had minorities and borrowed writing system from other countries thousands of years ago mean they need to now redefine what Japanese identity is and become a full multicultural nation the likes of North America and Western Europe ?
So if sushi replaced turkey for Thanksgiving, do non-Americans get to tell Americans how they should organize themselves too and define what a real American is ?
> People comment on every country [sic] immigration policies
That's the world as it is, not necessarily as it should be. Not being a citizen of the country in question, or part of the culture, and most importantly, not being one of the people that deals with the consequences of whichever choice is made, means your opinion counts for so little as to be barely worth sharing
I didn't share mine on Japan, but my opinions on my country's immigration policy is based on having to deal with the long-term consequences, as every citizen of my country must
Dude ethnically Japanese people that were born in Japan, lived their entire childhoods in Japan, are no longer considered Japanese if they live outside of Japan for 5-10 years.
People who have lived their entire lives in Japan, but are not 100% ethnically Japanese, will literally never be accepted as Japanese.
Permanent residency is about who can stay without having to worry about visas, while visas are about who is allowed to enter in the first place. Foreigners will still be in Japan, the only thing changing is that they'll be even more tied to a black company than before.
The mental model most immigration-naive people have regarding immigration is that the vast majority of "desirable" immigrants go to a country to get a job, work for some years, and then maybe they get something called a "green card" (permanent residency) or something. The reality is that most employers can't legally hire immigrants, unless they go through a LOT of hoops, which is not worth it. So a handful of employers specialize in this, and because they spend money to control this corner of the labor market, the labor of the immigrants trades at a discount relative to citizen labor. This is literally the opposite of what the system's stated intent is, immigrants are not supposed to undercut citizens, but nobody with power cares about that. So legal immigration is effectively an indentured servitude scheme where you work the bottom tier of a job for some number of years until you can get permanent residency.
What Japan is doing is, effectively, making the time you have to spend to get that reward a lot longer, and also disqualifying anyone less than 30 years away from retirement age unless they're rich enough to make up the shortfall[1]. This is primarily about empowering sweatshops (black companies) over imported workers.
You think it's about preserving Japanese culture, but I, being a huge fucking weeb, know for a fact that nobody calling for this gives a shit about Japanese culture. Especially not the Japanese politicians. The kinds of cultural things most foreigners value are things Japan has been trying to throw away since the Meiji Restoration; while the kinds of things Japan's elite value are byproducts of having a rigidly ossified social structure that cannot absorb any amount of change.
Like, for example... anime and manga? Foreigners like it. Otaku[0] like it. But Japan spent a decade trying to vilify otaku as mass murderers in training, and the people creating anime and manga haven't had much social prestige until recently. Hell, they still don't get paid very well.
The famed Japanese politeness is downstream of social oppression. They are polite for exactly the same reason American Southerners are polite; a combination of elites imposing their values on the populace and the populace adopting social defense mechanisms against the elite.
There is a narrative being pushed by ultra-rich elites. Think about how Mark Zuckerberg shifted from "we need to bring in insane numbers of H-1Bs to cover a labor shortage gap" to giving Trump shittons of money. Or how Elon Musk keeps talking about how we need as many women pregnant as possible. Or just the insane hardon that businesses have for robots and AI now. These all come from the same desire to keep wages down by creating a permanent underclass.
The underlying problem with the labor shortage gap, both in Japan and elsewhere, is that you can't afford to have kids in the middle of a wage stagnation and cost-of-living crisis. Japan has been in this crisis for so long that their population is decreasing, but every other rich country is not far behind. The root cause is that businesses cost-optimized people's welfare out of the economy, and they need people to be a renewable resource.
There are a few ways to fix the problem, but closing countries off to immigration is not one of them. Actually, if you wanted to break the hold sweatshops have on immigrant labor, you'd want to open the fucking floodgates and let the market close out the labor arbitrage opportunity we've been keeping open ever since the WTO made free global trade a thing. If the globalists are allowed to move goods through 20 countries to hyper-optimize their labor spend, then I should be allowed to move to whatever country has the highest wage for my given specialty to counteract that behavior. The problem is that this solution has transitional effects that would be unacceptable to the masses of people whose primary form of social power is the fact that they have a red and gold passport and the guy at the counter of the local Lawsons does not and never will.
[0] There is a minor difference in the meaning of the word "otaku" between Japanese and English. In Japanese, it just means "nerd" and you can be an otaku of anything. The meaning imported into English was specifically "anime-and-manga otaku".
[1] I'm also told by the AI midwit I had critique this comment that black companies commonly fuck up your pension payments, which would also make you have a shortfall.
Japan is not a multicultural country. You can't become Japanese through paperwork. It is very much through blood heritage, your language and cultural proficiency.
The bar to be Japanese is much higher than say Canadian or French. So why shouldn't they create laws that is aimed at benefiting themselves and their country without depending on foreigners?
Also if you have a business and you don't have $125,000 you are not going to make it in Canada or America either.