Foreign Faces, Familiar Fears

Immigration, Race, and the 2025 Upper-House Election

Dear readers, the Upper House election is right behind the corner, but I’m not going to vote. As a foreigner, I’m not allow to, never mind I’ve spent the last 33 years in Japan. The Japanese government will gladly take my tax money, but only Nihon kokumin (Japanese citizens) have a right to vote.

Speaking of foreigners, this year immigration has become, quite uncharacteristically, a hot topic among candidates. Let’s see how and why. The following essay is by Christopher Gerteis who helms the excellent Japanese Modernity @ Substack.

***** All emphases and highlighting by me.

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Japan’s Upper House election on 20 July 2025 has seen the unexpected elevation of “foreign nationals” as a campaign issue, despite consistent polling that places it far below concerns about inflation, wage stagnation, and energy costs among voters. The media spotlight, however, has turned toward immigration, foreign labor, and real estate investment by non-citizens.

What Is New—and What Is Not

Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s statement that Japan must decide “who to let into the country” and his party’s call for “zero illegal foreign nationals” signal a revival of securitized language long characteristic of Japanese immigration discourse. The novelty lies not in the substance of these positions but in their renewed centrality to electoral rhetoric. Opposition parties echo similar concerns, albeit framed with softer terminology: Nippon Ishin promises a centralized command structure to cap the total number of foreign residents; the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) demands restrictions on foreign real estate purchases; and Sanseito, a right-leaning populist party, seeks to block foreign nationals from acquiring permanent residence or citizenship.

Even nominally progressive actors offer only modest divergence. The Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) advocates for anti-discrimination legislation and a revised employment visa system, while continuing to frame immigration in terms of labor shortages in the nursing and childcare sectors. Komeito offers similar support for foreign labor, accompanied by simultaneous pledges to minimize “overstayers.”

These platforms rest on a shared premise: that foreign presence is provisional and should remain subordinate to national demographic strategy.

What appears to be a political debate over immigration is, in effect, a contest over the management of national anxiety—anxiety not only about population decline, but about inflation, inequality, and the limits of the postwar economic order.

Economic Anxiety as a Vehicle for Racialized Governance

Economic conditions in mid-2025 provide fertile ground for scapegoating. In May, inflation-adjusted real wages in Japan declined by 2.9 percent year-on-year, the steepest drop in nearly two years and the fifth consecutive month of negative growth.

Even as large unionized firms announced historic pay raises, these did not extend to the majority of workers, especially in small and medium enterprises without union protections. Nominal wages rose only 1.0 percent, far below inflation, while bonus payments collapsed by over 18 percent. The result is an intensifying squeeze on working households—an economic pressure that finds political expression in calls for border controls, housing restrictions, and exclusionary labor policies.

This economic frustration is now being redirected toward foreign residents, with DPP leader Yuichiro Tamaki citing foreign real estate purchases as a driver of urban housing unaffordability. The proposal to tax foreign buyers more heavily, modeled on Singapore, may appear pragmatic. Yet it ignores deeper structural causes—chronic underinvestment in public housing, speculative finance, and deregulated property markets.

The political effect is to misplace causality and redirect public frustration toward foreign presence rather than domestic policy.

Labor Without Belonging

As of December 2024, Japan's foreign resident population stood at approximately 3.77 million, representing a 10.5 percent increase from the previous year. The majority of these residents come from neighboring Asian countries: Chinese nationals number around 844,000, Vietnamese approximately 590,000, and South Koreans about 410,000. Many are employed in critical sectors, including manufacturing, elder care, logistics, and construction, roles increasingly vacated by a shrinking native-born labor force.

And yet, the dominant framing remains one of containment rather than inclusion. Prime Minister Ishiba’s comment that the government should fund Japanese language and customs education for foreign residents so they may “truly coexist” betrays the underlying logic: that integration is conditional, costly, and to be managed from above.

Foreign residents are not viewed as civic participants, but as temporary bodies with economic utility and political ambiguity.

Regional Flashpoints, National Reverberations

Recent local elections have functioned as laboratories for national strategy. In May, a candidate in the Saitama mayoral race gained unexpected traction by campaigning on anti-immigrant measures. This followed rising tensions in adjacent areas such as Warabi and Kawaguchi, where concentrations of Kurdish and other migrant communities have become focal points for public anxiety, media speculation, and hate speech.

These local dynamics now feed back into national electoral platforms, emboldening parties like Sanseito and Nippon Ishin to articulate demographic control measures with increasing clarity. “Population strategy” becomes a euphemism for ethnic selection. “Zero overstayers” becomes a substitute for zero tolerance.

The cumulative effect is to center foreign residents in a narrative of crisis and disorder, regardless of their legal status, social contributions, or duration of residence.

Historical Patterns and Present Risks

There is precedent for this discourse. From the colonial mobilization of Korean and Chinese labor in the early twentieth century to the postwar containment of Zainichi Koreans under the Alien Registration Act (repealed in 1993), the Japanese government has repeatedly structured what was perceived as ‘foreign’ presence through cycles of economic dependence and civic exclusion. The Nikkeijin migration policies of the 1990s, which invited ethnic Japanese from South America to address labor shortages without offering substantive rights, provide another example.

The present political rhetoric and policy echo historical patterns by advocating new technologies of control and visibility, including biometric registration, employer-tied visas, and population modeling systems that treat immigrants not as neighbors but as variables in a demographic equation.

If the failures of past examples are ignored, the consequences may be severe. The government risks yet again institutionalizing a tracked system of partial inclusion and permanent suspicion: labor without rights, residence without recognition, policy without accountability.

Who Belongs—and on Whose Terms?

Japan’s future will be shaped not only by population charts or GDP targets, but by the ethical and political decisions it makes about belonging. The question is not simply how many foreign residents the country can “manage,” but whether it can move beyond a schizophrenic politics of conditional inclusion within a rhetoric of exclusion.

Amid declining wages, rising costs, and political drift, it is tempting for parties to turn inward, to protect, to restrict. But the true risk is not demographic imbalance; it is democratic erosion. When elected officials normalize exclusion as a strategy and conflate population management with national identity, they do not solve the crisis—they become it.

This is not merely an immigration debate. It is a test of whether a constitutional democracy can withstand the pressures of hortatory ethno-nationalism cloaked in the policies of economic pragmatism.

Further Reading

• Liu-Farrer, Gracia. Immigrant Japan: Mobility and Belonging in an Ethnonationalist Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781501748629.

• Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780521174605.

• Douglass, Mike, and Glenda Roberts, eds. Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society. University of Hawaii Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780824828958.

• Chapman, David. Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity. Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 9780415381797.

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