Every morning, my aunt in Kumamoto sends me a Facebook Reel. Sometimes it’s cute animals, but more and more, it’s things like a foreigner doing something rude on a train, a shop sign in a language she can’t read, a tourist climbing something she definitely shouldn’t. You get the theme.
No shade to my cute aunt, but she’s 71, and never had a problem with a foreigner in her life. And now she’s completely certain that Japan is being overrun by foreigners.
Last month she sent me a clip of Sanae Takaichi at a podium, subtitled in yellow karaoke font, listing measures her government had passed to “protect” Japanese people. My aunt’s message underneath: 頼もしい. Dependable.
On the point of whether Takaichi can move Japan’s overly complicated government bureaucracy, my aunt is actually right. This woman is fast: She took over a minority government in October, called a snap election in January, and won 316 seats out of 465 on February 8 (that’s the largest single-party victory since Japan became a democracy).
Kinda impressive, if you ask me.
Takaichi knows how to get support
Attacking foreigners for all ills is not exactly a groundbreaking strategy, and with Japan, one of the world’s most homogeneous countries, experiencing an unprecedented wave of tourists (42.68 million last year, up 15.8%), the strategy is ripe for the picking.
With most Japanese people seeing tourists and immigrants as the exact same thing, her message works! And the weak yen really helps Takaichi here. When your whole country goes on sale you start getting the same kinda “bad” tourists that usually flock to Thailand or Bali, if you know what I mean…
And immigrants, even if the numbers are small, have increased rapidly. 4.12 million foreign residents at the end of 2025, past 4 million for the first time ever, and up 9.5% in a single year. So understandably, immigrant fear is at an all time high.
In such an environment, symbolic gestures to restrict immigration have been proven popular, and Takaichi is very, very good at exhibiting every single proposal passed as another curb on immigration.
Her “anti-immigrant” proposals are small though.
Visa fees are going up, especially the permanent residence fee, which went from ¥10,000 to ¥300,000. This is the first it changed in almost 30 years, and the fees are still cheaper than in most other countries. Take Australia for example, which charges over a million yen for its PR application.
The administration is also working hard on a pre-travel screening system called JESTA, kinda like the US one, arriving in 2028. And a proposal, still only a proposal, to triple the departure tax to ¥3,000 is in the works.
But there are some changes that are really making the headlines: The Business Manager visa is one. You see, before, if you had ¥5 million, you could put it into a business here and get a visa. Late 2025, Takaichi’s government raised that to ¥30 million, a six-fold jump.
Sounds like a massive wall to stop foreigners buying their way in, right? Not really. Out of 4 million foreign residents, this visa is used by about 1% of them…
Or take the change that really has the foreign community sweating: The PR revocation rule.
You thought you could stay forever just because you had permanent residency?? Well, not anymore. Starting in 2027 the government can strip you of it if you fail to pay your taxes or social insurance.
Takaichi leaned into this hard. She created a brand new cabinet post for it, and appointed hardliner Kimi Onoda as minister for “existing with foreigners.” Onoda immediately went on TV promising to create a situation where foreigners who do bad things will no longer exist in Japan.
It plays amazingly well on TV and social media, but in practice it targets a tiny fraction of people, because to get PR you usually work for a company in Japan, and if you do that they pay your taxes and your pensions for you. You literally cannot cheat the system as long as you work there. This rule is written to catch the rare deliberate tax evader.
It’s all really just posing…
I mean, even her flagship proposal, stopping foreigners from buying land near Japan’s army bases, has been really watered down. It started as a way to go after the Chinese, people they thought might become spies. Now it’s every person, Japanese included, who can’t buy that land. And now it looks like it won’t even include houses.
I don’t think any of these proposals are necessarily bad, and many of them are actually quite needed. They might not stop immigration, but they’re still very popular.
So what’s the damage?
