A foreign buyer illegally clears a huge chunk of forest in a Hokkaido national park to build himself a mansion. A foreign driver knocks down a group of schoolchildren and flees the scene. Foreigners are buying up blocks of flats in Tokyo and doubling rents.
These are a few of the sensational news stories that have been hitting the headlines as Japanese people prepare to go to the polls on Sunday.
They are feeding into an already febrile atmosphere of anti-foreigner sentiment that could decide the outcome of the election for the upper house. Hostility to an increase in immigration, particularly from China, is being jumped on and amplified by a new far-right political party, Sanseitō, whose slogan is “Japanese first” and whose leader, Sohei Kamiya, openly models himself on Donald Trump.
His party platform calls for “protecting Japan’s unique cultural heritage, restricting immigration and stopping welfare payments to immigrants”. So far, Kamiya is the party’s only councillor in the upper house of the parliament, the national Diet, but Sanseitō could get between 10 and 15 seats in the weekend elections.
“It looks like immigration could be the biggest factor in this election,” said Takehiro Masutomo, author of a new book titled Run Ri on the rise in immigration to Japan by largely upper-middle-class Chinese.
‘People here fear China is taking over our territory. It’s an angle that sells well’
Takehiro Masutomo, author
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy.
When parties such as Sanseitō rail against “foreigners”, it is code for Chinese or Koreans, the biggest foreign communities in Japan, and long the focus of xenophobia and discrimination. Sanseitō has blamed the property boom, which saw prices rise by 8% in Tokyo last year, on an increase in wealthy Chinese people coming to Japan since the pandemic.
“People here fear that China is taking over our territory,” said Masutomo. “It’s an angle that sells well.”
To what extent Chinese buyers are really to blame is hard to tell. But it has offered some juicy tabloid stories guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of Japanese patriots. One case told of a Chinese buyer who bought a block of flats with sitting tenants and then attempted to raise the rents. The aim, according to the report, was to drive out the many elderly Japanese tenants to convert the building for short-term holiday lets for tourists.
A bigger factor than Chinese buyers is the huge fall in the value of the yen. In 2020, £1 would buy you about 136 yen. Today, it is about 200 yen.
This means that for foreigners of all stripes, Japan is suddenly very cheap. The result is not just a flood of speculative money inflating the property market, but also a wave of tourism.
In 2015, almost 20 million foreign tourists visited Japan. This year, it is expected to hit 40 million.
“The Japanese are not especially xenophobic,” said Jeff Kingston, a professor at Tokyo’s Temple University and a resident for decades. “Immigration is being conflated with the huge influx of foreign tourists, a lot of whom behave pretty badly,” he added.
As in other countries, blaming immigrants is a far more easy option than addressing Japan’s longtime economic malaise. “The most important factor is that, for many Japanese people, real wages are continuing to fall,” said Masutomo.
For the first time since the early 1990s, Japan is experiencing real inflation. Most shocking is the price of rice; a 5kg bag that once sold for 2,000 yen (£10) is now selling for 4,000 yen.
Economic woes have added to the unpopularity of the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba. The ruling Liberal Democratic party is expected to lose its majority in Sunday’s vote. If it does, Ishiba could also lose his job, although no one seems to have any idea who could replace him.
For Masutomo, however, a big increase in seats for rightwing, anti-immigration parties could have a silver lining.
“Japan is not good at integrating people into its society,” he said. “Politicians have avoided any discussion of it for many years. But we need immigrants to fill our workforce. That is not going to change. So it is time for Japan to have a proper conversation about immigration, not to just use foreigners as scapegoats.”
Photograph by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty
