Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan
tokyopaladin.substack.com
tokyopaladin.substack.com
People in China realized they could just buy/lease a guesthouse in Osaka / any tourist hotspot, and rent it out on Airbnb. Then they become a "business manager" and get a Japanese resident visa within 3 months. All you needed is to invest 5million yen, which is like 31k USD, which isn't much. People wrote entire online guides on how to do this. They even had brokers/agents helping people with the process [0].
Approximately half of all business manager visas went to Chinese nationals. In Osaka, 41% of all short-term rentals were operated by Chinese individuals [1]. The visa practically turned into an Airbnb host visa.
It's not surprising at all that Japan made the rules stricter.
[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/06/05/japan/immigrati...
Which they were almost certainly divvying up. A bunch of people invest $32k each. Some management company buys the home, pays them all a cut of airBNB proceeds, etc. You don't "do" anything beyond put up $32k for your $31k piece of paper.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably not in most cases.
A lot of Chinese are cash rich (perhaps not on average but with 1.3 billion people the absolute number is large compared to other countries) and want to invest abroad, and are buying properties all over the place.
Another piece of evidence is the huge number of Chinese students in UK universities (from my experience) although the tuition fee alone is about £35k ($46k) a year.
Rent would cost ¥60,000–120,000/month, they would list it on Airbnb for ¥20,000/night, then assuming 50% occupancy the return is ~¥200,000/month.
It was very profitable. The payback period for the ¥5 million was 1.5 - 2 years.
That depends of what you're hoping to prevent.
If you want to filter out people who can't sustain themselves, petty crime or the like, it works. But it can open the door to a lot of unwanted effects.
A foreign national that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.
Even to their home country.
You can outsource pretty much the entire thing, and just be a name on a paper, and receive money in your bank account, that's as close to "passive income" as you can get. Lots of people do this today, pretty common for landlords to do so in Spain for example, and I'm sure all around the world.
My parents had a beach house for a while. It was rented May-Sept every year. They'd visit for a week in each shoulder season, spend half the time doing major cleaning/fixing, and left the day-to-day during rental season to a management company (same one that managed bookings for the house).
It wasn't 100% passive, but it was about as close as you can get as a retired upper-middle-class couple.
Apparently it's not passive, then. It's a seasonal job essentially.
The rent paid the mortgage, but that was about it. Repairs were more or less out of pocket.
I gave it up because I didn’t live locally and got raked over the coals on repairs a couple times. I finally quit because the property managers had an “emergency repairs” clause where they could do repairs without my approval and bill me.
One of the renters clogged the toilet at 11pm on a Saturday, moron decided to call the property management because I guess plungers are confusing, they decided that was an emergency, and I got a $700 bill to send a plumber out at midnight to plunge a toilet. Like not even a roto rooter or something, just a generic grocery store plunger.
Became clear I was either a) going to have to be much more involved, or b) accept that the returns are basically just equity in the house on a 15 year mortgage, minus overpriced repairs.
It only made sense as a medium-term investment - buy with cash, maintain for a decade (and maybe you're cashflow positive for part of that), then sell for a profit (hopefully).
Similarly, local to me, renting a house really only makes sense if you bought cheap (which for us normies means we bought it years ago, so the mortgage is cheap vs current rents).
The returns don’t seem substantially better than an index fund, it’s a headache to deal with, and if housing actually becomes affordable then you’re upside down (and the govt might air drop cash on upside down mortgages, probably not if you’re already paid off).
Not my forte though and I hand-waved the hell out of that math, maybe I’m way off. Just feels like a ton of capital to tie up for mediocre returns.
A beach house makes some more sense because you get the utility of being able to use it, which is worth something if you like to vacation to the same place.
Also if your business is real estate then you probably operate more efficiently due to integration and scale plus the rental could be part of a longer term redevelopment plan.
Ahh, that does make more sense.
I do 100% believe there's an economy of scale there. Even just being large enough to employ an in-house repair person would probably be a huge savings. There's a lot of stuff anyone that can swing a hammer could fix that you end up hiring expensive tradesmen to do when you're not local.
This is probably the fantasy part.
Quality of maintenance, honest, doesn't take all the money - you can pick only 2 of these for your property operator. Actually, you have to be lucky to get 2.
If it works great and you aren't involved in solving constantly incoming troubles, you're earning peanuts.
It really isn't, some of people I know personally are literally doing exactly that. These "management companies" basically does everything for you, if you haven't heard about them since before, go look them up, I'm sure there is at least one active in your own area.
Fun :| Impossible that different people have different experiences? Not claiming you're wrong, the world is a pretty big place after all.
> suddenly it's basically all downside for the country and the people living there
Producing something, goods, services, useful information, etc. is a net plus for society, adding value for both the producer and the consumer, making the society overall richer.
Rent-seeking is purely extractive - it extracts value from the consumer, and in the cases where the extractor is outside of the society, e.g., a foreigner or oligarch-type, it extracts value from the society, leaving the society poorer.
"Efficient capital allocation" is another hand-wavey concept with no clear definition which is far too often used to justify fundamentally evil results, up to and including arguably the most massive and fundamentally stupid strategic blunder in history.
The USA was the worlds remaining superpower and was democratic.
But based on "efficient capital allocation", the USA decided it was more "efficient" to offshore its "fungible" labor to cheaper Chinese workers. This gutted entire regions and sectors of the economy, literally destroyed the middle class which formed the basis of stability in the country, and handed to an adversarial authoritarian regime both numerous choke-points on it's economy and defense capabilities and technological advantages sufficient to turn it into a serious peer-threat. On top of that, the gutting of the economy brought about conditions for a full-on assault in democracy in the USA.
You seriously need to rethink your "philosophy" based on glib quips.
Landlords such as Airbnb hosts usually invest a lot in furniture and equipment, helping to keep the producers in business. Not to mention provide employment thanks to renovations, cleaning and maintenance. I'd say it leaves the economy more vibrant and benefits all. A classic example where landlords were banned was the Soviet Union, and all the housing problems that followed. Although the USSR finally collapsed, people there still live in the old Khrushchevkas...
Sure, let's talk about second-order effects as if they somehow contradict the main issue of extracting all profit.
Yes, to the extent there is investment that returns to the local economy, both as good/services purchased locally, and assets that remain local. that is a positive. But remember, these are ALL ostensibly profit-making ventures. To the extent the profit leaves the local/national economy, it is an absolute negative. If the landlord is a local, and their profits are spent locally, it is all positive. When the landlord is foreign or doesn't participate in the local economy, it is a hard negative. And a foreign or corporate-/oligarch-ish landlord has no incentive to put anything back into the local economy, or maintain the buildings beyond the minimum, so any positive effects are minimized contrasted with a local landlord who might take pride in his buildings & reputation and participate in community building because it is his community too. (Obviously exceptions exist, but exfiltrating the profits is a pure net negative.)
AS for your AirBnB argument, it is fabricated fantasy. There may be isolated instances where it is a positive, but I've recently read reports from four continents how both movements and laws are underway to attempt to undo the damage AifBnBs do to communities; you conveniently ignore this while tacitly arguing against it. The fact is, even as an AirBnB guest, remote owners suck, while on-site owners are typically great (I just enjoyed one of the best examples last week). The remote owners superficially spiff up the place so it takes good pics, but do the absolute bare minimum of short-term maintenance, while the on-site owners renting out parts of their own building actually invest in the property.
And overall, the influence of turning a substantial number of buildings into short-term rentals is pernicious. The people staying in those buildings by definition have no investment in the local economy, culture, or society, so they do nothing to help the commons issues. The reduced housing stock droves up rental rates for actual locals, allowing often remote landlords to extract more money from a declining community. It is effectively two methods of stripping assets and wealth from a community, effectively making it poorer — please explain how involuntary impoverishment makes improvements in the life of a community or it's individual people.
Is this a creative way of arguing that landlords are a net loss for the country? Because I would like to remind you that MANY people cannot afford to buy homes, and renting is how they make sure they don't become homeless.
I guess that’s a good thing (for voluntary renters… not so much for involuntary renters) but not really supposed to happen.
Foreign capital is undesirable in the housing market because:
1) It raises demand (when buying a home as a local, you now also have to compete with foreigners "investing", and this raises prices).
2) It often develops housing in a very unhealthy direction: Airbnbs and vacation apartments are toxic for local society and must be kept in check, otherwise you end up with half the houses just being shuttered for the whole off-season, and towns becoming empty husks.
3) Rent is a lot of money, and its obviously beneficial if it stays in the local economy instead of flowing abroad.
2) rent being the only way to afford shelter has zero relation to whether it is a net loss or not
Not landlords as a general concept, but there are many categories that are:
- Investors buying areas in bulk to monopolise available living space and manipulate prices
- Demand of renting space by investors making purchases unaffordable
- Temporary living space (Airbnb, etc) removing long term residence offer.
- Foreign investors exploiting living space from abroad, since the money extracted from rent will not be reinvested in the country.
The usual free market response to this is "more offer will even out demand". But there's lots of obstacles to this in real life. Regulatory capture, high upfront costs that limit builders, near inhexaustible demand by investors and tourism, etc.
However, it can be difficult for foreigners without a Japanese support network (like a blue-chip employer) to rent property in Japan at market price, because of discrimination by landlords. This isn't because of government policy, it's because building managers have the impression, mistaken or otherwise, that foreign tenants won't respect the rules, will be difficult to communicate with, or might skip town with unpaid rent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGAmKqTWjxU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLOsYTfl7k
(These two videos are quite recent at the time of writing this here.)
Don't get fooled by the deliberate (but misleading) title(s). This is a narration of more and more restrictions coming. So the article here also taps into this 1:1.
In some ways it reminds me of Nigel Farage in the UK, though in Japan it is not quite as tied to an individual person.
Is there something illegitimate in doing an activity that yield profit when the national is Chinese ? Or when it's a short term let ? Or when it is something that doesn't directly contributed to innovation benefiting the nation ?
But of course if we limit our perspective to an economic one, then it seems like a wise and sound approach to "escaping the hamster wheel" for the average Chinese person, easy money right? I think people in Japan probably don't have that perspective though, but instead look at the tail-effects of allowing that sort of behavior. That's why they changed the rules probably.
Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. There have been stories in the Japanese press about long-time restauranteurs being shut down by the new rules.
Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. The New York Times did a good podcast on how uncapped family reunification ended up being a loophole that totally overturned all the limits and compromises in the 1965 immigration reform laws in the U.S.: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse.
There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.
But none of those filters apply to family reunification. You don't need skills, you don't need a job. You're making much less of a sacrifice in terms of leaving your family behind, since by definition you already have family in the U.S. You can move into an enclave with people from your country and live your life and raise your kids the same way you were doing back home. You just enjoy the benefits of living in a richer country.
The result of all that is you end up with this bizarre system where you apply intensive screening to select 65,000 H1Bs, 19,000 O-1s, etc. But then you hand out hundreds of thousands of greencards to people who meet no criteria other than having family who is already here.
Sure, you could propose an alternative regime where that isn't permitted. But that's a competing proposal for how to structure things and has (I think) legitimate tradeoffs. While there might well be practical problems with any given implementation I don't think there's any fundamental issue with handling immigration on the level of the nuclear family.
That assumes we couldn’t get the number of skilled workers we want without allowing them to bring over their parents, siblings, etc. I don’t think that’s true, especially these days. I bet you could easily fill the 65,000 H1B seats just with unmarried foreign students studying in American colleges.
I don’t think the system was ever designed with the idea that we need to allow in all these additional family members to get the skilled immigrants we want. I think it’s just an accident of history. And the result is a law that simply makes no sense on its own terms. Why go to all the trouble of heavily scrutinizing less than 100,000 skilled immigrants while you allow in several times that with no filtering? At that point, you might as well just assign half a million spots by lottery, or auction them to the highest bidder.
To illustrate the point lets extend your line of reasoning to the absurd by imagining a policy that doesn't permit for one's spouse to immigrate. After all, if we're heavily scrutinizing 100k skilled slots then permitting an additional 100k unscrutinized individuals by association reduces the efficiency to 50%, right? Presumably we won't get many married individuals applying at that point but hey, there's plenty of unmarried students and young professionals so that's fine.
My personal view is that ideally any policy should be humane and should work for well rounded people. I don't think we should disregard the well being of the participants in an attempt to maximize a metric that we see as beneficial.
I also personally think that the nuclear family is a much more sensible unit of immigration than the individual is. I think we'd be better off with a system where each application is for a family as opposed to an individual and the applications are scored on an aggregate basis (ie multiple highly skilled family members should be viewed favorably, young children should be viewed favorably, things like that).
IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to sponsor 2 others on long term VISAs. But there would still be fraud (there always will be I suppose).
In Germany, the benefits are tied to contributions, and after 45 years old, having some sort of pension is a requirement for getting a residence permit.
That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Those workers will have demands too.
There's been a crackdown as of late, but it's significantly impacted the perceived benefits of immigration here (and significantly increased south-asian racism). I know this problem wasn't unique to Canada (AU/NZ/UK all had similar issues) as many countries felt it was better to get these immigrants educated here where their credentials could be recognized, but they underestimated the demand via diploma mills.
Canada’s moribund GDP per capita suggests they’re not getting a good deal. One big problem is that foreign education is worth very little because the standards are so much lower. Half my extended family in my parents' cohort moved to the U.S./Australia/Canada. They all had college degrees from Bangladesh, which was very favorable under the point-based immigration in Australia and Canada. Out of a dozen people, only my dad got a college-required job without further education. My uncle became a doctor after redoing medical school. And two cousins went to college in Australia and got professional jobs. That was it--everybody else got permanent residency based on paper credentials then took non-college jobs. And they lived in subsidized housing, and got a lot of support from the government.
I would be curious to see the statistics for what fraction of Canadian/Australian skilled immigrants actually get a job that requires their skills and credentials. I suspect that there's a high percentage of people who get permanent residency based on paper credentials, but who can't actually get a job. The American system of tying the visa to a specific job solves at least that problem. I suspect the rate of return for the Canadian/Australian system is poor outside of medicine + people who immigrate to attend college in Canada/Australia.
As raynier said, Canada's diminishing per-capita GDP does not in any way reflect this. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the country's post-2015 GDP growth has come from massively increased immigration.
Indians in the US are by are large filtered for ability, and contribute to legal immigrants in the country being of high quality in the aggregate (although H1B visa abuse has changed this view).
Canada has seen a colossal recent influx of Chinese and especially Indian immigrants, the latter group now twice as large as in the US per capita.
Like the US, Canada allows international students to work. Unlike the US, Canada allowed those students to work off campus (!) for up to 40 (!!) hours a week. This caused the rise of an entire industry, in which so-called institutions of higher learning (Conestoga, Lambton, Confederation) have 99% Indian "students" that work off campus, destroying the local job and housing markets.
While they are (mostly) legal, unlike the influx of Latinos streaming uncontrolled across the Mexican border until the Trump crackdown, the numbers are still staggering for a country of Canada's size. And at least those illegal aliens entering the US are looking for manual labor, with the men going into construction and other trades. The Indians in Canada aren't nearly so willing to get their hands dirty, working at Tim Horton's ("Timmigrants") and as truck drivers (causing havoc on highways).
So your parents don't need to have a pension or an income source if they want to live with you, and you can sponsor any disabled siblings (who get massive benefits from the UAE government whether citizen or non-citizen). But you cannot support an able-bodied male sibling above the age of 25. You can sponsor female unmarried siblings regardless of age as long as they are unmarried (realities of that region I guess). But more importantly, you cannot sponsor just about everyone and anyone, so it stops becoming a chain of sponsorships like it is in the West. There are some workarounds to this system though (e.g.: you can hire one as a personal driver and another as an administrative assistant staff for your company) but they're still very restrictive.
Citizenship is obviously not at all a given, even for long term Golden Visa holders. But at least they don't tax you either which is still a reasonable balance altogether. You will get considered for citizenship though if you have a stellar track record (research, entrepreneurship, sports, govt service).
If you want to attract skilled labour, you must allow them to bring their dependents. They come as a unit.
- Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only;
- Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently;
- Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth;
- Spouses of green card holders and unmarried children under 21 of green card holders have a wait of 1-2 years generally;
- Married children of US citizens have a wait of 10-25 years;
Additionally, the president has broad powers to limit giving visas (nonimmigrant or immigrant) for consular processing thanks to Trump v. Hawaii [1] that mostly cannot be challenged in court. There are various bans on this for 19, 39 and 75 countries. It is unlikely many of these people will not be able to get a visa at all at least until Trump leaves office.
Immigration has become a political scapegoat for many things from housing prices to crime to unemployment. There's no evidence of any of this. Housing is particularly funny. Migrants (undocumented or documented) aren't the reason your rent is through the roof. Also, migrants of any type commit fewer crimes on a per-capita rate than US citizens [2].
If you want to look at actual immigration abuse, I'll give you two examples:
1. There are credible allegations Elon Musk was out-of-status after leaving Stanford [3]. This matters because, if true, it makes him ineligible to adjust to an employment-based green card and, by extension, it means he can be denaturalized. USCIS under this administration is more aggressively pursuing denaturalization. Do you think that includes Elon Musk? Yeah, me neither;
2. Melania Trump, a model from Slovakia, came to the US on a tourist visa in 1996 and allegedly worked on that visa, which is unauthorized. She later got an EB-1 green card in 2001 [4], colloquially known as an "Einstein visa". Again, unauthorized work here would make her ineligible to adjust status and could be grounds for denaturalization as well. Do you think USCIS will pursue that? No, me neither. Also, she engaged in the Republican sin of "chain migration" by sponsoring her parents in 2006.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Hawaii
[2]: https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigra...
[3]: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/11/11/elon-musk-stanford-work...
I don't care about this or that individual. The problem is volume. When we came to the U.S. in 1989, there were only 10,000 Bangladeshis. Today there are over 600,000. There are "Little Bangladeshes" in many cities. I have a hard time believing highly skilled H1B workers and their kids are going to create these enclaves.
This is not a real problem. First we're assuming that migrants only marry foreigners. A significant portion of green cards are issued to people who marry a US citizen or green card holder so there's no spouse there and, at most, one set of parents. Also, it's not like every parent wants to come to the US.
And who really cares if parents come over? They don't get Social Security. They probably don't get Medicare either.
We are in fact completely dependent upon immigration with a fertility rate of ~1.54 per woman. Many industries (eg construction, agriculture) are completely dependent on migrant labor.
It doesn't matter what you or I think constitutes a "real problem." The underlying premise of the law is limiting the number and type of immigrants. If a law allows only ~100,000 highly scrutinized skilled workers, but then has a loophole for hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants with no skills and no filtering, then it is broken under its own animating premises.
It's like building a biometric security door and then installing an unlocked sliding barn door right beside it. You can't argue that "well, we don't really need to control who gets access." We went to all that trouble to build the security door, so there must be a reason.
And family reunification is largely unnecessary. Maybe you need a small number of family greencards connected to O and E visas, to attract superstar workers that are well established in their careers. But otherwise, the U.S. could easily fill 65,000 H1B slots just from single college students who don't need to bring family with them.
Bangladesh got 66 H1B visas in 2025, and 2 O1 visas. Even if that pace was consistent since 1989, that's under 3,000 H1Bs. If there were really 10,000 Bangladeshis in 1989, the population should be under 15,000 people today accounting for natural population growth: https://ile.github.io/population-calculator/#human_age=80&ti....
For the 600,000 figure to be accurate, there must have been hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis already here in 1989 who started identifying as Bangladeshi since then. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. But those figures are shocking for a country that provides the U.S. with a very small number of skilled immigrants.
You might enjoy Fatima Shaik's books as well (although her forebears were from what is now W. Bengal - which serves to draw out my point - they came like my ancestors before Partition and before 1971, so some were not even aware of what happened or that they were Bengali-descended as opposed to "East Indian" without some research). Remember Bengal and Orissa were joined at a certain point and Bengal was divided at least once before so things were in flux well before 1947.
It's a huge benefit, giving more people the benefits of freedom, bringing the country benefits of more free people (including economic growth), and bringing families together.
As there is little documented downside, it's a huge win. I want people to have freedom and families to be together. What's the downside?
Given that we have 2+ in each high street in Berlin, it seems it's not that difficult.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government has a problem with this practice. The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable. When the issue was raised, the income requirements were changed as an immediate reaction, but the ISA has broad authority to grant or deny based on many circumstances.
Put differently, acts like this were already illegal, but difficult for the ISA to catch. So they changed the base requirements which are theoretically much easier to catch than the actual illegal behavior.
From Asterix & Cleopatra (1965): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSL0D_ZUAAAvbeM.jpg
Relevant as ever.
... and fair, just, and respects freedom and other rights. Telling people one thing in 2015, giving them a decade to build a life in Japan, and then a decade later telling them they have to leave violates many of those things.
Obviously the political subtext is contempt for fairness, justice, and human rights. It's not hard to see how destroying the foundations of freedom and prosperity will turn out; you can see it already in the impact on many people who are immigrants and others outside a certain power structure (conservative, racially dominant, wealthy) in many countries. Removing human rights is license to act with contempt for others.
> In one case
One case doesn't indicate a problem. I don't believe it's dependent on any problem: Is it coincidence that xenophobia is suddenly popular in all these countries around the world, simultaneously?
> at all costs
That’s with nearly 100% certainty always wrong at leads to disaster
Second
I doubt the new requirements will hinder shell companies that much. The honest people on the other hand will be screwed.
That's pretty rich, gotta say!
I agree with the GP. It’s their country. They set the rules. If they want to change the rules because those rules aren’t working for them, that’s their prerogative. As a USian, I’m actually sort of jealous that they have the ability to make changes so quickly.
Not for any reasonable definition of "live in", you can't.
But even if you just assume that OP is here on the digital nomad visa thing, you’re effectively living here. More to the point, you’re following the rules, and it’s not at all ironic or contradictory to have an opinion that the rules can be changed by the host.
But if they're here on a Digital Nomad visa, then their stay is limited to 6mo with no pathway to extending this — _I_ personally don't think that qualifies as "living" in a place, but perhaps reasonable people can disagree on this point.
Look, even if OP is just living here on a tourist visa and doesn’t have any form of residency at all, and (s)he’s still following the rules as established, it’s not even remotely ironic to say that the rules are the rules, and the host has the right to change the rules.
It would be ironic if OP did that while admitting to violating immigration law.
>if OP is just living here on a tourist visa and doesn’t have any form of residency at all, and (s)he’s still following the rules as established
No, I don't think they are. I think if you're _living_ here on a tourist visa, that's very much "abusing the visa".
It’s a weirdly motivated form of pedantry to get snarky at someone for using the word “living” when you know nothing about their situation. It’s almost like you’re looking for a reason to be upset.
Except that’s not what he said at all. He said if there’s visa abuse, the abuse should be stopped.
How one gets “doesn’t want immigrants” from this is beyond me.
The irony comment comes across somewhat innefective and petulant when I and others i've encountered with such views hold them in spite of the effects it could have for us. I don't see the point in laughing at that any more than i see it in calling out irony when a rich person calls for tax hoops to be closed and taxation to be fair.
He still can think objectively, that's what it means.
By all means bring in people to run businesses in Japan. Legitimate businesses, not visa mills. This increase in capital requirements stamps out the visa mills.
No, it doesn't. The rich people abusing the system just deposit more money and get their checkmark. Small businesses cannot raise and float this kind of cash quickly.
Also, the policy change is being applied retroactively to visa renewal applications that had already been filed, before the policy change was even announced. So if you filed a few months ago, before any of this was announced, now you're getting rejected and sent home. If the govt was actually interesting in getting rid of illegitimate businesses, they could just go to them and see if they're real or not. All businesses that qualify someone to get a business manager visa have to be in commercial spaces, with signs with their name on it, and accessible.
What? No…I am not suddenly forbidden from using the English language because of visa status. What is one supposed to say? Temporarily residing? Extended vacationing? Work-visa-free inhabiting? Come on.
You’re hanging your hat on the OP’s use of the word “living”, which is so weirdly pedantic that I think you’re just looking for a reason to be upset that they had the temerity to defend the rule changes.
For all we know, OP is living here on a perfectly valid visa.
(Maybe it's also a cultural difference?
My native language distinguishes between the kind of "living" somewhere where you're just "staying" somewhere and where that place is the center of your life. I would not use the "I built my life here" verb for a 6mo stay.
Perhaps I'm letting that color my English a bit more than I should.)
That said, as a foreigner right now the best thing to do is to watch the legal environment as it shifts so that you don't fall afoul of it. And to be extra mindful of adhering to Japanese customs, which boils down to being nice along with things like realizing some places may not look on your tattoos the same way those tattoos are looked on in the West.
Thank you taking this "ex-pat" off our hands.
Cheers.
While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.
This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.
Recent example in Vietnam: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DY_-NcwDTaJ/
A lot of trashy tourists are moving from Bali over to Vietnam. I few sorry for the locals. Yes, they'll make a few extra bucks a week from more tourists but at the cost of seeing your society get destroyed slowly.
Dear Vietnam, please do not try to become the next Thailand and Bali for tourism. Do not welcome sex tourists, criminals, crypto bros, begpackers. Don't sell your soul for a few extra dollars.
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.
The elites aren't going to have a house next to immigrants. They don't feel the effects in their castle.
Anyways, this change is to target only the best immigrants. There are still ways for them to immigrate to Japan. This change just closes the loophole for lower quality immigrants.
This assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them.
The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood.
> lower quality
Humans are not lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.
It's because to the working class, a declining population isn't the most pressing issue. In fact, some of them may even want that because it means more resources to everyone else. Mass importing immigrants causes many issues for locals. Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling.
To businesses and governments, a declining population means lower market size and lower tax income. They're incentivized to want a larger population - sometimes by any means necessary.
And no, you can't mass import high quality immigrants because high quality immigrants have options and generally don't want to move to a country that isn't their culture or speak their own language. You will always end up with lower quality immigrants from the 3rd world.
Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Fabricating and attacking their motives is more evidence (not fabrication) that the argument is nothing but bias plastered over with empty words. So is the parroting of the talking points of some social tide.
> quality
Human beings are not low quality or high quality - and especially not based on your preference or personal benefit - and economics and history clearly show the benefit of more people with freedom and opportunity, including to the people gaining freedom and opportunity. They are as important as, and have as much 'quality' as you - otherwise, you are not important either.
Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous.
Japan's relationship with immigration is complex but what you're talking about really has nothing to do with the business manager visa.
Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.
The problem with the business manager visa was that it was being abused by people who weren't actually running real businesses in Japan. They were setting up shells to obtain residency. Much of the abuse was by Chinese nationals, which was for obvious reasons especially disturbing to Japanese given the history between the two countries.
Japan isn't the only country in Asia that has been forced to revisit its visa policies due to Chinese abuse. For example, the Philippines has made changes and added oversight to its SRRV retirement visa program because of abuse by Chinese nationals, most of whom were younger males coming as "retirees" but working and running local businesses illegally.
So yes, immigration is a sensitive, complicated subject in Japan but you're reading way too much into the changes to the business manager visa.
Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.
It's complicated from a cultural perspective because Japanese are fiercely proud and protective of their culture and, many would argue, xenophobic.
It is not complicated from an economic perspective. There simply aren't enough working-age Japanese to fill these roles.
As Japan ages, it is already struggling to maintain critical services, such as caretaking for the elderly. Without immigration, it would eventually face economy-stopping labor shortages.
The tension is between Japan's demographic reality and economic needs, and its idealistic cultural/religious/historical beliefs.
You cannot maintain the world's fifth-largest economy with a population that has lost 3 million people in the past 5 years that is losing somewhere between 250-500,000 working age people a year and will have more than 40% of its population over 60 by 2030.
And, I would argue, you cannot maintain a belief system structured around the ideas of genetic, cultural and historical superiority when you've had a fertility rate below the replacement rate since 1974.
This doesn't mean that Japan should open the gates to unchecked immigration (there are practical reasons it can't anyway) but having spent a good deal of time there I feel OK to say: Japan is dying and people need to accept it so that they can address it.
A declining population is objectively bad for working-class Japanese. The key reasons:
1. Labor shortages. Manufacturing, education, food processing, transportation and healthcare cannot find enough workers, putting immense strain on exports, domestic supplies, access to services and overall quality of life.
2. Domestic consumption. Obviously, this engine of any advanced economy declines as population ages and declines. This makes economic growth all but impossible to achieve and reduces opportunities for working age Japanese.
3. Pension and healthcare. Young workers support the state safety net. When young people have to support too many old people, the young people carry an unbelievable financial burden that prevents them from getting ahead. In Japan, the old age dependency ratio is crazy high. It's like 50 dependents for every 100 workers, one of the highest ratios in the world. For comparison, in the US, you have roughly 25-30 dependents for every 100 workers.
4. Rural death. Entire municipalities all over Japan are basically going extinct as their populations die off and the young people left behind move to the cities. There are over 9 million vacant homes in Japan now. Obviously, this phenomenon places financial strain on communities, who then need more support from the central government. And the biggest issue is that eventually the infrastructure (roads, rail, hospitals, retail, etc.) in these areas basically dies.
Average people might not think too deeply about this topic, might not educate themselves about it, and might even fall victim to propaganda that preys on their angst and fears. But the economic and societal impacts of a collapsing population are well-established. There is nothing good for Japan about its collapsing population, which is why the government is treating it like an existential emergency and taking pretty extreme action. The question is whether the action is too late and not extreme enough.
Anyone who is at the top of the ladder (educated, wealthy) will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. You can't fake it with incentives, America doesn't have to offer immigrants anything it simply exists as the global centre for tech, finance, medical etc. - nobody is lining up to move to China, India or Germany.
Anyone who is at the bottom of the ladder is, as Bernie Sanders put it, a pawn in the Koch brothers conspiracy to reduce wages. These countries don't care about quality they just want to jack up housing demand and bottom out wages because thats great for the asset class and big business (until they automate and ditch all these people)
The immigration narrative is BS. The idea that we're aging out so must desperately bring in more UberEats riders is nuts. Nobody in my country can afford to be a nurse - I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country because after 20 years working for the NHS she simply is not paid enough to live.
We're absolutely obsessed with immigration and all we are doing is lining the pockets of corporates, brain-draining countries that desperately need skilled people and blurring the lines of social responsibility in a globalist economy.
To go to the USofA or to, say, Australia?
What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.
https://m2now.com/this-is-where-the-rich-are-leaving-and-goi...
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
Just as in sports, if you’re trying to draft a top kicker/thrower/catcher/goalie/whatever, they’re going to avoid onerous terms and outsized effort.
This isn't actually true in all instances. You can literally buy residency (or even citizenship) in numerous countries, so anyone who is optimizing for the path of least resistance will always have options.
Japan is a very unique destination. It's one of the most developed countries in the world, with world-class infrastructure, a super interesting culture, great food, abundant nature, etc. For Westerners, housing is relatively inexpensive in much of the country, with tons of akiya (empty houses) available for purchase because foreigners can (at least for the time being) buy property with few restrictions. Due to the weak currency, very few developed countries (and basically none in Asia) are as affordable to Westerners.
The problem with the business manager visa is that many of the people obtaining it weren't really interested in running businesses in Japan. They were setting up shell companies to get residency.
Raising the capital requirement and adding new requirements around employment and language will no doubt hurt some legitimate business manager visa holders but realistically, the number of people running legitimate businesses in Japan who might have to leave will be dwarfed by the number of people who used the visa as a workaround to get residency.
Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.
As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound.
Anyway, migration is a human right.
What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny.
For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"!
So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right.
Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them.
But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it!
[0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are.
[1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.
Human rights are descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, your right to speak does not come from a piece of paper signed by a bunch of 18th century politicians; the Bill of Rights is a recognition of what people have always believed. Likewise, I am not saying that I, personally, deserve the legal right to move to this one specific country. I am saying that human migration is an activity people have been doing for tens of thousands of years and that restricting it is as much of a folly as restricting speech is.
In the realm of speech, we have the concept of the Streisand Effect, where even the smallest attempts at restricting speech immediately backfire by creating more discussion about the speech. And likewise, with immigration control, attempting to keep entire groups of people out also creates a paradoxical reaction. Namely, you create a black market for access, as criminals will organize themselves around figuring out how to evade the system. If your legal immigration system has reasonable paths to immigration that ordinary people can figure out and take advantage of, then nobody risks the illegal path, the state maintains effective control over the border, and we don't have this problem. But if you make your immigration system inscrutable for anyone outside your country's legal profession, set the visa requirements to be unmeetable by most people, or otherwise try to "keep them out", you are going to lose control over your borders purely from the economic demand overruling you.
How this works is that, because most people do not understand and cannot make use of the visa systems on their own, they rely primarily on employer sponsorship. As we've seen with the H-1B program in America, employee-sponsored visas create an underclass of golden-handcuffed visaholders who are only eligible for employment from the small handful of companies that specialize in visa sponsorship. In Japan, they have guest worker programs that are even more restrictive and funnel people into "black companies" (i.e. sweatshops). Some of them don't even bother with visa sponsorship and just rely on inducing well-meaning but law-illiterate people to work illegally.
To make matters worse, the state might even enjoy this state of affairs. As 400 years of American history have shown, it is politically expedient to have a permanent labor underclass. It lets politicians wriggle out of minimum wage, overtime laws, worker safety, and so on. For example, the US H-2A program is full of fronts for Mexican cartels doing human trafficking. The ICE raids on illegal immigrants have the paradoxical effect of giving those cartels more market power, creating a pliant underclass of agricultural slaves. Illegal immigrants could at least ghost farmers offering shitty work[0], but legal immigrants have a sponsor who knows where their family lives.
The things individuals care about with regards to immigration - i.e. damage to "culture" or "social homogeneity" - are downstream of the state deliberately creating this labor underclass. Politicians wouldn't care about them otherwise. Hell, Japan has a long history of denigrating its own traditional culture in favor of looking more western. The joke about any given traditional Japanese art is that its masters are four grandmas and one really passionate white guy. A lot of things we consider to be uniquely Japanese[1] are cultural hand-me-downs from other countries[2], because the Japanese government didn't care about culture until they realized they could use it to scare people into the ballot box.
[0] Again, "if it sucks, hit the bricks".
[1] Like the functioning train network
[2] Like how America threw away its functioning train network
Not having states with citizenship is not a human right.
>Sure. But culture changes all the time!
Not even remotely at the current speed. If it did many of the cultures and ethnicities in europe simply wouldn't exist.
Also your image of free unlimited migration runs into endless historical examples to the contrary.
Double negatives in English are difficult to parse, and I can read this two ways:
- "There is no legal entitlement to migration."
- "Citizenship is a human right, and must be exclusionary lest new citizens dilute the value of existing citizenships, ergo any policy that makes citizenship easier to obtain is a violation of human rights."
As a statement of fact, the former is true, but I also wasn't arguing that you already have a legally recognized right to enter any country of your choosing. If you were arguing the latter, however, that is bullshit. Citizenship cannot be a human right because it is a status granted by a state. The state does not grant you your human rights[0], it can only promise not to interfere with them.
As for the historical counterexamples to migration as a human right, I can also bring up plenty of historical counterexamples to free speech as a human right. There have been just as many societies that tried to quell speech as there were societies that tried to quell migration. And, likewise, most people were not in a position to migrate, just as prior to the printing press and mass literacy, most people did not have an audience for their speech. But we would not say that "free speech is not a human right because a lot of countries tried to quash it", or "because most people in most times did not have the means to use it". That would be absurd.
Furthermore, we should keep in mind that when I talk of migration as a human right, I am not solely talking about immigration. Most historical examples of states suppressing migration were just as interested in keeping people from leaving as they were concerned with those entering. The king does not want his servants leaving for a better kingdom; so he welds the exits shut. This practice continued all the way until the Soviet Union made this policy so onerous that the US decided that it would only trade with "non-market economies" if they abolished their exit visas. Emigration is already a legally recognized human right and any country that does not let its citizens leave is rightfully attacked as despotic.
As for culture, uh... I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Even if every country in Europe were sealed off from one another, the culture of today would be dramatically different from 40 years ago, or 40 years from now. You just don't notice it because you're drifting along the same tide. Likewise, two different countries do not become the same merely because that tide is pulling really fast. France and Czechia were far more isolated 40 years ago, than they are now that the Iron Curtain is gone and the EU allows freedom of movement. They are still culturally distinct countries, even though they're moving in similar directions nowadays.
[0] There are countries in Europe that use their constitutions as a place to put general welfare and infrastructure goals. For example, in Finland, broadband Internet access is a "human right". For the purpose of this discussion we're going to only be talking about human rights as negative freedoms - i.e. the Anglo conception of human rights. I am not opposed to positive freedoms, but that's not what we're talking about.
I think human rights are an abstract western concept that aren't as universal as the definitions like to claim. The free speech thing for example is not upheld in the vast majority of muslim countries when it comes to various discussions and criticism of religion. And that's a ton of countries.
There's other examples as well,.
>Most historical examples of states suppressing migration were just as interested in keeping people from leaving as they were concerned with those entering.
I don't think so tho it's of no matter to the discussion. At the end of the day keeping people from leaving was far more difficult than keeping people from coming in to the place where one did have power and jurisdiction.
>This practice continued all the way until the Soviet Union made this policy so onerous that the US decided that it would only trade with "non-market economies" if they abolished their exit visas. Emigration is already a legally recognized human right and any country that does not let its citizens leave is rightfully attacked as despotic.
India is one such country today and they trade just fine. That's not to say that I think it's just.
>As for culture, uh... I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Even if every country in Europe were sealed off from one another, the culture of today would be dramatically different from 40 years ago, or 40 years from now.
Not in the same way in any shape or form. Despite americanisation, other international influences and local cultural changes I found the culture of my great grandparents recognisable and familiar and can trace the family back hundreds of years in that same spot. Look at the census list from napoleonic times and all the other family names sound familiar too. I have their mannerisms, I speak their dialect, i speak their language, i eat their foods, etc. If i go to an open air museum to look at one of the dwellings from hundreds of years I find a ton of design elements that are essentially the ones I found in my great grandparents farm.
Mind you there are strong differences still and they exist even within less than 40 years but there's an obvious difference between those two kind of changes that one can only look past if they're wilfully doing so.
For example on the contrary I go to my capital and it's surroundings and they don't have the dialects there from a century ago. In fact they don't even speak the same language. Consequentially they watch different media and vote differently. They don't identify themselves with the people that existed there a century ago and to top it off and all of it led to sectarianism affecting our politics to this day. (which was utterly predictable.) There was a second wave of external migration mostly in the last 2 decades leading to those with national descent being about 20% of the population of which less than a quarter speak the old language (typically without the old dialects). This is Brussels I'm talking about and the same change that happened there now happens across the country at a slower (read historically breakneck) speed.
It has proven not to be beneficial for the local population (unemployment is trough the roof, there's a ton of religious radicalism, outsized crime and integration issues, etc) We also still live in a context where a fully sovereign nation has control over who it accepts and were it fully democratic it would answer to it's citizens who when faced with migration that does not serve them would mostly block it. Not by building a wall but by simply barring from the privileges and functions required to exist in society.
Every country does that to some extent and so I'd say the universal part of this supposed human right is so universally rejected that it can't be called one at all.
Your government does not know how to integrate foreigners.
America used to have an extremely racist and restrictive immigration policy. This was only undone about 50 years ago. As part of the deracialization of American immigration, a bunch of racist senators decided to give America an extremely generous family sponsorship program, specifically to keep the immigrant pool as white as possible. This backfired horribly (for them, not me): America became one of the easiest countries for people from poor countries to immigrate to, because we outsourced the question of who to admit to people who already knew who they are. This derisked the immigration process and resulted in more immigrants from more countries. So every major American city[0] has a pool of well-adjusted, fully integrated immigrants now.
Europe did... none of this. The immigration policy most countries in Europe has is tailored specifically for bringing in temporary workers that can be dismissed as will[2]. This selects for low-skilled rural migrants, and a random sample of those from any country will give you people who are more conservative than average. In contrast, America's relatively liberalized immigration policy means we're taking in migrants from all walks of life.
The proof of this is borne out in opinion polling of EU-external immigrants. For example, Turks who move to America have political opinions about Erdogan in line with the American mainstream - that is to say, they hate him as much as I do, if not more. Turks who move to Germany support Erdogan even more than Turks that did not emigrate.
To make matters worse, this property is self-perpetuating. A random immigrant from one of these countries will fall back upon their local diaspora population for support. In America that means making friends with people from all walks of life. In Germany that means joining an illegal far-right[1] Turkish biker gang.
The problem Europe has right now is not entirely foreign to American history. The restrictive, racist immigration policy America used to have was itself a reaction to the time in which America's immigration policy was "lol"[3]. Immigration used to be a matter of showing up to Ellis Island and answering a few questions. A crop failure and famine in Ireland, as well as widespread poverty in Sicily, triggered two huge waves of crisis migration to a country that had little Italian or Irish already. This naturally triggered a crime wave, followed by a white backlash that resulted in the nadir of American race relations and the passage of those racist policies.
Not that far off from Europe today, right? But at the same time, it's proof that this is a solvable problem, because America already solved it. We saw the problems with having a large Italian and Irish underclass and implemented programs and policies specifically to include and integrate them. The result is... nobody cares. The organized crime that followed the immigrants died out because we smothered it in a blanket of good job opportunities and inclusion programs. Unless you're teaching a New York State history class, you might not even know about any of this. America doesn't have a racial barrier between Irish or Italian immigrants and the rest of the country anymore. They're just... there.
[0] As a European you are probably arguing that America does not have cities because of our comically awful public transportation networks. That is true, but New York City is both the heavy rail capital of the country and the immigration capital of the country, so...
[1] In case this isn't obvious: the Muslims taking over your country are just as worried about western culture taking over theirs. Far-right ideology requires an other that has also adopted (or is perceived to adopt) the same far-right ideology with the labels swapped.
[2] To be clear, America also has visa programs that do this. Those are the ones the Mexican cartels are abusing; because they're designed to create a legal and economic niche for slave labor and human trafficking.
[3] Unless you were Asian. Fun fact: South Asians used to actually pretend to be black in order to avoid this!
Some of the migrants I found most eager to integrate were all americans. They did so in a short time too. Some of the most succesfull whilst also being visually and culturally distinct were (south) east asians who form a small spread out subsection of migrants.
>Your government does not know how to integrate foreigners.
It doesn't try to. Everything but. Hell we have major leftists parties advertising in arab and turkish. They also have a revolving door of scandals where they find out one of their migrant politicians has extremely problematic viewpoints. Hell we have some that left to join foreign politics after doing their vote gathering job for erdogan or the like here.
Some decade or 2 ago the prominent promise was that migrants would assimilate. To say they would not was labled biggoted. After all smaller italian migration had mostly done so. Now the progressive script on this matter has switched around completely and the expectation of assimilation is considered biggoted.
I think that says something about those progresives in question.
> In contrast, America's relatively liberalized immigration policy means we're taking in migrants from all walks of life.
It selects for richer migrants among other things even just by virtue of having a rather big pond to cross and an airport that doesn't let one sidestep the migration selection system to get trough.
On a sidenote I remember a similar discussion with a canadian stating they also had a ton of moroccan migrants around the same time and those have done very well. Somehow managing to not take note of the fact that the vast majority of their moroccan diaspora is somehow part of that small subsection of morocco that was jewish.
>America used to have an extremely racist and restrictive immigration policy. This was only undone about 50 years ago.
It also assimilated well since it had a strong focus on it's big cultural sphere, a lot of nationalism and considered being a hyphenated american to be something non aspirational and even derogatory.
Belgium doesn't have a big cultural sphere, it's the least nationalist country you can potentially think of so there's no way to cloak oneself in that way and many consider themselves [insert other nationality] or muslim first and belgian/flemish second.
>The immigration policy most countries in Europe has is tailored specifically for bringing in temporary workers that can be dismissed as will[2].
Them being guest workers was an initial excuse to make it palpatable to the populace when they were brought in to lower wages, take shit working conditions and combat unionization. In reality there's no dismissing at wil. There's no framework that sends them back.
>This naturally triggered a crime wave, followed by a white backlash that resulted in the nadir of American race relations and the passage of those racist policies.
What racist policies and what nadir of american race relations? If I think nadir of american race relations i think red summer or LA riots. Never of anything involving italians or irish. From what I remember learning the supposed differing perception of the irish and italians in the US has been massively inflated/overstate in recent decades since it fits a certain perspective. They're also not exactly that easy to discern from other groups. They're white and the perception that they were a different "race" was extremely fringe even if one likes to put the exceptions to that in the spotlight today and rather different than the differentiation from WASP in-group stuff.
A similarly weird retroactive progressive view is the noble savage stuff regarding native americans. A tribe that genocided another and has inhabbited a state far less continuously than let's say flemish in belgium gets uplifted by what is pretty much blood and soil rethoric of cultural and historic ties to the land and nature.
>To make matters worse, this property is self-perpetuating. A random immigrant from one of these countries will fall back upon their local diaspora population for support. In America that means making friends with people from all walks of life. In Germany that means joining an illegal far-right[1] Turkish biker gang.
In the US increasingly this kind of super large differentiated diaspora doesn't quite exist to the same extent except maybe for "african americans" as a wider group. Even chinese americans are only about 6mil if i remember well. You have places where ethnicities are very much concentrated and you see similar things happening but they're a tiny part of the country as a whole.
>As a European you are probably arguing that America does not have cities because of our comically awful public transportation networks.
I can't see why that would be and have never met a european that thought that.
>In case this isn't obvious: the Muslims taking over your country are just as worried about western culture taking over theirs.
yes americanisation/westernisation happens there as much as here. But I dare say there is a key difference in that there are no westerners moving to their countries en mass and going as far as excluding locals from housing and jobs in local administrations they take over with sectarian voting. I would bet money if that was the case it would fairly commonly be equated to or flat out called colonialism.
There's far less sub saharan africans who settle in morocco on the other hand and they do make it a political issue. Similarly the racism of my saudi ex's family (in SA to be clear) would make our far right blush and similar can be said about the takes of some turkish friends about syrians, armenians, etc whilst they're otherwise ironically very pro migration and either progresive or ...progressive anti-religious ultranationalist.
Funilly enough outside of those ethnicities they had conflicts with I've found Turkish inclusive ultranationalism to have been similarly effictive as the american flavour of the past. I know second generation people there of ethnicities from russia, central asia and the middle east who see themselves very very much as Turks.
In typical western european fashion I used to be very opposed to nationalism in this way and other ways but this and other experiences have kind of flipped my script.
PS: At the end of the day if non eu migrants are on average a net financial drain to a densely populated country then most argumets for it still just fall apart. Any argument that does push some perceived benefit seems to shatter on the fact that it depends on a system of eternal migration and population growth. The kind of stuff that would end up vindicating the replacement conspiracy theories.
He got called out several times about his stories so I wouldn't be surprised if he's making stuff up again.
Good point, WP [0] has some details, looks like pretty credible call outs.
I did read about that when I watched the show, but proceeded to forget because I didn’t actually care that much ;)
The rich people abusing this visa as second home have no trouble depositing a bit more money to meet the requirement. It only affects legitimate businesses that can't raise and float that kind of cash. It's performative punishment to appease the growing far-right sentiment. If they wanted to verify businesses were real, they can go there and foot and inspect. (They already have the right to do this, and all businesses that qualify for this visa must have a public office or commercial space with a clearly listed sign that can be accessed easily.)
Also, they enacted the change and applied it retroactively to existing visa holders who were waiting to have their visa updated. So people are now being rejected on new rules that were announced and enacted after they had filed to update their visa (which you must do every 1-3 years.)
Japan is not a theme park for foreign tourists to gawk at. It's a real place where people live and work.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
There is a Japanese-led movement attempting to raise awareness of this issue, at least as far as it affects ethnic restaurants, which I suppose is the most visible effect of it to regular Japanese people: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260529/p2a/00m/0na/00... As they point out, the stated goal of this policy change was to clamp down on rich people from other countries buying a "second home" with a visa in Japan. But the policy change to increase the capital requirement does not stop this. It only affects legitimate business. Because the rich people just deposit more money and meet the requirement. As the people in the link above point out, if the government was actually serious about this, they could instead verify the businesses are real by going there.
The people running small businesses, especially restaurants, cannot raise that kind of cash very quickly. And floating that amount of money in cash is just a bad idea.
More: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16536637 More: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16615301 Example: https://www.ndtv.com/feature/japan-deportation-threat-leaves...
The people here cheering this on, saying "Japan should throw out more foreigners to preserve Japan" need to realize that Japan is not a theme park. It's a real place that people live and work. And this policy change doesn't even do what it claims to do.
I’ve also heard of quite a few problems with some of these properties, such as operators not meeting licensing requirements or causing issues with nearby residents.
Japan also has a relatively generous social security system, especially national health insurance, which makes medical costs extremely low compared with many other countries. So I can see why this kind of route would keep attracting people from overseas.
In a country with a population of 123 million, that's a non issue just for pleasing far right Nippon Kaigi friendly voters.
*Sanseito.
Nippon Kaigi friendly are mostly trad big corps. These days the anxiety came from everyday folks that are starting to consider Sanseito vs good ol' LDPJ.
While not 100% the same, I do think that the last LDPJ huge victory reminds me of 2019 UK election, the last big hurrah for Conservative, before Reform starts seeping in.
A $31,000 capital requirement for a "business" is a joke. A food cart--not a truck, just a cart--requires more capital than that.
Even 187k is very low compared to Europe, I’m pretty sure all European countries have it higher than that.