> You should also recognize that there’s a difference between the people who visit, and the people who completely restructure their lives to immigrate. And there’s a difference between immigrants who do their best to learn and integrate into the culture, and immigrants who try to impose their culture on the host nation.
Oh definitely. When it comes to rules and laws there is always some cutoff or some threshold. It's like the driving age. The laws to generalize by necessity. There is only so much of a chance there to encode "level at which a visitor learned cultural norms", a "culture quiz" etc. Those are things for a citizenship but not visitors usually. In some cases it's easy to point to a legal proceeding or complaint and say "look this person is banned, he did X,Y,Z". But then there is stuff that not documented. Like maybe someone not taking their shoes off, or speaking too loudly, or reclining their seat without asking.
> > Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior
> The “phobia” part of the word is probably confusing you, in actual usage, xenophobia encompasses dislike, “fear” is not necessary. Similar to homophobia or Islamophobia, the term includes fear _or_ dislike/hatred.
I know, I was being pedantic on purpose to show that the words used matter. The way it's presented is as a moral transgression, Japanese not wanting foreigners to visit sort of sound the same as homophobes or islamophobes. I think it's unfair. Any country, especially one with a democratically elected government should be able to say who can come and who can't to their country.