As someone who loves traveling to Japan, *please* tax me for it. Don’t let it being awesome ruin itself through tourist volume! Particularly for the Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto trio. I would happily pay more and help Japanese society out a bit. Congestion pricing works, take the money and do something useful with it.
I’d be happy if Japan were made more expensive for tourists because then the locals and a few privileged bastards like me would have it all to ourselves heheh
Travel to a foreign country is a luxury good so I don’t see any issue with adding a premium to it if it improves the experience. If they’re smart about it, they’ll add it only for the peak seasons and drop it for the other times.
The problem isn't the absolute amount so much as the concentration and bad behavior. The bad behavior the just needs more enforcement (globally). But for the concentration, you have both the carrot and the stick. For the stick, taxes, as suggested here make sense. But for the carrot: I think they can do a ton more. There are many interesting places in Japan outside the mainstream and also many interesting times year to go. There are many festivals few outside Japan are aware of. These can be promoted and incentivized to spread things out.
When I go, I personally choose not to use the duty free consumption tax exemption for tourists, because I think tourists who use the infrastructure should also pay for it. Many Chinese tourists come,specifically for shopping and the tax exemption is a draw.
Free language classes aren’t, themselves, a garanter of fluency or integration: Sweden’s been offering them for decades, but the classes are only as good as the teacher (who are often terrible or just phoning it in) and they’re predicated on the assumption that immigrants will attend language schooling full-time for 12-18 months upon arrival, instead of, you know… working.
Which isn’t really something that makes sense for the higher-skill immigrants you might want to attract, especially as cost-of-living makes it pretty unrealistic to go without income for a year or two! To accommodate those folks, you need weekend and after-hours courses and remote learning, which are, of course, logistically challenging to organize.
The idea of making the courses dual-use as networking with locals seems great, in theory, but how would this actually work in practice? Japanese professionals are famously overworked already! Why would they give of their precious little free time to hand-hold some foreigners? Swedes don’t work as much and immigrants basically don’t exist to them, except as a problem, occasionally. There’s certainly no cosmopolitan networking occurring at these language classes or in any other mediated setting!
It seems more feasible that there could be on-the-job mentorships or programs for companies motivated by a labor shortage wherein the mentors were actually incentivized to do it. Maybe pair that with subsidized language programs on-site at companies after hours?
I don’t think a lot of integration policies or initiatives—in Europe, in particular—are really gamed out very rigorously, and the devil is really in the details. The programs that exist tend to put the responsibility/blame on the troublesome foreigner for learning a rote version of local cultural norms, a grab-bag of civic facts, and some language—but little is asked of the hosts. And what motivation do locals have to step up? And that’s even true for the people whose job it is! As stated, though many of the professional language teachers are motivated and engaging, many and perhaps most aren’t—the role is genuinely tough and the pay/status is low so the simple majority are treating it like “just another service sector job,” like maybe working as an eldercare aid. So these challenges would need to be addressed realistically to actually execute on such a program with positive outcomes.
The US successfully assimilated a massive immigration wave in the 1800s and are in the process of assimilating a massive immigration wave from the 1980s/90s without any of that. We don't have any of the violence and riots or any of the outrageous mass sexual assaults or pedophile rings that characterize European mass immigration.
This is, of course, not by design, but by the dumb luck that we live next to culturally and religiously similar latinos, and not Muslims like Europe does. The same brain dead progressives that launched European mass immigration here in the US would have let them in too if they came. But Japan isn't run by brain dead progressives, and they are focusing on immigration from other Asian countries, so I suspect it will work out more like American immigration than European.
The claim that the United States assimilated its historical waves of immigrants without experiencing violence, crime, or social disruption is both inaccurate and ahistorical. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrant communities in the U.S. were frequently and often *primarily* associated with crime, disorder, and moral panic—fueled by the same factors you see in Europe today: poverty, poor/segregated urban conditions, and populist xenophobic media coverage. Irish and Italian neighborhoods were linked to gang violence and organized crime; Chinese immigrants were accused of spreading vice and were targeted in violent pogroms such as the 1871 Los Angeles massacre and the 1885 Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming. Nativist fears about immigrant criminality and cultural incompatibility led to widespread discrimination and legal restrictions, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924, which codified ethnic quotas based on racial hierarchies.
Immigrants were also central to the radical political movements of the era. German, Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European immigrants helped lead major labor uprisings, often under socialist, syndicalist, or anarchist banners. The 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago—a defining moment in American labor history—involved German immigrant anarchists. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Russian Jewish immigrants, were linked to bombings and even attempted assassination. The 1901 assassination of President William McKinley was carried out by an anarchist of Eastern European descent, further fueling anti-immigrant hysteria and government crackdowns like the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920. So the notion that America was somehow uniquely immune to immigrant-linked unrest or extremism is a selective retelling of history.
Furthermore, the idea that Europe’s current immigration challenges stem from “brain dead progressives” is politically inaccurate. Many of Europe’s major immigration policies were implemented or expanded under conservative or centrist governments. Germany’s Gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) program that brought in millions of Turks began under conservative governments in the 1950s–60s and continued for decades. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a center-right leader, oversaw Germany’s decision to accept large numbers of Syrian refugees in 2015. In the UK, immigration from Commonwealth countries accelerated under Conservative governments, including under Churchill and Macmillan. In Sweden, the center-right government in the early 2010s made decisions that allowed for high levels of refugee intake (the Conservative PM implored Swedes to “open your hearts”)—long before the Social Democrats returned to power and quickly clamped down on the intake in response to backlash. Immigration has often been driven by economic needs and post-colonial obligations, not simply by left-wing ideology.
This idea that people migration happens because bleeding hearts want it to out of stupidity or naïveté or something is nonsensical. Immigration happens a because of both *demand* for immigrants among countries with declining demographics and labor shortages (AKA the entire Western and developed world, now including Japan) and *supply* of people desperate to leave untenable economic or political conditions.
And political efforts to stop immigration are always extremely difficult if not impossible: just look at how shiftless the post-Brexit efforts to reduce immigration were in the UK—the opposite occurred, with immigration spiked ever since they left the EU! So far, despite its fevered rhetoric and draconian methods, the Trump Administration has actually deported fewer illegal immigrants than was the average under Biden in the US! And what about that Bug Beautiful Wall!? It remains rhetorical only. None of this is from lack of trying: the truth is that it’s just not an easy fix to stem immigration if that supply and demand is there! Not the least because there are always perverse incentives to not *really* do what it takes: why isn’t Trump’s ICE focusing on punishing employers and individuals that hire all this illegal labor, if it’s such an emergency issue? Just make e-verify universal and clamp down on anyone who breaches and viola, the demand-side factor is gone, right? Oh yeah, that hasn’t even been attempted … because those law-breaking employers are ironically often the Republicans’ wealthy, donating base! You saw this dynamic revealed when Trump suddenly decides that farms and meatpackers hiring illegals is fine, actually.
Lastly, the idea that Latin American immigration to the U.S. is inherently easier to assimilate than Muslim immigration to Europe is reductive. The U.S. has long wrestled with the integration of Latino communities—who face obvious language barriers, economic marginalization, and cultural scapegoating, much like immigrant groups in Europe. Many Muslim immigrants to Europe come from former colonies (e.g. Algerians to France or South Asians to the UK) and both speak the language natively and share cultural affinities that are arguably closer than you’d see between a Spanish-speaking Cuban or Mexican and Anglophone American culture). The difference between the European and the American experience of integrating near-abroad immigrants lies not in some inherent cultural compatibility but in the longer timeframe and fewer post-colonial entanglements. Assimilation, whether in the U.S. or Europe, is always a long-term, multi-generational process—usually painful and politically contested in the short-to-medium term (and clearly even still, with our current MAGA politics). History shows that no society integrates newcomers without conflict, and painting one region as successful and another as a failure based on present anxieties is historically and politically misguided.
This is a large part of why I find the reports of exceptionally low immigrant crime in the US somewhat unconvincing. Either the United States has immigrants committing significantly fewer crimes than citizens, in contrast to both its own history and the rest of the world, or the US has poor data collection, due to both its federal structure and citizens' expressed desires.
Another analysis is that most crime occurs in pockets of poverty stricken, gang prominent areas. Sometimes this occurs from immigration, or ethnic enclaves, or just a concentration of the economic underclasses. This seems true across many different countries and situations. If you go into any American city - most the crime is concentrated into a few key areas.
At various times in the US history immigration has channeled into this ghettos and other times (or concurrently, but in different places) has not. Likewise the baselines for native populations has varied.
In Japan students visas require basic language proficiency (JLPT N4) and work visas for some occupations (like nursing, which Philippines has an export market in) and hospitality and construction also require it. Companies that sponsor visas also require language skills, and do provide training after arrival.
In my experience, immigrant workers I’ve talked to in hotels and convenience stores all had basic Japanese fluency, and most English as well. These were immigrants from Nepal, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and other places, which all have great economic incentives to emigrate to Japan, so I assume that either through visa selection or motivation the people who studied the language the most got in, or at least are the ones in customer facing jobs (these were at places ranging from the Family Mart in Nagasaki station, to the Ritz-Carleton in Fukuoka)
"The programs that exist tend to put the responsibility/blame on the troublesome foreigner for learning a rote version of local cultural norms, a grab-bag of civic facts, and some language—but little is asked of the hosts."
That's how it should be. You immigrate to a place it's your job to learn and fit in. If that's not your bag, then maybe don't immigrate.
I am starting to wonder if these hard-right swerves are a feature rather than a bug of post-industrial societies facing demographic decline (which is to say pretty much all of them). The peculiarities of Japan's terrain, culture, and socio-politics seems to have buffered it for a while but no amount of insulation lasts forever.
Japan had a lot of problems this year. Rice shortages, rising prices, a series of high-profile incidents involving foreign investors and refugees, and another summer of climate change. I do agree that tourism plays a part in this, but for a different reason than you raise. Even in the heart of Kyoto, where the flood of outsiders is truly out of control, I sensed little friction with visitors (this was confirmed by several cabbies I spoke to there last week.) Rather, I think young folks in particular see this big influx of people who look a lot like them going wild on vacations they can't afford themselves, and it makes them angry about their situation. Most seem smart enough to blame it on their leaders rather than the visitors. But obviously not all.
It's hard to tell at this early stage if Sanseito's success simply reflects their drawing out fringe voters who would normally have sat things out (almost 60% of the eligible population voted in this election, compared to just over 50% usually), or an actual movement. It's scary stuff either way, but regardless, the issues Japan is facing as a hyperaging post-industrial society aren't going away anytime soon.
The demographic situation that may lead to young males voting for radical change could be from the large and increasing percentage of old people, who then naturally vote in their own interests. As in other countries where the conservative backlash is strong, women don’t seem to be as much behind it. In US and maybe Europe young males seem to resent that women have more opportunities, disproportionately enroll in college, and are more selective in dating partners, but I don’t know if these trends are similar in Japan.
Well that would reduce visitors from Thailand and China and other countries that Japan requires tourists to have visas, but EU, Australia, US and Canada don’t need visas now.
Only a few tourist attractions like Himeji castle have higher fees for non residents, but it isn’t widespread and probably unevenly enforced since I doubt locals enjoy having to show ids. And same would be true of Noah’s hotel tax suggestion, hotels are now only supposed to require passports only of non-resident foreigners, but they don’t want to burden locals, so they only ask for passports of guests who have non-Japanese names, aren’t fluent or who don’t have the right look. This in practice means, as happened to me in the past, permanent residents have to carry passports, even though legally they aren’t required to show them. One Japanese woman with a Korean name sued a hotel for this practice, but I don’t know what the outcome was. Hotels are very accommodating to locals, many let you check in without a credit card or ID and you just pay cash when checking out - but they never allow this for guests that don’t appear Japanese. So collecting a non-resident hotel tax (not on foreign bank accounts, since it would be avoidable by paying cash) would be covered under the same passport requirement, but there would be many complaints from resident foreigners.
Note that Japanese hotel taxes are pretty low, there is a 400¥ accommodation tax, a 300¥ furo tax if the hotel has a hot spring, and then bigger hotels typically add a 2000¥ combined service and tax charge, but I think it’s mostly not tax.
Last year there were some ramen shops that implemented a foreigner “tax” by putting expensive options on the menu like seafood ramen with a small crab leg thrown in for 3500¥, which no local would pay for, but rich tourists think it’s a good deal - which it is because can you get even a basic ramen in California for under $24 including tax and tip?Ramen shops typically charge only around 500¥ for ramen, and these businesses depend on high turnover, and while locals eat and leave in less than 10 minutes, tourists come in and take photos and linger too long over what is really fast food.
Those are fair concerns. Some countries do entrance fees without requiring you to go through the entire visa process. You might also open yourself up for reciprocal fees, but could structure it in such a way that maybe no one will feel slighted by it.
The overarching point I was trying to make is that if over tourism is a problem then just tax the tourism to both reduce it to a manageable level and capture some of that value, but the implementation of it will be important.
Great article. As a Westerner who has been living in Asia (currently Thailand) for the past two decades I've noticed that not only has the number of tourists been increasing but their behavior has been getting worse. There has always been a subset of tourists who come and insist on making trouble but recently it seems hardly a day goes by without a viral story about a (usually Western) foreigner starting a fight, destroying property, or simply acting like an entitled ass towards locals. I think this partly reflects the post-Covid breakdown of social cohesion at home, where people are just nastier and less considerate than they used to be for reasons I don't understand. Another big problem is social media and the "influencer economy" where wannabe influencers perform outrageous stunts in public for clicks (like that idiot on the train in the video Noah shared), to the annoyance of the local population.
As someone who grew up in Osaka in late 90s to 00s and lived in Tokyo in 2010s, I can’t stress enough how touristy it became!
And unlike Rome, we haven’t built the infrastructure to accommodate all tourists- like Kyoto has seen some tourist issue for long time but it still was limited to “tourists from Tokyo”
And Kyoto’s public transportation is not built to get around - it is rather designed to go to Osaka for commuting (Hankyu, Keihan and JR are basically all going to Osaka. The only exception is Kintetsu that is going to Nara). And there’s no way that busses that go to those touristy areas are suffice. Oh, don’t get me started how Kyoto station is outside of downtown Kyoto or the touristy places for the weird train aversion in Meiji era - (downtown Kyoto, Karasuma and Kawaramachi on Shijo Street is about 1.5-2 miles north of Kyoto station)
In fact, a half of my high school classmate went to Kyodai (Kyoto University) but their primary transportation is a bike.
I wish Kyoto had built more public transportation but building subways in Kyoto is very challenging - too many historic stuffs in the ground!
As a temporary resident staying in Kyoto the public transit situation is definitely suboptimal. I usually take the bus to get from one side of the city to another, but compared to Tokyo it takes forever. At least it makes the city feel a bit slower and more peaceful than Tokyo and Osaka. I feel a bit guilty about contributing to the absurd overtourism going on here, but especially in the quiet area where I live it is quite pleasant.
Having spent most of the past decade in Japan I think it’s definitely the tourism: these days most foreigners that Japanese interact with are tourists, and virtually all of the “bad behavior” from foreigners is by tourists (as you point out, the vast majority of foreigners living in Japan make a concerted effort to follow Japanese social norms). Why not charge a significant tourist tax (>US$100) for visiting? It could easily be levied via being added to airline fares for visitors who don’t have a visa or a Japanese passport. Not only would it raise tax income, it would also result in a change in mix of tourists and (hopefully) less anti-social behaviour.
One reason is that criminal law is strict, suspects can be held incommunicado for long periods for interrogation without lawyers allowed and using threats and sleep deprivation, and if arrested the conviction rate is 99%. If questioned by the police just touching the cop (as in trying to push past them) can trigger this detention, and potential violators know this.
One thing that’s struck me about coming here to Japan is how much more like West it is increasingly becoming, in ways both good, bad and neutral. On the one hand it has an enormous number of unique traditions and cultural products, both new and old, going strong as ever, but it is also increasingly obsessed with Western fashion, brands, music, food and, unfortunately, politics. It seems like Japan has had an unusually apolitical culture for a long time, which is part of why the basically ideology-less LDP has stayed in power for so long. But that seems to be quickly changing. That was probably made inevitable by the recent immigration and tourist waves (which in turn were made inevitable by the aging population), even if the amount of immigration is still, by Western standards, tiny at this point (though it may not stay that way). Similar problems produce similar reactions, it seems, no matter the country.
Hasn’t Japan been obsessed with Western brands and culture for a long time? Things like denim mastery, Ivy League fashion were decades ago, weren’t they?
I like your point about birthrates and cultural assimilation. Europe is having the same issue.
They have low tfr and low demographic momentum. In many countries like Italy or Serbia, crude death rates exceed births rates, and there arent enough women of child bearing age to maintain the native european population... hence immigration.
However, even the developing world has below replacement birthrates. Mexico has a lower TFR than America. Most of Latin America, Middle east, and South east asia are below replcement as well. Afghanistan, Pakistan and most of Sub saharan Africa are the only regions that will have above 2.1 replacement for the next decade.
Immigrants either convert with the populations tfr or form enclaves as you said, fueling nativist politics.
The demographic crisis is already here, and there is no spend your way to replacement birth rates that has worked. Its either immigration or AI/robotic/cheap energy productivity.
I wrote about the intersection of demographics and migration issues here:
A co-worker and his wife went to Sweden to visit the wife's relatives. He was the NASA representative to NATO at the time. In conversation the relatives mentioned the "Italians" who ran an ice cream shop down stairs. The "Italians" were part of a group who came in during the Napoleonic era. Italians reminds me of a walking tour of Boston with my brother in law. We walked from Back Bay to Paul Revere's house and back. I remember hearing more Italian spoken than Murikan.
A couple of points, Noah. Are you perhaps overestimating/being a bit premature about the importance of this result, i.e., that of Sanseito? I mean, look at the results:
What seems to have happened, more than anything else, is a significant loss by the Komei and a a mix up of the opposition parties. It is true that the Sanseito increase is significant, but it's not even the largest opposition and from my (somewhat limited) understanding, it's not uncommon for these parties to rise and fall?
To be clear, I'm not super familiar with Japanese politics, but I do get the impression that people are seeing too much of a backlash here. Not no backlash, there's definitely some of that (especially towards tourists!), but the size might not be as large as the reaction seems.
Also, per our discussion in real life, it would be excellent if Japan had more easily accessible language classes, for sure, and that could be a very important policy. But it's possible to have significant integration even if your Japanese isn't that great, as long as opportunities are there, something we disagree a bit in.
For now, with the mass migration that's happening, Japanese companies need to be more open to people with more limited Japanese skills. We're not talking huge numbers here, yet, but there's going to be significant amount of wasted skills if they aren't more flexible than having the usual JLPT N2 requirements. I.e., accept more workers with something a bit lower for positions where Japanese doesn't have to be that high, accepting the trade-off between language skills for other skills (and give workers a chance to improve their Japanese as time passes, that's fine).
As immigration number grow, the current inflexibility is going to be a growing issue...
When are you going to write about Trump’s apparent relaxing, as reported in the NYT, of export controls on chips to mainland China?
But also, great post. I agree that public safety precedes density. I wonder what it will take for US-Americans (or the French for that matter) to consider Singapore-style caning or a Denmark-style attack on high-crime cultures. Like, they’re beyond the pale right now, “off the wall.” But IDK what would it take to put something similar “on the wall” in the United States.
According to NHK election polling, the supporters of SanSeiTou are over 60% males under 30, and since this demographic is very small (8% of the population and shrinking) they won’t be winning majorities unless they can appeal to older voters. Although the speeches and viral clips from the SanSeiTou politicians is about foreigners not following garbage rules, or tourists crowding shoppers out of the shotengai markets, they also have weird proposals like forcing women to not work and raise children, claiming wheat was introduced into Japan after WWII to poison the Japanese body and spirit (MJHA?) , reintroducing the draft, developing nuclear weapons, and starting a drone force of elite gamers.
I don’t think many actually vote for these ideas, they are mad at LDP corruption and cronyism (one of causes of the rice shortages this year) and raising the consumption tax (which tourists can legally avoid on certain purchases) to prop up the floundering social support for the increasing elderly population.
One of the credos that I use to guide my behavior is “when in Rome, do as the Romans”. I worked in Japan for a project in the late 1990’s, and was very thankful for having learned things about their culture before I got there.
As someone who loves traveling to Japan, *please* tax me for it. Don’t let it being awesome ruin itself through tourist volume! Particularly for the Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto trio. I would happily pay more and help Japanese society out a bit. Congestion pricing works, take the money and do something useful with it.
Agreed.
I’d be happy if Japan were made more expensive for tourists because then the locals and a few privileged bastards like me would have it all to ourselves heheh
Travel to a foreign country is a luxury good so I don’t see any issue with adding a premium to it if it improves the experience. If they’re smart about it, they’ll add it only for the peak seasons and drop it for the other times.
The problem isn't the absolute amount so much as the concentration and bad behavior. The bad behavior the just needs more enforcement (globally). But for the concentration, you have both the carrot and the stick. For the stick, taxes, as suggested here make sense. But for the carrot: I think they can do a ton more. There are many interesting places in Japan outside the mainstream and also many interesting times year to go. There are many festivals few outside Japan are aware of. These can be promoted and incentivized to spread things out.
When I go, I personally choose not to use the duty free consumption tax exemption for tourists, because I think tourists who use the infrastructure should also pay for it. Many Chinese tourists come,specifically for shopping and the tax exemption is a draw.
Free language classes aren’t, themselves, a garanter of fluency or integration: Sweden’s been offering them for decades, but the classes are only as good as the teacher (who are often terrible or just phoning it in) and they’re predicated on the assumption that immigrants will attend language schooling full-time for 12-18 months upon arrival, instead of, you know… working.
Which isn’t really something that makes sense for the higher-skill immigrants you might want to attract, especially as cost-of-living makes it pretty unrealistic to go without income for a year or two! To accommodate those folks, you need weekend and after-hours courses and remote learning, which are, of course, logistically challenging to organize.
The idea of making the courses dual-use as networking with locals seems great, in theory, but how would this actually work in practice? Japanese professionals are famously overworked already! Why would they give of their precious little free time to hand-hold some foreigners? Swedes don’t work as much and immigrants basically don’t exist to them, except as a problem, occasionally. There’s certainly no cosmopolitan networking occurring at these language classes or in any other mediated setting!
It seems more feasible that there could be on-the-job mentorships or programs for companies motivated by a labor shortage wherein the mentors were actually incentivized to do it. Maybe pair that with subsidized language programs on-site at companies after hours?
I don’t think a lot of integration policies or initiatives—in Europe, in particular—are really gamed out very rigorously, and the devil is really in the details. The programs that exist tend to put the responsibility/blame on the troublesome foreigner for learning a rote version of local cultural norms, a grab-bag of civic facts, and some language—but little is asked of the hosts. And what motivation do locals have to step up? And that’s even true for the people whose job it is! As stated, though many of the professional language teachers are motivated and engaging, many and perhaps most aren’t—the role is genuinely tough and the pay/status is low so the simple majority are treating it like “just another service sector job,” like maybe working as an eldercare aid. So these challenges would need to be addressed realistically to actually execute on such a program with positive outcomes.
The US successfully assimilated a massive immigration wave in the 1800s and are in the process of assimilating a massive immigration wave from the 1980s/90s without any of that. We don't have any of the violence and riots or any of the outrageous mass sexual assaults or pedophile rings that characterize European mass immigration.
This is, of course, not by design, but by the dumb luck that we live next to culturally and religiously similar latinos, and not Muslims like Europe does. The same brain dead progressives that launched European mass immigration here in the US would have let them in too if they came. But Japan isn't run by brain dead progressives, and they are focusing on immigration from other Asian countries, so I suspect it will work out more like American immigration than European.
The claim that the United States assimilated its historical waves of immigrants without experiencing violence, crime, or social disruption is both inaccurate and ahistorical. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrant communities in the U.S. were frequently and often *primarily* associated with crime, disorder, and moral panic—fueled by the same factors you see in Europe today: poverty, poor/segregated urban conditions, and populist xenophobic media coverage. Irish and Italian neighborhoods were linked to gang violence and organized crime; Chinese immigrants were accused of spreading vice and were targeted in violent pogroms such as the 1871 Los Angeles massacre and the 1885 Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming. Nativist fears about immigrant criminality and cultural incompatibility led to widespread discrimination and legal restrictions, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924, which codified ethnic quotas based on racial hierarchies.
Immigrants were also central to the radical political movements of the era. German, Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European immigrants helped lead major labor uprisings, often under socialist, syndicalist, or anarchist banners. The 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago—a defining moment in American labor history—involved German immigrant anarchists. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Russian Jewish immigrants, were linked to bombings and even attempted assassination. The 1901 assassination of President William McKinley was carried out by an anarchist of Eastern European descent, further fueling anti-immigrant hysteria and government crackdowns like the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920. So the notion that America was somehow uniquely immune to immigrant-linked unrest or extremism is a selective retelling of history.
Furthermore, the idea that Europe’s current immigration challenges stem from “brain dead progressives” is politically inaccurate. Many of Europe’s major immigration policies were implemented or expanded under conservative or centrist governments. Germany’s Gastarbeiter (“guest worker”) program that brought in millions of Turks began under conservative governments in the 1950s–60s and continued for decades. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a center-right leader, oversaw Germany’s decision to accept large numbers of Syrian refugees in 2015. In the UK, immigration from Commonwealth countries accelerated under Conservative governments, including under Churchill and Macmillan. In Sweden, the center-right government in the early 2010s made decisions that allowed for high levels of refugee intake (the Conservative PM implored Swedes to “open your hearts”)—long before the Social Democrats returned to power and quickly clamped down on the intake in response to backlash. Immigration has often been driven by economic needs and post-colonial obligations, not simply by left-wing ideology.
This idea that people migration happens because bleeding hearts want it to out of stupidity or naïveté or something is nonsensical. Immigration happens a because of both *demand* for immigrants among countries with declining demographics and labor shortages (AKA the entire Western and developed world, now including Japan) and *supply* of people desperate to leave untenable economic or political conditions.
And political efforts to stop immigration are always extremely difficult if not impossible: just look at how shiftless the post-Brexit efforts to reduce immigration were in the UK—the opposite occurred, with immigration spiked ever since they left the EU! So far, despite its fevered rhetoric and draconian methods, the Trump Administration has actually deported fewer illegal immigrants than was the average under Biden in the US! And what about that Bug Beautiful Wall!? It remains rhetorical only. None of this is from lack of trying: the truth is that it’s just not an easy fix to stem immigration if that supply and demand is there! Not the least because there are always perverse incentives to not *really* do what it takes: why isn’t Trump’s ICE focusing on punishing employers and individuals that hire all this illegal labor, if it’s such an emergency issue? Just make e-verify universal and clamp down on anyone who breaches and viola, the demand-side factor is gone, right? Oh yeah, that hasn’t even been attempted … because those law-breaking employers are ironically often the Republicans’ wealthy, donating base! You saw this dynamic revealed when Trump suddenly decides that farms and meatpackers hiring illegals is fine, actually.
Lastly, the idea that Latin American immigration to the U.S. is inherently easier to assimilate than Muslim immigration to Europe is reductive. The U.S. has long wrestled with the integration of Latino communities—who face obvious language barriers, economic marginalization, and cultural scapegoating, much like immigrant groups in Europe. Many Muslim immigrants to Europe come from former colonies (e.g. Algerians to France or South Asians to the UK) and both speak the language natively and share cultural affinities that are arguably closer than you’d see between a Spanish-speaking Cuban or Mexican and Anglophone American culture). The difference between the European and the American experience of integrating near-abroad immigrants lies not in some inherent cultural compatibility but in the longer timeframe and fewer post-colonial entanglements. Assimilation, whether in the U.S. or Europe, is always a long-term, multi-generational process—usually painful and politically contested in the short-to-medium term (and clearly even still, with our current MAGA politics). History shows that no society integrates newcomers without conflict, and painting one region as successful and another as a failure based on present anxieties is historically and politically misguided.
This is a large part of why I find the reports of exceptionally low immigrant crime in the US somewhat unconvincing. Either the United States has immigrants committing significantly fewer crimes than citizens, in contrast to both its own history and the rest of the world, or the US has poor data collection, due to both its federal structure and citizens' expressed desires.
Another analysis is that most crime occurs in pockets of poverty stricken, gang prominent areas. Sometimes this occurs from immigration, or ethnic enclaves, or just a concentration of the economic underclasses. This seems true across many different countries and situations. If you go into any American city - most the crime is concentrated into a few key areas.
At various times in the US history immigration has channeled into this ghettos and other times (or concurrently, but in different places) has not. Likewise the baselines for native populations has varied.
I can't put my finger on it but there's definitely something about this which doesn't quite track.
In Japan students visas require basic language proficiency (JLPT N4) and work visas for some occupations (like nursing, which Philippines has an export market in) and hospitality and construction also require it. Companies that sponsor visas also require language skills, and do provide training after arrival.
In my experience, immigrant workers I’ve talked to in hotels and convenience stores all had basic Japanese fluency, and most English as well. These were immigrants from Nepal, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and other places, which all have great economic incentives to emigrate to Japan, so I assume that either through visa selection or motivation the people who studied the language the most got in, or at least are the ones in customer facing jobs (these were at places ranging from the Family Mart in Nagasaki station, to the Ritz-Carleton in Fukuoka)
"The programs that exist tend to put the responsibility/blame on the troublesome foreigner for learning a rote version of local cultural norms, a grab-bag of civic facts, and some language—but little is asked of the hosts."
That's how it should be. You immigrate to a place it's your job to learn and fit in. If that's not your bag, then maybe don't immigrate.
I am starting to wonder if these hard-right swerves are a feature rather than a bug of post-industrial societies facing demographic decline (which is to say pretty much all of them). The peculiarities of Japan's terrain, culture, and socio-politics seems to have buffered it for a while but no amount of insulation lasts forever.
Japan had a lot of problems this year. Rice shortages, rising prices, a series of high-profile incidents involving foreign investors and refugees, and another summer of climate change. I do agree that tourism plays a part in this, but for a different reason than you raise. Even in the heart of Kyoto, where the flood of outsiders is truly out of control, I sensed little friction with visitors (this was confirmed by several cabbies I spoke to there last week.) Rather, I think young folks in particular see this big influx of people who look a lot like them going wild on vacations they can't afford themselves, and it makes them angry about their situation. Most seem smart enough to blame it on their leaders rather than the visitors. But obviously not all.
It's hard to tell at this early stage if Sanseito's success simply reflects their drawing out fringe voters who would normally have sat things out (almost 60% of the eligible population voted in this election, compared to just over 50% usually), or an actual movement. It's scary stuff either way, but regardless, the issues Japan is facing as a hyperaging post-industrial society aren't going away anytime soon.
Interesting! How is it a feature??
The demographic situation that may lead to young males voting for radical change could be from the large and increasing percentage of old people, who then naturally vote in their own interests. As in other countries where the conservative backlash is strong, women don’t seem to be as much behind it. In US and maybe Europe young males seem to resent that women have more opportunities, disproportionately enroll in college, and are more selective in dating partners, but I don’t know if these trends are similar in Japan.
Seems to me that the problem of seasonality could be addressed with a varying visa price.
Want to go in cherry blossom season? 200% surcharge. Want to go during off season? A 50% discount.
Might take a bit to get the price and levels right but tourists would get the message it's cheaper to go at certain times and adjust accordingly.
Well that would reduce visitors from Thailand and China and other countries that Japan requires tourists to have visas, but EU, Australia, US and Canada don’t need visas now.
Only a few tourist attractions like Himeji castle have higher fees for non residents, but it isn’t widespread and probably unevenly enforced since I doubt locals enjoy having to show ids. And same would be true of Noah’s hotel tax suggestion, hotels are now only supposed to require passports only of non-resident foreigners, but they don’t want to burden locals, so they only ask for passports of guests who have non-Japanese names, aren’t fluent or who don’t have the right look. This in practice means, as happened to me in the past, permanent residents have to carry passports, even though legally they aren’t required to show them. One Japanese woman with a Korean name sued a hotel for this practice, but I don’t know what the outcome was. Hotels are very accommodating to locals, many let you check in without a credit card or ID and you just pay cash when checking out - but they never allow this for guests that don’t appear Japanese. So collecting a non-resident hotel tax (not on foreign bank accounts, since it would be avoidable by paying cash) would be covered under the same passport requirement, but there would be many complaints from resident foreigners.
Note that Japanese hotel taxes are pretty low, there is a 400¥ accommodation tax, a 300¥ furo tax if the hotel has a hot spring, and then bigger hotels typically add a 2000¥ combined service and tax charge, but I think it’s mostly not tax.
Last year there were some ramen shops that implemented a foreigner “tax” by putting expensive options on the menu like seafood ramen with a small crab leg thrown in for 3500¥, which no local would pay for, but rich tourists think it’s a good deal - which it is because can you get even a basic ramen in California for under $24 including tax and tip?Ramen shops typically charge only around 500¥ for ramen, and these businesses depend on high turnover, and while locals eat and leave in less than 10 minutes, tourists come in and take photos and linger too long over what is really fast food.
Those are fair concerns. Some countries do entrance fees without requiring you to go through the entire visa process. You might also open yourself up for reciprocal fees, but could structure it in such a way that maybe no one will feel slighted by it.
The overarching point I was trying to make is that if over tourism is a problem then just tax the tourism to both reduce it to a manageable level and capture some of that value, but the implementation of it will be important.
Great article. As a Westerner who has been living in Asia (currently Thailand) for the past two decades I've noticed that not only has the number of tourists been increasing but their behavior has been getting worse. There has always been a subset of tourists who come and insist on making trouble but recently it seems hardly a day goes by without a viral story about a (usually Western) foreigner starting a fight, destroying property, or simply acting like an entitled ass towards locals. I think this partly reflects the post-Covid breakdown of social cohesion at home, where people are just nastier and less considerate than they used to be for reasons I don't understand. Another big problem is social media and the "influencer economy" where wannabe influencers perform outrageous stunts in public for clicks (like that idiot on the train in the video Noah shared), to the annoyance of the local population.
Great article!
As someone who grew up in Osaka in late 90s to 00s and lived in Tokyo in 2010s, I can’t stress enough how touristy it became!
And unlike Rome, we haven’t built the infrastructure to accommodate all tourists- like Kyoto has seen some tourist issue for long time but it still was limited to “tourists from Tokyo”
And Kyoto’s public transportation is not built to get around - it is rather designed to go to Osaka for commuting (Hankyu, Keihan and JR are basically all going to Osaka. The only exception is Kintetsu that is going to Nara). And there’s no way that busses that go to those touristy areas are suffice. Oh, don’t get me started how Kyoto station is outside of downtown Kyoto or the touristy places for the weird train aversion in Meiji era - (downtown Kyoto, Karasuma and Kawaramachi on Shijo Street is about 1.5-2 miles north of Kyoto station)
In fact, a half of my high school classmate went to Kyodai (Kyoto University) but their primary transportation is a bike.
I wish Kyoto had built more public transportation but building subways in Kyoto is very challenging - too many historic stuffs in the ground!
As a temporary resident staying in Kyoto the public transit situation is definitely suboptimal. I usually take the bus to get from one side of the city to another, but compared to Tokyo it takes forever. At least it makes the city feel a bit slower and more peaceful than Tokyo and Osaka. I feel a bit guilty about contributing to the absurd overtourism going on here, but especially in the quiet area where I live it is quite pleasant.
Yeah, and the bus is so crowded as well!
Like the fact that there are only two subways for a city with that many visitors is lowkey insane - that said, I get why that happened…
Having spent most of the past decade in Japan I think it’s definitely the tourism: these days most foreigners that Japanese interact with are tourists, and virtually all of the “bad behavior” from foreigners is by tourists (as you point out, the vast majority of foreigners living in Japan make a concerted effort to follow Japanese social norms). Why not charge a significant tourist tax (>US$100) for visiting? It could easily be levied via being added to airline fares for visitors who don’t have a visa or a Japanese passport. Not only would it raise tax income, it would also result in a change in mix of tourists and (hopefully) less anti-social behaviour.
> In fact, I knew two such former gangsters in Osaka.
Are you hinting that substack is not your full time occupation.
Don’t check the subscription box for “An offer too good to refuse.”
> Its famously safe streets give women and children the freedom to walk around at night alone without worrying
Do you have a sense of why this is so, and what would it take for other places to emulate and get better.
One reason is that criminal law is strict, suspects can be held incommunicado for long periods for interrogation without lawyers allowed and using threats and sleep deprivation, and if arrested the conviction rate is 99%. If questioned by the police just touching the cop (as in trying to push past them) can trigger this detention, and potential violators know this.
One thing that’s struck me about coming here to Japan is how much more like West it is increasingly becoming, in ways both good, bad and neutral. On the one hand it has an enormous number of unique traditions and cultural products, both new and old, going strong as ever, but it is also increasingly obsessed with Western fashion, brands, music, food and, unfortunately, politics. It seems like Japan has had an unusually apolitical culture for a long time, which is part of why the basically ideology-less LDP has stayed in power for so long. But that seems to be quickly changing. That was probably made inevitable by the recent immigration and tourist waves (which in turn were made inevitable by the aging population), even if the amount of immigration is still, by Western standards, tiny at this point (though it may not stay that way). Similar problems produce similar reactions, it seems, no matter the country.
Hasn’t Japan been obsessed with Western brands and culture for a long time? Things like denim mastery, Ivy League fashion were decades ago, weren’t they?
The US had an apolitical era after WW2 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/24/this-1950-political-science-report-keeps-popping-up-in-the-news-heres-the-story-behind-it/), which ended in the 1960s. It might be that race/migration issues are the driver of political polarization.
I like your point about birthrates and cultural assimilation. Europe is having the same issue.
They have low tfr and low demographic momentum. In many countries like Italy or Serbia, crude death rates exceed births rates, and there arent enough women of child bearing age to maintain the native european population... hence immigration.
However, even the developing world has below replacement birthrates. Mexico has a lower TFR than America. Most of Latin America, Middle east, and South east asia are below replcement as well. Afghanistan, Pakistan and most of Sub saharan Africa are the only regions that will have above 2.1 replacement for the next decade.
Immigrants either convert with the populations tfr or form enclaves as you said, fueling nativist politics.
The demographic crisis is already here, and there is no spend your way to replacement birth rates that has worked. Its either immigration or AI/robotic/cheap energy productivity.
I wrote about the intersection of demographics and migration issues here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/the-future-of-immigration-policy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki
A co-worker and his wife went to Sweden to visit the wife's relatives. He was the NASA representative to NATO at the time. In conversation the relatives mentioned the "Italians" who ran an ice cream shop down stairs. The "Italians" were part of a group who came in during the Napoleonic era. Italians reminds me of a walking tour of Boston with my brother in law. We walked from Back Bay to Paul Revere's house and back. I remember hearing more Italian spoken than Murikan.
A couple of points, Noah. Are you perhaps overestimating/being a bit premature about the importance of this result, i.e., that of Sanseito? I mean, look at the results:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/166/
What seems to have happened, more than anything else, is a significant loss by the Komei and a a mix up of the opposition parties. It is true that the Sanseito increase is significant, but it's not even the largest opposition and from my (somewhat limited) understanding, it's not uncommon for these parties to rise and fall?
To be clear, I'm not super familiar with Japanese politics, but I do get the impression that people are seeing too much of a backlash here. Not no backlash, there's definitely some of that (especially towards tourists!), but the size might not be as large as the reaction seems.
Also, per our discussion in real life, it would be excellent if Japan had more easily accessible language classes, for sure, and that could be a very important policy. But it's possible to have significant integration even if your Japanese isn't that great, as long as opportunities are there, something we disagree a bit in.
For now, with the mass migration that's happening, Japanese companies need to be more open to people with more limited Japanese skills. We're not talking huge numbers here, yet, but there's going to be significant amount of wasted skills if they aren't more flexible than having the usual JLPT N2 requirements. I.e., accept more workers with something a bit lower for positions where Japanese doesn't have to be that high, accepting the trade-off between language skills for other skills (and give workers a chance to improve their Japanese as time passes, that's fine).
As immigration number grow, the current inflexibility is going to be a growing issue...
When are you going to write about Trump’s apparent relaxing, as reported in the NYT, of export controls on chips to mainland China?
But also, great post. I agree that public safety precedes density. I wonder what it will take for US-Americans (or the French for that matter) to consider Singapore-style caning or a Denmark-style attack on high-crime cultures. Like, they’re beyond the pale right now, “off the wall.” But IDK what would it take to put something similar “on the wall” in the United States.
According to NHK election polling, the supporters of SanSeiTou are over 60% males under 30, and since this demographic is very small (8% of the population and shrinking) they won’t be winning majorities unless they can appeal to older voters. Although the speeches and viral clips from the SanSeiTou politicians is about foreigners not following garbage rules, or tourists crowding shoppers out of the shotengai markets, they also have weird proposals like forcing women to not work and raise children, claiming wheat was introduced into Japan after WWII to poison the Japanese body and spirit (MJHA?) , reintroducing the draft, developing nuclear weapons, and starting a drone force of elite gamers.
I don’t think many actually vote for these ideas, they are mad at LDP corruption and cronyism (one of causes of the rice shortages this year) and raising the consumption tax (which tourists can legally avoid on certain purchases) to prop up the floundering social support for the increasing elderly population.
One of the credos that I use to guide my behavior is “when in Rome, do as the Romans”. I worked in Japan for a project in the late 1990’s, and was very thankful for having learned things about their culture before I got there.