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But acculturation is real and powerful; people tend to follow the social norms of the people around them, so when you drop a random American or Australian in the middle of urban Japan, even if he was a gangster back home, he'll probably follow the rules like everyone else does. (In fact, I knew two such former gangsters in Osaka.)

On average, it looks like foreigners get arrested at a bit less than twice the rate of native-born Japanese people. Given the very low baseline, this isn't a very significant amount of crime. Japan has a murder rate of about 0.23; even doubling that would still leave them safer than Korea or China , so increasing it by a far smaller percent via immigration isn't going to change the nation's fundamental character. Immigrant crime isn't a big deal in Japan...yet.

But if the foreign-born population of Japan keeps growing, will this still hold true? If Japan's population goes from 3% foreign born to 16% - the level of the UK - there will be large enclaves where foreigners and their descendants live out their lives mostly surrounded by each other instead of by Japanese people.

At that point, will acculturation to low crime rates break down? That's probably what happened in France, where“banlieue” immigrant neighborhoods are high in crime and have seen frequent rioting , despite the overall peacefulness of the country. It would be a shame to see Japan forced to become like France, with guards armed with machine guns standing on street corners.

The loss of the ability of women and children to walk safely alone at night in urban areas would be a tragedy. The scary thing here is that we don't really know if this will happen, or how much immigration it would take to bring it about...and we won't ever know, unless and until we wake up and find that it's already too late.

So it's reasonable for Japanese people to be uneasy about the possibility of continued mass immigration. In fact, although I'm personally an advocate of continued large-scale immigration in America, I'm pretty apprehensive about the prospect when it comes to Japan. And I can understand why some Japanese people are apprehensive as well.

The overtourism problem

In fact, I think there's another reason for the rise of nativist politics in Japan: the overtourism problem.

In recent years, thanks in part to a concerted decades-long campaign by the national government, the entire world has learned that Japan is an easy place to visit and get around in.

Translation apps, Google Maps, cheap international roaming, and Apple Pay have made it even easier. Japan is an incredibly unique, pleasant, and fun place, and it's also now a cheap place for foreigners, thanks to the recent weakening of the yen. Everyone who recommends travel destinations says the same thing: Go to Japan.

As a result, Japan has become absolutely flooded with tourists. In 2024, the country probably received about 37 million travelers:

Source: JITTI

If this boom were dispersed evenly throughout time and space, it wouldn't be very onerous. If every tourist came for only one week, and they were spread out evenly throughout the year, 37 million annual visitors would represent only 0.6% of the Japanese population. That's tiny.

The problem is that the tourists are not spread out evenly through time and space. They crowd into a few places - the west side of Tokyo, the older neighborhoods of Kyoto - at a few times during the year. During the cherry blossom season in late March and early April, west Tokyo feels as international as NYC.

The coffee shops and restaurants and parks are crammed with foreigners, few of whom can speak Japanese. Train stations are jammed up with tourists fumbling with their payment cards at the ticket gate. It's almost impossible to get a dinner reservation.

In some neighborhoods, the crush goes away during off-season, but some of Japan's most beautiful and vibrant spots have been hollowed out into tourist traps. Golden Gai, a small drinking district which houses some of Tokyo's coolest little bars, is now almost entirely tourists.

Shibuya, once the beating heart of Japan's youth culture, is now a museum of itself. Akihabara is no longer the haunt of anime nerds and social outcasts, but a place where tourists go to shop at a shrinking number of increasingly generic stores.

Nowhere has it worse than Kyoto. Reeves Wiedeman had a great travel report in the Intelligencer the other day, illustrating how everything that made Kyoto interesting and distinctive has been either chased away by a constant choking throng of tourists, or crassly commercialized to sell to foreigners.

This is what economists call a“congestion externality.” If only one tourist goes to Shibuya, she can get lost in a neon wonderland; if a million tourists go to Shibuya, the neon wonderland gets replaced by something empty and tawdry, and no one gets to enjoy it.

Congestion externalities also strain the efficient public transit systems and well-designed streets for which Japan is famous. Cities are best when they're built for continuous occupancy, but tourism is seasonal.

That means if you build a train system to handle peak tourism season, it'll be underused for much of the year. But if you build a train system to handle the average number of riders in order to maintain profitability, it'll be unusable when the tourists come. There's no fully satisfactory solution to this problem.

And all that is before we take tourist behavior into account. In Chicago or Philadelphia, a tourist is probably going to be less rowdy and more law-abiding than the locals; in Japan, it's just the opposite. Tourists don't acculturate as much as immigrants do; they haven't been in a country long enough to know how to follow the local rules and norms.

As a result, you now see huge numbers of videos of tourists acting up in Japan. I'll post just a few:

And, of course, there are all the high-profile cases of streamers going to Japan and behaving badly in order to get attention online.

This isn't as bad as murder or theft, obviously, but it does degrade the character of a nation like Japan. The anti-foreigner anger fueling the rise of Sanseito isn't just because of immigrants; it's partly because of tourists .

And the real crux of the tourism problem is this: When does it end? If this were a temporary issue, it would be bearable. But Japanese people can look at places like Venice and realize that tourism isn't a temporary phenomenon; if nothing ever gets done, the country's Tier 1 cities are going to be theme parks for all eternity.

Cutting down on overtourism would probably go a long way toward defusing Japan's rising anti-foreign backlash. One simple policy would be for each city to levy a surcharge on hotel reservations made to foreign bank accounts.

This would allow Tokyo and Kyoto to selectively raise the price of tourism to those hot destinations, pushing international travelers out to cheaper smaller cities and rural areas where their dollars are more needed. (It would also raise revenue for the government.)

I think it would also help to arrest and punish of tourists who engage in criminally disruptive behavior. All Singapore had to do in order to get a reputation as a country that brooks no nonsense from tourists was to cane one guy for vandalism .

Japan needs immigrant selectivity and active assimilation policy

But cutting down on overtourism won't solve the whole problem. Japan is simply not traditionally a nation of immigrants, and so learning how to deal with mass immigration is going to be a bumpier road than it was for the US. (And note that even for the US, it was often bumpy indeed...like now.)

Fortunately, Japan has some time. Anger at immigration has not yet come to dominate the national mood. Polls still show very favorable sentiment toward immigration. Here's one from 2024, showing that pro-immigration sentiment has actually increased in recent years :

Source: Asahi

So the Sanseito backlash is still among a minority of Japanese people. But as we've seen with MAGA in the US, a minority of very dedicated, angry people can create a lot of trouble for a country.

Japan's ruling LDP is going to have to act. Traditionally, the LDP wins by being ideologically flexible and addressing the concerns of the electorate as they arise. It needs to do so again, so that the immigration problem doesn't end up causing the rise of a Trump-like figure.

The first thing Japan's leaders should do is to improve immigrant selectivity. The country has struggled to attract skilled immigrants en masse, due to low entry-level salaries and the language barrier.

But the government should redouble its efforts - as the US becomes a less attractive destination, Japan may emerge as an attractive alternative. In fact, this is one of the main topics of my recent book,“Weeb Economy .” (Sadly, the book is only available in Japanese.)

But skills aren't the only kind of selectivity. Japan can selectively target immigration from countries that are culturally and religiously similar to itself - places like Vietnam and Thailand. It can try to attract political dissidents from China, and refugees from the Hong Kong crackdown.

The second thing Japan should do is to improve assimilation policy. Japan's system for dealing with immigrants was built on the assumption that they were temporary expats or guest workers who would eventually go back to their home countries. The children of foreigners often attend their own schools, and some of them end up with limited Japanese ability.

This has to end. Kids born to foreigners in Japan should be sent to Japanese schools, so that they learn the language, and - even more importantly - so they acculturate to the norms of the Japanese kids around them. The only kids who go to international school should be those whose parents intend to leave soon.

It's also worth looking at the idea of residential dispersal, in order to prevent the formation of ethnic enclaves that resist Japanese culture. Singapore does this by enforcing racial diversity within each apartment block.