My Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 67: “Int’l tourism has been good for Japan”, where I argue that short-sighted criticisms about Japan being “overtouristed” may spoil things, so don’t let the debate backfire into racialized policymaking

Posted on June 20, 2025 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Hi Blog. I just got back from a tour in Japan and saw a lot of tourists. “Overtourism is becoming a hot topic. But it threatens to metaphorically “kill the golden goose”. I offer my perspective in my latest SNA column on how even local NJ Residents are falling into the fallacy that tourism is “spoiling” Japan, because countermeasures are threatening to encourage racial profiling against them. Read on. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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INTERNATIONAL TOURISM HAS BEEN GOOD FOR JAPAN

Short-sighted criticisms about Japan being “overtouristed” may spoil things. Don’t let the debate backfire into racialized policymaking.

SNA VM 67, June 19, 2025, By Debito Arudou

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2025/06/19/visible-minorities-international-tourism-has-been-good-for-japan/
Last month’s column was late because I just got back from four weeks in Japan. A luxury of academia is that in between semesters I can do long trips. As retirement looms, I’m finding ways to make life not only about work and column writing.

Interestingly, Japan is becoming part of that work-life balance. Like so many other Japan long-termers (such as Donald Keene and Alex Kerr), I’m finding myself living in Japan about twice a year. I like both Japan and US better when I can take a break from each, enjoying the best of both worlds.

The interesting thing I discovered this trip, as the US goes through another periodic isolationist phase, is that Japan in contrast seems to be becoming more accommodating. International tourism is making Japan into a more open society and an easier place to live.

JAPAN IS OLD AND BORING. EXCEPT FOR THE BOOMING TOURIST ECONOMY

When I first arrived in the 1980s, Japan was this forbidding, impenetrable, and “inscrutable” society hidebound to illogical systems. A place with a pervasive “culture of no,” where any new idea was shot down as “lacking precedent.” It certainly spent a lot of energy stymieing young, optimistic, reform-minded young people like me at the time.

But I’m aged 60 now, and finding Japan a lot more cooperative and friendly. Even sensible.

Granted, it helps that I’m fluent in the language, and Japan is inherently geared to serving old people who crave routine and predictability. It prides itself on public transport running on time, social welfare systems being reliable, and government policy being predictable and boring.

I really get that now. Given the decade of constant and wasteful spectacle generated by the Trump Era, not to mention a non-zero chance of outright civil warn in the US, I’m actually craving a boring government.

But one thing is certainly not boring about Japan: the tourist economy.

This, of course, is the product of decades of government programs. “Cool Japan,” “Yokoso Japan,” and “Omotenashi” have had their intended effect. Japan is becoming a major world tourist hub.

This trip I saw a lot of it. In addition to my regular flaneuring around Tokyo, I nipped out to Nagano, Osaka, Nara, Okayama, and Fukuoka. I saw firsthand how Japan is successfully coping with more diversity than ever before—while fighting its reflex to blame foreigners for everything.

JAPAN’S TOURISM IN PERSPECTIVE

The rate of growth of Japan’s tourism from overseas has indeed been startling, tripling from under 10 million to over 30 million foreign visitors in about a decade.

From that has sprung a lot of hoopla about Japan is becoming “overtouristed.” A quick Google will find much griping and sniping: overcrowding, traffic congestion, bad manners, garbage, luggage, noise, intrusive photography, etc. Some even call it an “invasion.”

That’s the blame reflex. But let’s keep things in perspective.

First, Japan is still a relative laggard compared to other countries. It doesn’t even make the top ten. According to World Population Review, the most-visited countries in terms of international tourist arrivals are predicted to be (in descending order, 2024): France, Spain, the US, China, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, Germany, and the UK.

Japan bubbles under at #11. No doubt those rankings will change as the US self-sabotages its tourist economy, but Japan’s numbers are still less than half the totals of each of the top five. And yet they somehow manage their foreigner “invasions” with a lot less grumbling.

Second, it’s important to note that most tourism in Japan does not involve inbound foreigners. According to Statista, more than 80% of tourism in Japan over the past decade has been domestic. So when you talk about a tourist in Japan, they’re overwhelmingly likely to be a Japanese.

That said, that looks to change. For the first time in 2024, record numbers of tourists from overseas made up nearly a quarter of all tourist expenditure, and tourism in general is now a significant part of Japan’s economy. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, successive record-breaking years of tourists now amount to an estimated 7.5% of Japan’s GDP.

This means after more than thirty years of economic stagnation, tourism is the one reliable source of growth and jobs. It’s forecast to account for one in ten jobs in the Japanese workforce by 2034.

RISING TO THE OCCASION WITH CLEAR ACCOMMODATION

Staying three weeks just outside Ginza this trip, I saw for myself the fruits of this tourism boom, and I think Japan is handling it pretty well.

Ginza’s streets and shops were crowded as usual, but this time there was enough ferment of foreign languages around me to make me feel I was back in Europe. Non-Japanese (NJ) were navigating trains, subways, and the shinkansen, and I saw no apparent source of concern. The NJ staff in the name-brand shops and convenience store counters were normal to the point of mundane.

Local businesses and facilities seem to be coping just fine. Along all the major train arteries were multilingual maps and ticketing machines. Food menus, especially at the chain restaurants, were on iPads or via tabletop QR codes in at least four languages. No actual spoken interaction between customer and staff was required for people to get service.

That’s quite a change. Not so long ago, there were frequent cases of establishments with “Japanese Only” signs and rules. Their most common excuse for refusing NJ entry was the presumption of a language barrier. “We don’t speak foreign languages, so we can’t give foreigners good service.” So naturally they gave them no service at all.

Of course, exclusionism still happens (and people still send me “Japanese Only” signs occasionally). But from what I saw, businesses have found a workaround. As they will. The lure of the foreign tourist yen has been irresistible, and it’s knocking down barriers.

Now tourism looks likely to expand beyond the beaten paths. I saw phalanxes of foreign tourists in places as far-flung as Tsuruga. In the backstreets of Ginza, I saw lines around the block for boutique sandwiches and other fad foods that tourists told me they found on Instagram and YouTube. People aren’t just following the tour guide flags. They’re finding their own adventures. Which means the rising tide of tourist funds will incentivize businesses nationwide to lose their exclusionary rules.

BLOWBACK FROM THE LOCALS

Of course not everyone is happy, and one surprising voice of dissent I found were long-term NJ Residents I talked to.

They felt foreign tourists were spoiling things. Echoing the standard complaints that people worldwide always make about tourists (including Japanese tourists abroad a generation ago), they find fewer and fewer “unspoiled” places where they can escape crowds,

That’s why they too support some means to tamp down on foreign tourists. Such as dual pricing. Entry restrictions. Higher entry and exit taxes to deter the onrush.

I asked why they supported charging foreigners extra.

“Because they are causing extra problems. Places have to provide menus and services in other languages. That costs money. Foreigners should foot that bill.”

Me: “So I guess that means you’d be in support of a tax on handicapped people, because one has to provide extra ‘barrier-free’ services to them, yes?” Well, uh, no.

Me again: “And how would you enforce a dual pricing policy? Don’t you think that foreign residents of Japan—like you—and Japanese-citizen Visible Minorities would also wind up being charged extra just because they didn’t look ‘Japanese’ enough?”

They responded with the fact they faced dual pricing structures in other countries. To which I said, “Yes, but you were incoming tourists there. You might think differently if you were a resident of that country and charged more just for looking foreign.”

Some cited Hawaii’s “Kama‘aina” discount for Hawaiian residents as extra pricing for foreigners. To which I said, “But when I was a resident there, I too got the “Kama’aina” discount once I got my Hawaii driver license. So it wasn’t racialized enforcement. It was a matter of residency. It’s not the same system.”

Their grumble would then return to how the tentacles of foreign tourism were killing off their special Japan. Whereupon I noted that, again, most tourism in Japan is still overwhelmingly domestic, done by residents of Japan, including crowds and pollution. We basically hear about foreign culprits because they’re more easily targeted by media. Their retort was basically yeah but still.

That was generally how our conversations went. I politely left unspoken their sense of entitlement—how only they should retain the privilege of visiting a depopulated temple, shrine, or natural area. But if others might wish to have the same experience, that would spoil it. Lucky my friends got there first so they could close the door behind them.

HALF-BAKED ARGUMENTS AND PUBLIC POLICY

Unfortunately, the Japanese Government is falling into similar logical fallacies. Local governments are already instituting higher fees starting in July at some places (such as Hokkaido’s Niseko ski resort), where the policy rubric is “foreign tourist” vs “Japanese residents.” Again, where do foreign residents fall?

As the Japan Times noted on June 5, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is considering hiking the departure tax (currently levied on Japanese and foreign departer equally) only for foreigners. And it still lumps foreign tourist and NJ Resident together as a single unit. Worse, as usual, lawmakers are explicitly only considering the concerns of “the people (Japanese citizens)” in their policy rhetoric.

Even columnist Gearoid Ready (who generally goes out of his way to defend Japan government policies) in 2024 wrote a Japan times article entitled, “Japan really should charge tourists four times more” and make it a nationwide policy. But then he didn’t include himself as a resident of Japan, and didn’t discuss how this policy would personally affect him.

Again, this isn’t being well thought through. And it’s especially ironic that some of the strongest voices are from by reactionary NJ Residents who are potentially penalizing themselves.

Some of this understandable. With any social change there is going to be fallout and blowback. The point is to make sure that all parties have a voice at the table when crafting public policy to resolve problems. This should include locals, Japanese tourists, foreign tourists, and foreign residents. There should be conscious distinctions between each as interest groups.

It’s also important to remember why we are in this situation. The government and by-and-large the locals wanted this. And they got it. Now live with it and tweak it. Don’t make a xenophobic meal out of it.

The bottom line is that the tourism boom has been a net positive. It’s stimulating the economy, enriching both guest and host, made people more flexible about dealing with diversity, and made Japan more accessible and less inscrutable.

Most importantly, from my point of view, it’s torn down more “Japanese Only” signs than I ever could have.

The potential is there for this all to go sour. But this is what happens when you see foreigners as an economic entity but not a domestic political force. Time for that to stop.

And it’s especially time for NJ Residents not to shoot themselves in the foot by agreeing with discrimination against tourists. Because in many policymakers’ view, all foreigners are tourists. Change course. Because with the direction things are going, they won’t be part of the “Kama’aina” unless they push for it.

ENDS

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Debito’s SNA VM column 58 “Japan’s Census Shenanigans”: How Japan’s registry system and accounting of foreign residents has led to statistical inaccuracies and exclusionary politics (July 30, 2024)

Posted on July 31, 2024July 31, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

SNA VM 58 JAPAN’S CENSUS SHENANIGANS

Subtitle: How Japan’s registry system and accounting of foreign residents has led to statistical inaccuracies and exclusionary politics

By Debito Arudou, PhD. Shingetsu News Agency, Visible Minorities column 58, July 30, 2024

Courtesy https://shingetsunewsagency.com/2024/07/30/visible-minorities-japans-census-shenanigans/

A fundamental issue for any country is knowing who lives there, and this is generally measured by a national census every ten years.

Censuses are serious things. They should accurately reveal in granular detail who people are, where they live, and how they live, in order for public policies to effectively target social services, health and welfare. Censuses even have international standards, with the United Nations’ Statistics Division providing a template.

In 2020, the UN approved the “World Population and Housing Census Programme,” which “recognizes population and housing censuses as one of the primary sources of data needed for formulating, implementing and monitoring policies and programmes aimed at inclusive socioeconomic development and environmental sustainability.”

The UN notes that, “Disaggregated data are fundamental for the measurement of progress of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, especially in the context of assessing the situation of people by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability and geographic location, or other characteristics.”

Yet a seemingly simple act of a headcount is subject to nasty political tugs-of-war.

POWER IN NUMBERS, IF MEASURED

For example, in the late 2010s, the Trump Administration pushed hard to insert a nationality question in the US Census. The unstated reasoning behind not counting non-citizens (as exposed by the New York Times) was purely political. Republican policymakers wanted to shrink the populations of urban areas (which generally vote more Democrat) so they would get less federal funding. It would also shrink Democrat power in terms of electoral delegates, helping Republicans win elections and further gerrymander electoral districts in their favor.

In other words, the GOP wanted to stop counting immigrants as people because they wanted to counteract an inevitable demographic phenomenon—the United States getting browner.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court ultimately blocked this move, so the current policy of the US Census remains to count all people in the US, regardless of legal status, as denizens. But that’s the power of a Census—counting people is the lynchpin of political representation.

JAPAN’S STATISTICAL HOCUS-POCUS WITH COUNTING EVEN DOCUMENTED FOREIGNERS

In Japan it’s even more politicized and nasty, but that’s not news. Japan has steadfastly refused to account for its foreign population for generations.

For example, from 1947 onwards, despite their contributions to Japan’s wartime effort as soldiers and citizens of empire, Japan stripped all resident ethnic Koreans and Chinese of their Japanese citizenship and residency.

By doing so, Japan effectively ethnically cleansed the country.

It worked like this: Japan has two registry systems. One, the koseki system, confers Japanese citizenship. The other, the basic resident roster (jumin kihon daicho), determines residency.

By excluding foreigners from the latter, the local resident rosters, all foreigners were rendered as legally invisible on local household (setai) registries. Even if they were married to Japanese—foreign spouses simply weren’t listed as “family members.”

Similarly, Japan refused to issue foreigners living in Japan equivalent Residency Certificates (juminhyo), which are essential to establishing basic amenities such as bank accounts.

In other words, anyone not officially a Japanese citizen on a koseki was not an official Japanese resident (jumin) either. Japan remained the only “developed” country in the Postwar order doing this, long into the twenty first century.

After enough embarrassing oddities making the news (e.g., local governments granting honorary juminhyo to stray animals and cartoon characters), the system was amended in 2012 to allow Foreign Residents with legal residency visas to be issued juminhyo.

But to this day Japan still excludes foreigners from the jumin kihon daicho. This means they are not counted in Japan’s official population tallies.

Look closely at the government’s next annual announcement of population decline. The wording includes the caveat that they are talking about the “population of Japanese” (nihonjin no jinko), not the “population of Japan” (nihon no jinko). This despite the fact that Foreign Residents live in and pay taxes in Japan like any other Japanese? Again, you have to be a citizen to be countable.

Nasty old habits die hard.

CONTROL THE CENSUS AND MAINTAIN JAPAN’S ETHNOSTATE

So what about Japan’s broader decennial Census (kokusei chousa)? Does it better account for the status of Non-Japanese in Japan?

I turned to scholar Dr. John C. Maher, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at International Christian University, and author of works including “Language Communities in Japan” (Oxford University Press, 2022), “Multilingualism: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford, 2017), and “Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language” (Routledge, 2012).

To see how diversity was measured in censuses worldwide, his approach was to look at how closely they adhered to UN census protocols. Let’s start with what he found intriguing from a linguistics point of view:

“There are around 211 censuses in the world. Most never ask about what language is spoken by the household. For example, Italy, Holland, Germany, Sweden, and Greece do not. But Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, New Zealand—in other words, the English-speaking countries—do.”

But if you’re going to include questions about languages spoken, Dr. Maher stresses, do it right. “Questions like these are tendentious. Some may actually create the wrong impression. For example in Britain, the question asked is, ‘What is your main language?’ From a linguistics standpoint, that’s poorly constructed. No answer will give you dispositive data.”

Japan doesn’t include a language question either, and in Dr. Maher’s view this is quite “normal” among the community of nations. What Japan does do surprisingly well, he notes, is acknowledge domestic multilinguality.

“Japan publishes its Census in 22 languages. Most countries, including the United States, come nowhere near that number. You can, of course, opt to get the Census in Japanese, so it’s not forced on you. But that’s a remarkable effort to communicate with your foreign population on the part of the government.”

However, there is one question Japan also conspicuously leaves out: a question on race and ethnicity.

That’s odd since Japan’s Census is otherwise pretty nosy. It asks detailed questions about socioeconomic status, income, household members, etc. As it should, for reasons argued above.

But a number of my friends (who harbor abiding concerns about what any government does with your data) consider the Japan Census overly intrusive, and treat it like the NHK guy knocking to collect TV subscriptions.

To get around that predisposition, the Japanese government stresses that answering Census questions is entirely optional.

But how about making it optional for respondents to reveal their racial or ethnic backgrounds?

The Japan Census for decades now has refused to include that question.

It does, however, ask about nationality. And that’s where I see the politics tiptoeing in.

For example, when I (as a Japanese citizen) fill out the Census, there is a question about nationality. You either choose “Japanese” or “Foreign;” and if the latter, indicate your country of citizenship.

As a naturalized citizen, I tick “Japanese,” of course. But there is no means for me to indicate that I am a Japanese with American ancestry/ethnicity/national origin, etc. If I could, I would indicate my hyphenated status. A “Japanese with American roots” (beikoku-kei nihonjin).

But I can’t. The Census remains willfully blind to that.

I asked Dr. Maher why. “A former member of the committee for the national census told me that questions about ethnicity and language are omitted because of concerns about privacy.”

Suddenly now there’s a privacy concern? Even though making things optional should obviate that?

“I don’t have a hypothesis for that. When I have one, I will ask the Japan’s Census Committee. But I imagine their answer will be something along the lines of, ‘Our privacy concerns are the same as every other country.’”

Dr. Maher concluded, “Granted, most countries don’t follow the guidance from the UN Census Committee, despite their experts from many countries on how to do a census. So I have little doubt that Japan believes it is not acting anywhere outside the international norm.”

WHY DOES THE JAPAN CENSUS OPT TO BE INACCURATE?

Dr. Maher, being the cautious academic, doesn’t have a hypothesis yet. But here I’m writing in the capacity of a newspaper columnist, and it’s my job to have an argument. So I will offer mine:

Japan doesn’t inquire about race and ethnicity because that data would uncover an inconvenient truth—that Japan is in fact more multicultural and multiethnic than official narratives would hold.

Japan has had generations of international marriages and fairly small (but unignorable) numbers of naturalized citizens.

Those people will not show up as such on the Japan Census.

This matters. Thanks to the bloodline assumptions (enshrined in Japanese law) that anyone with Japanese citizenship is of Japanese blood, many people (even some overseas academics who should know better) erroneously assume that Japan has few, if any, minorities; and even if they exist, they are invisible.

Never mind the existence of Visible Minorities that ground this very column. Never mind the evidence of “Japanese Only” signs. Never mind all the cases of police racial profiling during street shakedowns, targeting Japanese citizens who don’t “look Japanese.”

Their existence is officially overlooked by the Japan Census by having only a nationality question.

This is essentially a means to deny policy relief to Japan’s Visible Minorities, unilaterally deciding they aren’t worthy of being counted.

Without any hard data, now comes the repeated claims by the Japanese government in the United Nations that Japan doesn’t need a law against racial discrimination.

Why? Because Japan has no races.

Japan’s international representatives have officially and repeatedly stated that all Japanese citizens belong to “the Japanese race,” and any discrimination that happens is happening to “foreigners,” due to their foreign nationality. It’s “foreigner discrimination,” not “racial discrimination.”

Thus in Japan you are either a Japanese or a foreigner. The binary must hold. And the Japan Census’s nationality-only question explicitly upholds it.

Dr. Maher would not explicitly say that the Japan Census deliberately chooses to maintain the fiction that Japan is monocultural and monoethnic (tan’itsu minzoku).

So I will. That’s its goal. It opts to be inaccurate.

Because it’s completely within character. Given the long and continued history of excluding foreigners from population and residency tallies, the National Census’s undercounting Japan’s people with foreign roots is just another nasty old habit.

There are another five years before Japan’s next Census. Plenty of time to make amends and amendments.

Add the optional race and ethnicity question, include foreign residents as part of the official Japan population, and give us some official data for just how diverse Japan actually is.

ENDS

Kyodo: “Record 3.4 million foreign residents in Japan as work visas rise” in 2023. Only a brief reference to foreign crime (i.e., overstaying) this time. Fancy that.

Posted on March 30, 2024March 30, 2024 by Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

mytest

Hi Blog. Interesting statistics here on how the labor migration has resumed to the point where hundreds of thousands of NJ are migrating to Japan every year, and NJ Residents are at record highs. Also interesting is that Kyodo doesn’t seem to feel the need to shoehorn in foreign crime statistics this time (just a brief allusion to overstaying at the end). I’ll be incorporating these stats into my next SNA Visible Minorities column, out shortly, and argue how this influx can translate into political power. Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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Record 3.4 million foreign residents in Japan as work visas rise
PHOTO: Foreign tourists visit Sensoji Temple in the Asakusa area of Tokyo. As of the end of December, 3,410,992 foreign nationals resided in Japan, up 10.9% from the previous year.
The Japan Times/Kyodo Mar 23, 2024
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/23/japan/society/foreign-nationals-visas-japan-record/

The number of foreign nationals residing in Japan hit a record high of over 3.4 million in 2023, government data has shown, with employment-related visas seeing significant growth amid the country’s efforts to address its acute labor shortage.

As of the end of December, 3,410,992 foreign nationals resided in Japan, up 10.9% from the previous year to mark a record high for the second consecutive year, the Immigration Services Agency said Friday.

The number of specified skilled workers jumped 59.2% to around 208,000, while trainees under Japan’s technical internship program grew 24.5% to around 404,000 to approach the record high level marked in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, the data showed.

The specified skilled workers visa, which allows the holder to immediately take on jobs in designated industries without the need for training, was introduced in 2019 in response to Japan’s severe labor shortage resulting from its declining birthrate, with the aim of attracting foreign workers.

Meanwhile, permanent residents, who made up the largest group by residential status, stood at around 891,000, up 3.2%. Engineers, specialists in humanities and international services, including foreign language teachers, rose 16.2% to around 362,000.

By nationality, Chinese accounted for the largest population of foreign residents at around 821,000, followed by Vietnamese at around 565,000 and South Koreans at around 410,000.

The number of foreign arrivals, excluding reentry by residents, increased more than sixfold from the previous year to around 25.83 million following the easing of border restrictions associated with COVID-19.

The number has now recovered to over 80% of pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

In 2023, over 9.62 million Japanese nationals left the country for reasons including tourism, which was more than triple the figure from a year earlier but still remained under half of pre-pandemic levels.

There were 79,113 foreign nationals who overstayed their visas in Japan as of Jan. 1, 2024, an increase of 8,622 compared with the year before. Vietnamese made up the largest group at approximately 15,000. ENDS

debito.org

Important Statistics

Kyodo: “Record 3.4 million foreign residents in Japan as work visas rise” in 2023. Only a brief reference to foreign crime (i.e., overstaying) this time. Fancy that.