Sanae Takaichi Talks Tough on Immigration While Quietly Opening Japan’s Doors to Survive Demographic Collapse

Japan is confronting two existential transitions at once: demographic economic dependency and regional security instability. But its political leadership is attempting to manage both through narratives of fear, control, and exclusion rather than through an honest reckoning with structural reality.

Foreign labour is rising because the arithmetic is brutal. Election rhetoric is hardening because the admission is politically toxic. Japan is trying to import labour without importing permanence, while simultaneously tightening its security posture. That dual strategy buys time. Then it sends the bill.

A collision Japan can no longer postpone

Japan is being pulled through two transitions simultaneously. One is internal, slow-moving but relentless: demographic exhaustion, a shrinking workforce, and a rising dependency burden that hollows out economic capacity. The other is external and abrupt: regional security instability that is narrowing Tokyo’s strategic ambiguity and hardening national identity language.

These forces are now colliding inside domestic politics. Foreign labour inflows, once handled quietly through bureaucratic channels, have become an explicit campaign issue. The same government that relies on foreign workers to keep the economy functioning is now framing their presence as a social risk to be contained.

This contradiction is no longer implicit. It is articulated openly by the Prime Minister herself.

In campaign remarks earlier this year, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi argued that Japan must go further than her predecessors to protect the country from the instability she believes unchecked immigration has brought elsewhere. Her administration has promised tougher immigration systems, reviews of land ownership by foreigners, and crackdowns on alleged non-payment of tax or national health insurance. At the same time, it has created a new ministerial post dedicated to what it calls “well-ordered and harmonious coexistence with foreign nationals.”

This is the core hypocrisy of the current government. Takaichi repeatedly insists that foreign labour is economically valuable and that she draws a line at xenophobia. Yet her political language treats foreign presence as a destabilising intrusion, something to be policed and disciplined, rather than acknowledged as a permanent structural pillar of the economy.

Telegraph Online has already documented how Takaichi narrowed Japan’s strategic ambiguity by framing Taiwan contingencies as threats to national survival under the 2015 security legislation. That survival framing now bleeds directly into domestic debates about who belongs, who is provisional, and who must be controlled.

Read the earlier Telegraph Online analysis on Takaichi and Taiwan

Demographic exhaustion is the base layer

Demographic exhaustion is not a background trend. It is the base layer beneath every argument Japan is now having about labour, immigration, welfare, fiscal sustainability, and national power. A shrinking workforce is a capacity shock. It does not negotiate, and it does not wait for consensus.

Japan’s vital statistics are unambiguous. Births have collapsed to historic lows while deaths have reached record highs, producing a natural population decline approaching one million people per year. This is not a cyclical dip. It is replacement failure becoming structural.

Long-range projections sharpen the picture further. Japan’s population is expected to contract dramatically over coming decades while the share of citizens aged 65 and over continues to rise. As the support base thins and the dependency burden grows, every institution that relies on a steady inflow of younger workers becomes fragile: companies, hospitals, care systems, transport networks, municipal services, and eventually the defence establishment itself.

Japanese demographers have been explicit about the severity. Several have warned that the pace of decline matters as much as the scale, compressing adjustment timelines and leaving little room for gradual reform. The problem is not ignorance. It is political reluctance to accept what the numbers imply for how the country must organise itself.

From labour shortage to labour dependency

Once demographic exhaustion takes hold, labour markets stop behaving cyclically and begin behaving structurally. Firms do not hire foreign workers because they have embraced globalism. They hire because domestic labour is no longer available at scale, and it is not returning on timelines compatible with economic continuity.

This is why foreign labour inflow is no longer marginal. It is becoming a system input across construction, logistics, care work, hospitality, food services, and municipal maintenance. The economy now depends on people the political system still insists on treating as temporary.

The expansion of intake pipelines is therefore not an experiment. It is an admission by design. Japan is rebuilding its labour architecture because the alternative is contraction and service failure. The state knows this. What it does not want to admit is what follows.

Anxious homogeneity and inherited exclusion

Japan’s social model prizes order, conformity, and predictability. Many Japanese themselves describe their society as anxious and rule-bound, highly sensitive to disruption in everyday life. In such an environment, rapid demographic change is not absorbed quietly. It is experienced as intrusion.

This anxiety is now being activated politically. During the current campaign, Liberal Democratic Party candidate Tamayo Marukawa warned that residents felt “anxious and confused” when foreigners “came into the areas where they live.” The language is revealing. Foreign presence is framed not as participation but as encroachment.

More explicit rhetoric comes from the political fringe. “Japan should not become an immigrant nation,” Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya declared at a rally in Kawaguchi. “Politicians just want to accept more and more immigrants. That’s the real problem.” His party’s rise has been fuelled by increasingly direct anti-foreigner messaging.

Racism in Japan is not a new invention of the current labour crunch. Longstanding discrimination against resident Koreans, suspicion toward Chinese communities, and internalised hierarchies predate modern migration. Under demographic stress, these inherited exclusions are politically reactivated.

Immigration without admission

Japan’s most consequential policy choice is not what it has done, but what it refuses to say. Political leaders avoid the language of immigration, preferring to speak of “foreigner policy” and “coexistence.” This is not semantics. It is how permanence is denied.

Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University, has described the immigration debate as politically manufactured. “Immigration as a problem is absolutely a made-up debate,” he said. “It is serving a political purpose. People were not that concerned before.” Foreign residents, he argues, are being used as scapegoats for inflation, a weak yen, and stagnant wages.

By insisting on the language of temporariness, the state preserves a political fiction. It imports labour while avoiding the civic obligations that come with settlement. The result is a growing mismatch between lived reality and official discourse.

Selective tolerance on the ground

The contradiction plays out locally. Some foreign communities are treated as stable and acceptable because they are educated, middle class, and institutionally legible. Others become symbols of disorder because they are poorer, more visible, or legally contested.

In Kawaguchi and Warabi, a small Kurdish community has become a lightning rod for xenophobic agitation. Tas Tevfik, who has lived in Japan for 22 years, described his kebab shop receiving dozens of hostile calls a day after negative media coverage. “I’m paying ¥30mn in taxes per year,” he said. “If those people thought about how much we pay, they should apologise.”

By contrast, in Edogawa, a growing Indian community is often described by local leaders as an example of successful integration. Yuichi Kondo, founder of the Namaste Edogawa community group, acknowledged friction over language and noise, but described the area as largely stable. “This is a good community that has built their lives here,” he said.

This is selective tolerance at work. The system can deny xenophobia while operating an implicit hierarchy of belonging. The cost is that foreign residents remain conditional guests rather than acknowledged stakeholders.

Security pressure and the identity pivot

Regional security tension intensifies the contradiction. As threat narratives rise, leaders reach for identity consolidation. Survival language spills from foreign policy into domestic politics, reinforcing boundary thinking at the exact moment economic permeability becomes unavoidable.

The Taiwan debate is therefore not separate from immigration rhetoric. It sharpens it. When the nation is framed as under existential threat, the definition of who belongs becomes narrower, not broader.

Anxiety as governance

Economic anxiety provides the fuel. When wages lag prices and household confidence weakens, leaders look for visible arenas of control. Foreign residents become politically useful because they are visible, classifiable, and already framed as provisional.

Takaichi has insisted she draws a line at xenophobia while warning that some foreign nationals’ behaviour creates “anxiety and unfairness.” The framing legitimises public fear while disclaiming prejudice. It converts structural stress into a problem of discipline.

The cost of ambiguity

Import labour at scale while refusing to admit permanence and the costs accumulate. Municipalities shoulder integration burdens. Schools manage language gaps. Employers handle informal settlement. Police and courts intervene when politics escalates into harassment and protest.

Because the state will not name the project, it cannot build a coherent settlement architecture. Integration becomes piecemeal and reactive. Conflict is managed through control rather than legitimacy.

Japan as an early case

Japan is not an exception. It is early. Many advanced economies face the same arithmetic. Japan reached the wall first.

The hard landing

Japan’s leadership is attempting to run a dual strategy: economic permeability with political impermeability. It imports labour while denying permanence. It promises coexistence while campaigning on intrusion.

Japan is not deciding whether to become an immigrant nation. It is deciding whether to admit it already has. A society can delay settlement language. It cannot delay arithmetic.