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▲ carlosjobim a day ago | parent | next [-]

There is nothing cruel about it. Nobody has been forced to go and live in Japan.

▲ Barrin92 a day ago | parent [-]

telling a person that has build a successful life after eight years, is assimilated and speaks the language and can support themselves that they have to leave on completely absurd conditions that virtually nobody could meet, including native citizens, is cruel by just about every definition of that term.

Those people have only ever paid in, have much better options than Japan at this point economically given how far the country has fallen behind, and the logical terminus of this is basically being some kind of ethnic chauvinist second world clown country.

If you're even turning skilled tech workers and law abiding people away your immigration problem is solved by virtue of being poor in another 10-20 years. Japan fell below replacement fertility in the 70s, 35% of the population is over 60, good luck caring for those tens of millions of people about to retire.

▲ throwaway2037 20 hours ago | parent [-]

    > they have to leave

No one is forcing them to leave. They can continue to live and work in Japan on their current visa, and renew it. Japan is simply raising the requirements for permanent residence using the traditional ten year path. To be clear, there are numerous paths to permanent residence that are much easier than the traditional ten year path. (Your favourite LLM can tell you all about it.)

    > completely absurd conditions

The new requirements are not this. In short: (1) modest Japanese language requirements, (2) more pension (or personal) savings, (3) higher salary.

    > If you're even turning skilled tech workers ... away

They are not. As I understand, Japan does not limit the number of skilled visas, such as engineer, humanities, or manager. Also, many of those foreign tech workers will make more than 10M JPY per year and can easily qualify for something called the "Highly Skilled Professional" (HSP) visa. Depending upon your "HSP points", you can get permanent residence after one or three years without any of the other requirements.

The real issue is the people who have lived and worked in Japan for a long time, but don't earn large salaries. Japan is basically closing the door for permanent residence for those people unless they marry a local. My hot take: I am OK with closing the door for those people. They are basically earning a lower middle income. I'm not sure Japan wants or needs to have those people as permanent residents. However, they are free to live and work here as long as as they want. After they finish working, they can return to their home country. No one is taking that away.

    > good luck caring for those tens of millions of people about to retire.

They will do it by expanding their existing (enormous) technical intern programme. There are already many low(er) skill foreigners working in elderly care.

	▲	bamboozled 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> No one is forcing them to leave. They can continue to live and work in Japan on their current visa, and renew it. Totally wrong, people who were eligible for the business manager visa are no longer elgibile with zero warning or grace period granted, so yeah, total BS. If you built a business here, that's been destroyed if you don't have enough money to quality for another business manager visa under the new (ridiculous) requirements. What about the people who have worked for 10 years , paid all their tax, not broken the law, but don't have 30 years worth of money to live on, do you think they should be rewarded with the rejection of a PR? On what grounds is that fair? I get the feeling you either have zero connection to Japan, or you do live here and are married to a Japanese, so you're happy to see the ladder get pulled up because "you're ok".

▲ jdw64 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree, but unfortunately, looking at the news from Japan, far-right support rates are higher than one might expect.

So it's true that those in power are harming innocent people in order to maintain their power, but it's also true that Japanese people believe they are being harmed by foreign immigrants.

And some of it is actually true. Of course, conversely, there's also the problem of many Japanese companies hiring Southeast Asian workers at low wages and mistreating them.

But whether it's me as a Korean or Japan, both tend to have a certain authoritarian mindset instilled based on "ethnic" identity. So one aspect of this policy is "we only welcome rich foreigners who spend money and leave," and the media responds accordingly.

Strictly speaking, if you look at these policies strengthening restrictions on foreigners from a third-country perspective, you can see them from the angle of far-rightization. That is, sanctions against outsiders for the sake of internal cohesion[1]. But considering the severe aging population in Japanese industry right now, it's effectively cutting off one's own nose to spite one's face.

However, East Asians receive a somewhat different education from you, so that's how it is.

The real cause is the failure of Abenomics and the resulting weak yen, which benefits financial companies and exports but sacrifices the Japanese people—the incompetence of the regime is the problem. But because it's hard to grasp all of that complex background, people want to attack something else that's near them.

And also, because the morality of some underdeveloped countries (I know it's an example...) differs from that of developed countries, friction often occurs. Just as the sense of time differs between agricultural regions and cities, for instance.

[1]https://csrda.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/socialresearch/pr/26PressRel...

	▲	andrekandre a day ago \| parent [-]
		`> The real cause is the failure of Abenomics and the resulting weak yen` i think you are right, there is a lot of over-tourism (and from some places 'rude' tourists that are really aggravating to people) but that is also being caused by weak yen in the end... whats the saying? everything is downstream from economics?