The Migration Problem in Japan: A General Overview

The global migration problem has not spared Japan, one of the world’s economic leaders. The country’s leadership has to take into account many objective factors when tackling it.

The Demographic Situation Looks Increasingly Grim

However, the responsible leadership of any country cannot wait until depopulation becomes critical and is forced to respond to its negative consequences here and now. Prime Minister Kishida identified this issue in January 2023 during a speech before parliament. Meanwhile, at the level of private business, this problem had already been solved long ago in a format beneficial to business itself, i.e. without much regard for the inevitable social costs.

In particular, this refers to the rapid growth in the influx of migrants from other countries of the Indo-Pacific region – and not always legal ones. At the end of 2025, the total number of such migrants was estimated at 4 million, with Japan’s current total population being less than 125 million people. It is not only private business that is the culprit, though. The country’s leadership itself, by encouraging the influx of migrants, is trying to overcome the negative consequences of the continuous decline in births and the population’s aging over the past 45 years.

Migrants As a Factor in the Growth of Domestic Political Tension

However, the year-on-year increasing influx of people representing other cultures into a country that spent the 250-year Edo period in a state of almost complete isolation from the outside world (during which Japan’s highly specific culture actually took shape) could not help but provoke a negative reaction among the........

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