<story><title>Japan has changed in important and visible ways</title><url>https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed-a-lot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deepGem</author><text>So Indians are on the top of the emigration food chain and I wonder why Japan is not one of our top destinations.&lt;p&gt;There are like 50K Indians in Japan, mostly Tokyo. This is a surprisingly low number. Sure there is the language barrier but that barrier holds true for Germany also which has a lot more Indians.&lt;p&gt;My hunch is education - Japan does not have too many universities to attract young talent, as compared to Germany, Australia or the UK. I&amp;#x27;m not sure if this is by design or if there are some other factors at play.&lt;p&gt;If Japan built a lot more universities and made it easier and relatively affordable for foreign students to sign up with English classes etc, perhaps there will be a lot more immigrants from countries such as India, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.</text></item><item><author>willbudd</author><text>As far as I know, naturalization only involves a basic language test at around the level of N3; which should be very easy if you picked up any Japanese at all during the years spent living in the country.&lt;p&gt;The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent residency status.&lt;p&gt;1) Citizenship is needed in order to vote. Important for the health of any democracy; but in a country where it seems to be LDP all day every day anyway, immigrants can hardly be faulted much for not placing much value on this aspect.&lt;p&gt;2) For Americans, Japanese citizenship allows them to revoke their American citizenship, in order to avoid double taxation. (Not an issue for other nationalities, where the ludicrous concept of double taxation doesn&amp;#x27;t apply.)&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s about it as far as I can think of. Add to that the fact that Japan doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize dual citizenship, it&amp;#x27;s no surprise most immigrants are satisfied to just stick with permanent residency.&lt;p&gt;Note that the bar for permanent residency has been lowered in recent years, making it more easily attainable than an equivalent status in most other industrial nations.</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.&lt;p&gt;I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try. Everything I&amp;#x27;ve read about Japan has stated that the overall culture is &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people, even to many mixed-race people of Japanese descent (e.g. from Brazil).&lt;p&gt;Having a culture that just says &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re happy to have you work here for a while, but you&amp;#x27;ll never really belong here&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t really a good sign for long-term integration.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rippercushions</author><text>For Indian migrants, Japan is not nearly as attractive as the US, Canada, Australia etc.  Wages particularly in engineering&amp;#x2F;IT are comparatively low, working conditions are tough, the language is difficult, and Japanese society is known for being xenophobic. Politely so, for most part, but still: you might not get beaten up, but neither nor your children will you ever be accepted as Japanese.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s no coincidence that the biggest groups of immigrants to Japan are the Chinese and Vietnamese, who have a leg up on the language (Chinese characters for the Chinese, obviously, but Vietnamese has a lot of Chinese loans shared with Japanese too) and blend in better in terms of physical appearance and culture.</text></comment>
<story><title>Japan has changed in important and visible ways</title><url>https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed-a-lot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deepGem</author><text>So Indians are on the top of the emigration food chain and I wonder why Japan is not one of our top destinations.&lt;p&gt;There are like 50K Indians in Japan, mostly Tokyo. This is a surprisingly low number. Sure there is the language barrier but that barrier holds true for Germany also which has a lot more Indians.&lt;p&gt;My hunch is education - Japan does not have too many universities to attract young talent, as compared to Germany, Australia or the UK. I&amp;#x27;m not sure if this is by design or if there are some other factors at play.&lt;p&gt;If Japan built a lot more universities and made it easier and relatively affordable for foreign students to sign up with English classes etc, perhaps there will be a lot more immigrants from countries such as India, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.</text></item><item><author>willbudd</author><text>As far as I know, naturalization only involves a basic language test at around the level of N3; which should be very easy if you picked up any Japanese at all during the years spent living in the country.&lt;p&gt;The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent residency status.&lt;p&gt;1) Citizenship is needed in order to vote. Important for the health of any democracy; but in a country where it seems to be LDP all day every day anyway, immigrants can hardly be faulted much for not placing much value on this aspect.&lt;p&gt;2) For Americans, Japanese citizenship allows them to revoke their American citizenship, in order to avoid double taxation. (Not an issue for other nationalities, where the ludicrous concept of double taxation doesn&amp;#x27;t apply.)&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s about it as far as I can think of. Add to that the fact that Japan doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize dual citizenship, it&amp;#x27;s no surprise most immigrants are satisfied to just stick with permanent residency.&lt;p&gt;Note that the bar for permanent residency has been lowered in recent years, making it more easily attainable than an equivalent status in most other industrial nations.</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.&lt;p&gt;I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try. Everything I&amp;#x27;ve read about Japan has stated that the overall culture is &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people, even to many mixed-race people of Japanese descent (e.g. from Brazil).&lt;p&gt;Having a culture that just says &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re happy to have you work here for a while, but you&amp;#x27;ll never really belong here&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t really a good sign for long-term integration.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>solidsnack9000</author><text>Both India and Germany have much stronger cultures of English usage than Japan -- and Australia and the UK are English speaking countries. Educated Indians learn to use English in a business setting, but this is not really as useful in Japan; and German has a lot more common with English (and with the many Indo-European languages, like Hindi and Sanskrit, that are familiar to people in India even when they are not their spoken language) than Japanese has with either language.</text></comment>