One of the two women that Japan’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has appointed to her cabinet is Kimi Onoda, who will be in charge of promoting “orderly coexistence with foreigners.” Onoda, who was born in the U.S. to a Japanese mother and an American father, has adopted as the motto of her ad hoc portfolio “Zero Illegal Foreigners,” which means she will work to deport any non-Japanese person who is in Japan without authorized permission to be here. 

As anyone who has read a Japanese newspaper or watched a Japanese newscast since the campaign for the Upper House election last summer knows, foreigners in Japan has been the issue du jour, whether the foreigners are tourists or de facto residents. The reason is the ascendancy of Sanseito, whose campaign slogan was “Japanese first,” implying that they would work to regain the primacy of native people in a country where foreigners have supposedly been granted special privileges. Some of these privileges could more accurately be described as loopholes that a small subset of foreigners have indeed taken advantage of, but for the most part Sanseito’s campaign fed off the latent anxiety across the population, which was caused by the huge influx of foreign tourists over the past few years, a situation that has been exacerbated by uniformly negative media coverage, mainly about rude foreign tourists. This anxiety was seized upon by anti-foreigner elements who wish to curb the introduction of low-paid foreign workers to make up for acute labor shortages and deport people who came to Japan to escape persecution in their own countries. Misleading news stories were reposted ad nauseum through social media, much of it by Russian bots, about problems caused by foreigners and government programs that were believed to be encouraging immigration though they did not, such as the long-standing hometown exchange program devised by the Japan International Cooperation Agency to promote cooperation between Japanese municipalities and places in Africa. But the ruling Liberal Democratic Party did not clear up the misinformation and, in fact, adopted the Sanseito credo as its own after the upstart party performed better than expected in the election, believing that it reflected the sentiments of the people. Newly enlightened members of the public who came out vociferously against Japan’s immigration policy did not realize that, in fact, there is no immigration policy. If anything, immigration became stricter two years ago when the LDP revised the relevant law. 

An article in the Oct. 10 Asahi Shimbun discussed the Zero Illegal Foreigners plan, which started in May after Sanseito’s campaign demonstrated real forward momentum. Deportations have indeed increased in the subsequent three months, though not anywhere near the levels achieved by the current Trump campaign in the U.S. to deport undocumented foreigners. From June through August, 119 foreign nationals, accompanied by immigration agents, were deported from Japan, all of it paid for by the state. During the same period in 2024, 58 foreign nationals were deported. By nationality, the June-August 2025 deportations included 34 Turks, 17 Sri Lankans, 14 Filipinos, and 10 Chinese. Thirty percent of these people had applied for refugee status, thus marking a significant change from the past, when deportations could not be carried out while a decision on refugee status was pending. Two years ago the government revised the Immigration Law to allow deportation after 3 unsuccessful bids for asylum even if a new application had been submitted. An applicant can also be deported if they have been found guilty of a crime. During the entire first year after the revision went into effect, a total of 25 people whose applications were still pending were deported, whereas 36 whose applications were still pending were deported between June and August of this year. 

The push to prevent undocumented foreigners from staying in Japan is not necessarily new. Asahi reports that during the first six months of 2025, there were about 71,200 irregular residents recorded, which is 3,600 less than the number recorded in the last six months of 2024. It should be noted that in the 1990s, there was an average of 300,000 irregular residents a year. The decrease over time, however, was not just due to crackdowns on these foreigners, but an increase in the issuance of “special residence permits.” Currently, the nationality that dominates irregular residents is Vietnamese, who mostly come to Japan as so-called technical trainees, followed by Thais. Asahi notes that when the government or media refer to “illegal foreigners,” the term encompasses not only people whose visas are no longer valid, but also refugees whose applications for asylum have been turned down and persons who have been “smuggled” into Japan. That’s why foreigner support groups prefer the term “irregular resident” to “overstayer,” since the latter emphasizes illegality. 

Of all irregular residents, Kurds from Turkey, many of whom live in Saitama Prefecture, have probably received the most media attention. Asahi says that deportations of Kurds have picked up since the Zero policy went into effect, a development that seems more symbolic than anything else given that, compared to other nationalities, there aren’t that many Kurds here in the first place, but the press has continually pointed to “friction” between Kurds and locals in Saitama, so deporting Kurds has more benefit to the government in terms of showing the public that they’re doing something, even when that something involves breaking up families. Asahi described a 41-year-old Kurdish asylum seeker who had been released on a temporary basis conditional on his reporting to immigration every three months. One day he went to immigration for his mandatory check and didn’t come home. His wife and three children, all of whom have visas, found out he’d been deported the next day. The family is thinking of following him back to Turkey, where he faces persecution for political activities, but all of his children know no country other than Japan, since they grew up here. 

The Japan Bar Association has called the Zero Illegal Foreigners plan a violation of international law, since it denies the rights of non-Japanese who pose no threat to the safety and security of the Japanese people. The policy effectively cultivates the “incorrect perception that irregular foreign residents upset the social order” and thus leads to discrimination. The Japan Association for Refugees says that the Japanese government does not properly recognize refugees and does not protect them in accordance with international laws that Japan has pledged to uphold. Japan receives the lowest number of refugees of all the major industrial countries, no more than double digits every year. In word it says it accepts refugees, but in deed it does not. One famous lawyer has repeatedly pointed out that immigration authorities reach judgments about asylum by only checking documents. They almost never interview the refugees themselves, thus revealing the authorities’ true intentions. Given that the government obviously believes the Japanese public does not want foreigners, it would seem more honest to say simply and clearly that Japan does not accept refugees, but for some reason they refuse to make such a statement, and thus persecuted people from other countries continue to come to Japan with the hope of gaining asylum.

In a sense, the same goes for foreigners who come to Japan to work temporarily. Their labor is welcome, but they are not, because they don’t have a chance to gain residence. Japan is not the only country in the world with an incoherent immigration policy—the United States’ has been famously broken for years—but it doesn’t get discussed much by those in power. 

Last summer, after the Upper House election, writer and activist Karin Amamiya wrote on the online Magazine 9 about Sanseito’s effect on Japanese politics. She said that the conventional opposition parties, in particular the Consitutional Democratic Party of Japan, did not take full advantage of the public’s disillusionment with the ruling LDP as a result of money scandals and the party’s involvement with the Unification Church. Sanseito filled the resulting vacuum. As someone who writes extensively about the poor and other marginalized communities in Japan, Amamiya saw the Japanese First campaign as being inherently discriminatory, even if the average person sees it being perfectly justified. She herself used to work in the so-called water trade, meaning the entertainment world of bar hostesses and sex workers, and she and her colleagues were looked down upon by the general public, including feminists. The experience taught her how discrimination works, and she perceives it now in the accepted attitude toward foreigners “who are seen as not following rules.” She mentions one LDP politician from Saitama who toured the enclaves of Kurdish residents and then said publicly he didn’t want to “coexist” with “foreigners who cannot maintain social order.” 

Thanks to Sanseito, the public has become “politicized” about immigration, says Amamiya. Yasumichi Noma, the activist host of the web program No Hate TV, recently visited Niigata Prefecture to cover a demonstration by people who were demanding that the government crack down on “illegal foreigners.” He was shocked when none of the demonstrators knew who he was. This was not a case of self-aggrandizement on Noma’s part. He has covered many such demonstrations over the years and they are usually populated by hard right-wing types who know exactly who Noma is. These demonstrators were, in contrast, people who have never been active in such a way before, meaning Sanseito has stirred the inchoate resentments that many people feel toward foreigners. 

In another article in Magazine 9 that appeared Oct. 1, Amamiya wrote about how social media was now filled with female influencers who once wrote about things like fashion and diet plans. They now almost exclusively wrote about foreign tourists, and in a uniformly negative way. They said foreigners were arrogant and characterized the inbound rush as an “invasion.” These women, she said, had never expressed any political interests in the past, but were now obsessed with one Chinese landlord in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, who had raised rents by 150 percent in order to force out tenants so that he could convert his rental units to AirBnB apartments. These were the people who threw their support behind Sanseito, and the conversion, as she said, was incredibly fast. 

“No one was talking about problem foreigners in May,” wrote Amamiya. “But by the election it had become the number one issue.” The LDP, which knew it was in trouble with voters, picked up the issue as if it was their own, and, in a sense, it was. They just hadn’t been as blatant about it before.