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.
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