Japan wants foreign talent—and then does everything possible to make foreigners leave. It’s not logical but it’s politically practical. And it’s stupid. But Japan Inc. never learns. 🧑🏻‍🔬 During COVID, Japan basically shut itself off from the non-Japanese world for two years, contributing to financial disasters and bankruptcies that companies are still dealing with. Now it has effectively passed new rules that close the country off again. In a country with some of the lowest wages in the G7, demanding that foreigners applying for permanent residency earn more than the typical Japanese worker seems unreasonable. Add stipulations such as decades of pension payments and requirements to pass a Japanese-language test at a very high proficiency level, and permanent residency becomes effectively out of reach for most people already here. So ask yourself: How many people are willing to spend 10 years of their lives living here for only a slim chance of getting permanent residency? Why learn the language? Why invest your money, time, and future in a country that makes it so difficult for you to stay? And this is happening in a country with a rapidly declining population, a rapidly growing elderly population, and a serious labor shortage. What happens when there aren’t enough foreigners willing to come here to work in nursing homes, care for the elderly, and fill the jobs that Japanese workers themselves aren’t filling? Eventually Japan will have to backtrack. But when it does, who will trust this government enough to come back and build a life here? Of course, Takaichi seems determined to imitate her manly hero, Donald Trump, who has already helped turn America into Trumpistan—a sham democracy and, in my view, an economic disaster. It’s a shame to watch Japan start down the same road and turn itself into Japanistan. It’s ass-backwards Galápagos thinking. But there we are. Read more here: 👇 tokyopaladin.substack.com/p/…

Japan just told the foreigners who built lives here, who learned the language, paid the taxes, raised the kids, buried the years — you were too slow. No permanent residency. Not because you didn’t earn it, but because it’s easier to blame 3% of the population than to answer for thirty years of decline. It’s a good short-term play. Scapegoats always poll better than self-examination. But the rot was never the foreigners — it was three decades of the LDP running the country like a family business, cronies first, everyone else an afterthought. One day the math will catch up. People will look around and ask how it all fell apart. But by then the answer will be sitting in Singapore, or Berlin, or back home — because the smart ones don’t wait around to be blamed for a mess they didn’t make. They just leave. Quietly. And they don’t come back.