Double standards in travel rules reveal a distrust of foreigners
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskCut to the 21st century. Throughout the pandemic, Japan has maintained some of the tightest border controls of any democratic country. To this day, tourists are barred unless part of a group tour. Some observers are calling the government’s approach “neo-In some ways, Japan’s pandemic policies are normal for Asia, where many places took a draconian approach to keeping out the virus.
Such isolationism is a reversal of the pre-pandemic direction of travel, so to speak. Spurred by its ageing, shrinking population, Japan had been opening up. The number of tourists had grown from fewer than 7m in 2009 to more than 30m in 2019. The number of foreign students nearly doubled over the same period. The tally of foreign workers, albeit from a low base. In 2019 the Japanese government loosened laws to allow some foreigners to stay for longer.
The pandemic revived an enduring scepticism about foreigners. “Japanese conceptualised covid as something that comes from the outside,” says Oussouby Sacko, a former dean of Kyoto Seika University, who was born in Mali. The unspoken logic is that foreigners cannot be trusted to stick to the practices, from mask-wearing to silent eating, that many believe helped the country maintain the, a club of 38 mostly rich countries, despite having the highest share of old people.
The short-term political gain comes at a cost, however. Japan has already lost a cohort of foreign students, the very people who often go on to become bridge-builders between countries. Only around 11,600 managed to enter Japan in 2021, compared with some 120,000 in 2019. Foreign students stuck in limbo have protested. Some have switched to studying in countries with more open borders, such as South Korea.
The present-day isolationism serves as a reminder of why Japan needs outsiders in the first place. The country needs to quadruple the number of foreign workers by 2040 to sustain the government’s modest average growth target of 1.2%, according to a recent study by a group of Japanese think-tanks. Japanese business leaders have been among the loudest voices calling for reopening.
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