arichardsmith

The number of times I (white, living in Japan) have raised concerns about anti-foreigner sentiment, only to be told “they’re not talking about people like you”, would beg to differ.

My concern with these rules is that they don’t seem likely to address the issues at hand, but they do legitimise a rising xenophobic sentiment.

From what I see, the main drivers of negative sentiment towards foreigners are poorly behaved tourists, investors developing land and municipal issues with short-term residents. Being stricter on long-term workers addresses none of these. I live in Hokkaido and travel to many rural parts of Japan for work, so my experience will differ from someone living in Tokyo. However, I feel the other issues are blown out of proportion to fan the flames.

Requiring permanent residents to maintain an above-average annual income (¥5.9 million) favours people who settle in Tokyo, where the average is ¥6.8 million, over Aomori, where it is ¥4.8 million. This works against using immigration to help repopulate rural areas.

But maybe they just want short-term workers? That seems fundamentally at odds with expecting immigrants to integrate and contribute to society. It is a commitment to learn the language, put down roots in a community and pay into social system. The benefits of which you only see years if not decades later. It’s difficult to expect that when your future in the country is deliberately temporary and uncertain.

I know people who have been here for decades and built businesses who may now have to leave. There was a good example in the news of a Nepalese restaurant that had been in business for over 10 years, whose owner was facing the possibility that his Business Manager visa wouldn’t be renewed under the new investment requirements. Someone who spends years building a business, paying taxes and serving the local community may be pushed out, while a wealthy overseas investor can drop some money into a property investment and get a visa without having paid any tax here. Who thought that one through?

It makes me feel that long-term residents are being targeted because we’re an easy target, rather than because these measures address the causes of the backlash. That erodes trust. The cost of my visa has gone up 10x while my income hasn’t changed; how can I trust they won’t add more arbitrary rules? Remember, this is the same LDP whose leader 10 years ago said, “Japan will become a country where permanent residency can be obtained at one of the fastest speeds in the world.” What changed?

The blast radius is also limited by the fact 3/5 require remote functions to be enabled, which is still marked "experimental". Then 1 more uses hydratable, which is only relevant when using async mode, which is also behind an "experimental" flag.

As someone who is in the midst of migrating from Svelte 4 to Svelte 5, I definitely feel the pain of syntax changes. However, I'd argue that `on:change` -> `onchange` isn't frivolous.

A real world example: in Svelte 4, I had a custom input component that wrapped an <input> element. To be able to do `<MyInput on:change={callback} />` took a bunch of event forwarding boiler plate (or magic `on:change` syntax to forward that one event). When I wanted to also forward blur events I had to go through the same process. Now in Svelte 5 I can just use `const { foo, ...rest } = $props()` then spread with `<input {..rest}>` and I get all events forwarded for free.

They could have kept the original `on:change` syntax, but that would have made property access more painful (who wants to call `rest['on:change']`?) and would have broken all my other components that I haven't migrated yet.

The same goes for slots to snippets. Being able to pass snippets around like props has allowed me to simplify tons of components where slots were limiting.

As a solo dev working part time on a Javascript project, I definitely hate some of the ecosystem churn, but this is one refactor I'm happy to do, and I'd say the same about most of the Svelte 5 changes.

I heard anecdotaly from someone who worked at Rakuten that the shift to English caused issues in meetings, not because of language problems but because English doesn't designate social structure like Japanese.

In Japanese, you conjugate verbs differently depending on if the person is more or less senior than you, as well as other language changes. Apparently when they switched to English it caused people to take offense that lower people were being rude. Also, people also struggled to identify who was at what level, something that is super easy listening in to a Japanese conversation.

Not sure how involved the person I heard this from was, but it makes a good story!

My personal experience having lived here for 8 years (not in a city and not in the tech industry), is you are quickly "welcomed" but to "integrate" takes a long time, if ever, and involves changing a lot of your own behavior. Many of my friends who have lived here much longer than me have the same experience.

Most of us quickly made casual friends as you described, but are yet to make many close friends. As for integrating into society, most of us found society quick to help and welcome us, but struggled to move on from "the foreigner that needs help and teaching" to "the person with ideas and opinions as valid as an equivalent Japanese person", this is irrespective of Japanese ability.

Perhaps that is why many people says it's difficult to integrate, what we immigrants want from integration and what Japanese society wants from integrated immigrants is fundamentaly different.