Japan eyes adding Japanese proficiency to permanent residency requirements

https://lemmy.world/post/40402240

Japan eyes adding Japanese proficiency to permanent residency requirements - Lemmy.World

Lemmy

The double standard is funny. If the US or UK did something like this, we’d (rightly) consider it xenophobic and condemn it. But with Japan, we’re like “Yes! You must secure the existence of your people and a future for Japanese children!”
It is about learning the language of the country if you’d like to stay with no restrictions. There’s plenty of other crap in Japan you can call Xenophobic, but being at a minimum proficiency with the local language of a country you’d like to live in for an indeterminate amount of time is not it.
While this is generally a pretty reasonable ask in most situations, it seems like now is the worst possible time for them to make immigration more difficult. The coming demographic collapse is not a question of “if,” but “how bad,” at this point. Even if their birth rate proportionally climbs to the highest in the world magically over night, they are still looking at severe issues, and now many of those new births will still be dependants when it happens. They should really be incentivising immigration as hard as they can to take the edge off of what is coming at this point.
Sure, you are probably right about that. But I never argued against that, I just disagree that this a prime example of Japanese xenophobia.