My wife and I loves Japan and we visit quite often prior to having kids. Once we had kids, the people's attitude changes towards you. Suddenly my crying kid is annoying everyone and throwing shade. Elevators and seats clearly designated for strollers is often filled to the brim and nobody getting off/out.

It's a culture of hating kids.

Fun fact. Women who have kids must give up their careers. Grandparents is culturally not allowed to help with the grand kids. Like, you pop them out, you take care of them yourself, often without even help from the father.

At any point they can start giving people a UBI and they will have the option to quit their jobs and raise a family.

The old ways of systemic slavery will not work as human societies progress, especially in our post scarcity world.

"Population crisis" is a myth, created by people who want cheap labor. What's the crisis? What's so bad about a declining population number? Spell it out!

It's also possible they are racist.

But if the choice were between racist and greedy, I'm going to bet on greedy 100% of the time.

The "Japanese First" platform sounds an awful lot like the "Asia for Asians" slogan of pre WWII imperial Japan. It's not a pretty thought but it's hard to blame them when the US is looking less and less like an ally and trading partner on the world stage.

In exit polls from the last election foreigner problems (which lumps tourists in with residents) was still only like 3rd. And for the foreigner issues, overtourism and people buying property and pricing out locals are big issues (and sometimes running (often illegal) guesthouses).

Japan's population crisis is caused by its young people being too overworked and overcharged to want to have children. Their population by age is becoming very top-heavy which means that the young are paying a lot to keep the old alive.

The solution to this (apart from don't get into such a situation) is to import young workers to even out your population spread and to raise wages in line with the cost of living and raising a family.

They appear to be shouting "Damn foreigners! Coming over here and making all our elderly live longer than we can economically support them! Overworking our breeding generation so they don't want kids! Curse those foreigners!"

Aww cmon Japan, I love you guys.. I was thinking about escaping there.

He's supported by the most exceptionally ignorant among the right-wing (whom we call 'netto-uyoku'—Internet right-wings). Many people in Japan use Xitter as their primary source of information and are being brainwashed by the xenophobic conspiracies flooding the platform. This country is over; it's actually worse than America, IMHO.

Wouldn't it be interesting as the New world order becomes a thing maybe, they shake things up and require everyone to return to whichever country their skin color matches. USA would become Native American again, and all the white people would have to go back to Europe 😄

The populist surge comes as Japan, a traditionally insular nation that values conformity and uniformity, sees a record surge of foreigners needed to bolster its shrinking workforce.

Here's your short reminder that there is no such thing as a "too small workforce".

Anti-immigrant policies, which allow populists to vent their dissatisfaction on easy targets, are appealing to more Japanese as they struggle with dwindling salaries, rising prices and bleak future outlooks.

A smaller supply of labor on the labor market means that higher prices will be paid for said labor, which means higher salaries. The decline of japanese population is a good thing for the people. Trying to "fill up" that population with foreigners is the most wrong thing anybody could do in that situation.

I fully, 100% support the japanese people with trying to uphold their own culture, their own way of life, and deal with their problems themselves. If you rely on foreigners to solve your problems, then you have already lost. In fact, you never even tried. If you have dwindling salaries and you try to fix the problem by giving away more jobs to other people, then you're stupid and shouldn't hold a ruling position. That's economics 101, not a conspiracy theory.

I mean, America has traditionally been an immigration country. 97% of people in the US today are the descendants from immigrants, so at least there i can understand that immigration seems like a historically continuous process. But japan always had little migration, both in and out. It's pissing me off that newspapers say we need to "fix" our declining birthrates. We don't need to "fix" it because it's not a problem. It's just people giving the planet a break and creating some more space for themselves. Fewer people in a country means more resources per person. That increases the resource supply and decreases the Cost of Living; which probably increases the Quality of Life.