As someone living in Taiwan, can I set up an LLC and get all the benefits of it?
I now have a Singapore entity that helps me out for getting a Stripe account mainly.
Extreme tourism influx due to covid rebound and weak yen. And most Japanese people not being observant enough to understand that those foreigners causing trouble (or simply just putting pressure on existing infrastructure) is not the residents but shitty tourists.
Most of the issue they have would be reduced if the yen got stronger or they introduced some expensive tourist fee, but that's very unlikely
Most people in any nation aren't observant enough, without exception. Since it's the Japanese people whose opinion counts here, it's their turn right now to be called out for it.
This is the actual answer but too many people are invested in their own narratives to see it.
When you visit someone's country you are not just a guest, you are the model for everyone else who comes from where you do and who looks like you do. The assumption is that how you behave is how others from where you came from will behave. In an age where social media exposes everyone all the time, bad behavior gets seen and shown to others and conclusions drawn based on that behavior.
But rather than admit that this is a thing which exists, others just want to press tired arguments about race and racism. Which even if true, who cares? It's their country. They're allowed to welcome or decline anyone they wish. How arrogant are we really to think that we can dictate who and what others allow in their homes?
You know, Johnny Somali fled Japan, went to South Korea, tried the same shit, got arrested and is now in South Korean prison. I think it briefly made news but nowadays I doubt most people remember him.
If you have a functioning society and a petty criminal, you can just... arrest them. No needs for all those xenophobic drama.
Or not, I guess. After all, what am I to tell Japanese people what to expect from their own police?
Somali did much more than just disrespect, e.g. deepfake pornography of women he met, trespassing onto construction sites, throwing food in businesses.
Not sure how it's work in japan, but many of these things require a formal criminal complaint in my country and people are not used to disrespectful people.
Saying that it's the issue of a country is wrong and to simple minded.
> But rather than admit that this is a thing which exists, others just want to press tired arguments about race and racism.
It seems like your preceding paragraph argues that this racism exists, without using that specific word.
> How arrogant are we really to think that we can dictate who and what others allow in their homes?
How often do you see that, as opposed to people simply stating how they feel about who/what others allow in their homes? I’ve rarely seen the former and almost always see the latter.
I agree that pr** should be banned from Japan.
But he was used a tool against people who have nothing to do with him.
My black friends tell me that it is very hard to be taken seriously when your kin thinks that attitude is a matter of noise.
One of them told me his relationship ended with his fiance because her father was "racist" and didn't believe he was one of the most well paid engineers in the state.
Sanseito scapegoating foreigners for every problem (particularly Chinese and SE Asian), highly organized social media campaigns with a lot of help from western right wingers, nuisance video streamers exploiting the weak yen to do 'insult/abuse the locals vacations' for cheap, and a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment since the beginning of the year.
Early in Takaichi's premiership, she answered a parliamentary question about the possibility of a Chinese attack on taiwan by sying that this would present an 'existential' problem for Japan. This alarmed the Chinese who saw it as an intrusion on their private business and a reminder of Japanese war atrocities; but before they could make a restrained diplomatic complaint, a Chinese consul in (iirc) Osaka went nuts on social media telling Takaichi to pull her filthy neck in before it was chopped off. After that neither side could back down without losing face so they're stuck in a diplomatic deep freeze.
There are a lot of other structural factors I could go into but those are the major differences since 2024. Actual incidence of crime or large population shifts seem to be absent.
While Takaichi is responsible for the lack of tact in that situation, I personally blame the opposition politician that raised the question hoping to score some cheap political points when the end result couldn’t have been more obvious.
Purchasing power dropped with yen weakening, shrinkflation and inflation in all shopping categories, stagnant salaries and work policies + politicians who are preying on all of this with the "foreigners bad" rhetoric.
Large social media campaigns full of misinformation about how foreigners are all getting free fully-paid higher education, cheating welfare, and how foreigners don't pay any taxes at all, complete with AI-generated infographics showing sad japanese families handing over cash to foreigners wearing hijab.
Yeah, I've had a couple of conversations with Japanese people who were surprised to hear that I need to have a job to maintain a visa, since they think foreigners can just come here and get money from the government for doing nothing. Japan accepts very few refugees, so realistically this isn't happening to the extent that people believe. Leaving aside whether immigration is a net positive or negative, the foreign population of Japan is almost entirely working, studying (on their own dime), owning a small business* or the spouse/child of someone doing one of those things.
*While there are some reports of rich people just creating something that meets the bare-minimum requirements of a "business" to get a visa, these people are independently wealthy and not collecting welfare payments.
I don’t support xenophobia, but after visiting Japan, I can see how it happens. Foreigners are disruptive and disrespectful, often carelessly, but also often when they are trying not to be. I was really trying to be polite and respectful, and I learned some Japanese (not nearly enough), and I could tell I was bumbling at times.
It is one thing when it is one person, it is another when it is every tenth person.
I came away with more empathy for Japanese xenophobic sentiment. I was getting frustrated by rude gaijin and I was one (well I was trying really hard not to be rude).
I personally don't have a problem with xenophobia. I see it as the other side of the coin from openness to 'foreign' cultures and peoples. Both always exist in a society (opening up and shutting out) and you need both.
A people that don't have any xenophobia will have their country taken over and their culture erased. While also, a people that don't have any openness to foreign people and foreign cultures will stultify. You need both, in balance (and often that balance is shifting, in one direction or the other).
> I don’t support xenophobia […] I came away with more empathy for Japanese xenophobic sentiment
What more does supporting it entail than being sympathetic to the sentiment? You’re not Japanese, it sounds like, so being xenophobic towards non-Japanese doesn’t work in this context. Only a Japanese person could experience it.
Would it also be xenophobia, or more xenoannoyance? Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior?
> What more does supporting it entail than being sympathetic to the sentiment?
It is a bad, counterproductive impulse that will hurt their society long term, just as I think xenophobia in the US has been counterproductive.
You should also recognize that there’s a difference between the people who visit, and the people who completely restructure their lives to immigrate. And there’s a difference between immigrants who do their best to learn and integrate into the culture, and immigrants who try to impose their culture on the host nation.
Xenophobia doesn’t really jive with recognizing people as individuals and recognizing that a foreigner can learn Japanese well and follow the cultural norms (aside from the norm of having been born in Japan to Japanese parents, but only because it is impossible for a gaijin to do that).
In other words, I don’t think it’s right to broadly group immigrants into the same bucket as disrespectful tourists, but I also see on a human level how that impulse arises. The greater majority of well-behaved tourists don’t stand out like the problem-causers do.
> Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior
The “phobia” part of the word is probably confusing you, in actual usage, xenophobia encompasses dislike, “fear” is not necessary. Similar to homophobia or Islamophobia, the term includes fear _or_ dislike/hatred.
> You should also recognize that there’s a difference between the people who visit, and the people who completely restructure their lives to immigrate. And there’s a difference between immigrants who do their best to learn and integrate into the culture, and immigrants who try to impose their culture on the host nation.
Oh definitely. When it comes to rules and laws there is always some cutoff or some threshold. It's like the driving age. The laws to generalize by necessity. There is only so much of a chance there to encode "level at which a visitor learned cultural norms", a "culture quiz" etc. Those are things for a citizenship but not visitors usually. In some cases it's easy to point to a legal proceeding or complaint and say "look this person is banned, he did X,Y,Z". But then there is stuff that not documented. Like maybe someone not taking their shoes off, or speaking too loudly, or reclining their seat without asking.
> > Are the Japanese really terrified of foreigners or just annoyed at misbehavior
> The “phobia” part of the word is probably confusing you, in actual usage, xenophobia encompasses dislike, “fear” is not necessary. Similar to homophobia or Islamophobia, the term includes fear _or_ dislike/hatred.
I know, I was being pedantic on purpose to show that the words used matter. The way it's presented is as a moral transgression, Japanese not wanting foreigners to visit sort of sound the same as homophobes or islamophobes. I think it's unfair. Any country, especially one with a democratically elected government should be able to say who can come and who can't to their country.
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