Why This Topic Landed in Japan

The expansion of foreign intake in Japan is a live domestic argument, and European migration stories are habitually read as a preview of where Japan is heading, so a border scene at this scale travelled fast. Two things drove it further than the previous day's reporting had. The first was scale: Spain's interior ministry put the crossings at 50,000 and the president of Ceuta at 60,000, in a city of roughly 84,000 residents, with the military and police deployed. The second was footage of people swimming in, which conveyed the numbers in a way a figure could not. By the end of 31 July, more than 48,000 of them had already returned to Morocco.

Two details kept correcting the discussion as it went. Ceuta is not an island but a Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast, bordering Morocco by land, and readers worked this out among themselves as the thread went on. And a stabbing of a local resident circulated as part of this story without appearing in reporting on these crossings; the attack in Ceuta that reporting does describe dates from February. What the threads settled on instead was a court ruling to the effect that migrants who swim ashore cannot be removed — a courts-against-policy frame that maps cleanly onto Japanese arguments — and the reassurance, repeated in several forms, that the sea around Japan is wider than the strip of water at Ceuta.

Key Reaction Themes

  • Scale first, then film references — The footage was described through disaster and zombie cinema, with the crowd read as a single mass rather than as individuals.
  • The judiciary as the culprit — The ruling that people who swim across cannot be removed drew more anger than the crossing itself, and was described as a precedent that will be near-impossible to undo.
  • Measuring Japan against it — Readers reached immediately for Japan's own numbers and geography: the annual rise in foreign residents, and the width of the Tsushima Strait as an accidental defence.
  • Correcting the map — A running thread of readers established that Ceuta sits on the African continent, and that a strait swim of tens of thousands was never what happened.
  • Old empires, old debts — A counter-current argued that Spain's colonial record, its handling of Western Sahara and the unresolved question of Gibraltar make the country a poor candidate for sympathy.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

The footage of people crossing by sea

Shock at the scale ran straight into predictions about Japan.

Comments:

  • "It's literally World War Z www"
  • "This is a war of invasion, surely."
  • "What's with the timing?"
  • "For the people who actually live there this can only be terrifying."
  • "Don't run abroad just because you hate your own country. Bring down your own government instead. At the risk of your life, obviously."
  • "Japan's not-so-distant future."
  • "It's plain illegal entry. Throw every one of them back."
  • "Seeing people say 'Japan has too many immigrants!' starts to feel funny. The real thing is on another level."
  • "Amazing that this many come across the sea. There's no telling how big a syndicate the brokers on both sides have built. Japan has dodgy companies by the truckload too, but it would never come to this."
  • "Why are there only men in the video of the moment they enter? Is the plan to go through the immigration process and then bring the rest of the family over?"

Working out what Ceuta actually is

The thread corrected its own geography as it went.

Sources: 2ch

Comments:

  • "Scary."
  • "Lucky Japan's an island country."
  • "That said, Japan's foreign population goes up by 400,000 a year too. Not illegal immigrants, though."
  • "I clicked expecting Africans and they're just white."
  • "'Illegal immigrant' is too gentle a word. They're just criminals."
  • "Morocco is a perfectly decent country, so why? If this is allowed I want to emigrate from Japan to Spain too."
  • "Ceuta is on the African continent side, you know."
  • "So there's a Spanish exclave called Ceuta on the African continent. First I've heard of it. Obviously tens of thousands can't swim across the strait."
  • "They're coming with nothing, right? How are they going to live?"
  • "Looking at a map, it's Spanish territory sitting in Morocco. There can't be any pure Spaniards there."

The fence, the troops and the court ruling

The judiciary took most of the blame.

Sources: Sankei, 2ch

Comments:

  • "The Reconquista, again."
  • "It'll be worth watching what they do if Islam reoccupies the place."
  • "You could shoot a zombie film with this?"
  • "The court rules that migrants who swim across can't be removed, and this is exactly what you get. Are judges idiots in every country?"
  • "Come by boat to near the shore, swim a bit, and you're safe."
  • "The men go in first and call the family over afterwards."
  • "Even with South Korea being close, it's 50km between Tsushima and Busan, and the Genkai Sea gets rough, so a small boat won't easily make it. Japan is fortunate."
  • "Just expel the migrants — isn't that fine? What's the problem?"
  • "The Spanish courts went and made it legal."
  • "Once a supreme court precedent is set it won't be easily overturned… incompetence in the judiciary is a terrifying thing."

More than 48,000 of the 60,000 return

The follow-up figure landed in the middle of the argument.

Sources: 2ch

Comments:

  • "What happened?"
  • "I assume every Harvard-graduate, highly educated On-J poster understands this, but Ceuta is on the African continent, so they didn't swim across the Mediterranean." [Translator's note: "On-J" is a self-mocking label for posters from a 2channel board; the Harvard line is sarcasm.]
  • "Spain went around invading all sorts of countries back in the day, so this is just revenge, isn't it."
  • "In the New York Times it's the people opposing immigration who are getting hammered lol"
  • "They're not black."
  • "People around there are racially white, after all."
  • "Morocco's political system is unstable or something, is that it?"
  • "There's a problem on the Spanish side too, for leaving Western Sahara alone."
  • "But the real fault is that Britain took Gibraltar and won't give it back, so Spain can't get its proper national strength back."