Four Stories in One Day: Japan's Backlash Against Multicultural Policy

Why This Topic Landed in Japan

Four separate matters happened to surface on the same day, and readers read them as one.

In Iruma, Saitama, a 91-year-old woman living alone was reported missing by her son on 31 July and later found dead in woodland. A 33-year-old Vietnamese national, arrested in a separate case, is reported to have told police he entered the woman's house intending to steal. Running against it in readers' minds was a story that had been given prominent coverage around the same time: Vietnamese nationals helping to rescue an elderly woman in the Kumamoto earthquake disaster area.

Kumamoto Prefecture, meanwhile, announced it would place "multicultural coexistence promotion officers" and brief foreign residents on everyday rules, with further acceptance of foreign workers in view. The timing, while recovery from the earthquake was still under way, sharpened the response.

In Osaka, an imam from a mosque had given a class at Narutaki Elementary School in Sennan City. Asked about it, the board of education replied that the class served multicultural coexistence and the resolution of human rights issues and did not violate the constitution. The sharper objection was that footage of the class was published on a TikTok channel that regularly posts sermons from the mosque.

The fourth was domestic transport. Haneda's on-time departure rate for domestic flights fell from 91 percent in fiscal 2015 to 83 percent last fiscal year, a record low, and from 1 September six domestic carriers will move the baggage drop deadline from 20 minutes before departure to 30.

Key Reaction Themes

• Distrust of what gets covered — The gap between the rescue story and the criminal case was read as deliberate selection rather than news judgment.
• "Coexistence" rejected as a word — Readers reached repeatedly for a homophone that turns coexistence into coercion.
• An argument about order, not principle — Disaster recovery and domestic labour were repeatedly named as the things that should come first.
• Where religious neutrality sits — Objections were built by comparison: would the same be allowed for other religions, and was the good side taught without the bad.
• Attribution by nationality — On the airport story, readers' first explanation for the delays was foreign passengers.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

The Saitama killing and how it was covered

The suspect's nationality and the contrast with a rescue story running at the same time were argued together.

Sources: NHK ONE

Comments:

• "I had no idea at all. Information manipulation is terrifying."
• "There are far more dangerous ones than there are good Vietnamese, so they should all go home to their country. Ah, and not just Vietnam, other countries too."
• "But the Japanese are at fault too, you know."
• "The person who was rescued would probably have been rescued even without the technical intern trainees. The person who was harmed would not have been harmed if the technical intern trainees weren't here."
• "This is exactly why television has become a degraded version of video sites and social media."
• "It ends up creating the impression that Vietnamese people never do anything decent, because of a handful of criminals."
• "Why does the old media help promote immigration?"
• "Among Vietnamese there are good people and bad people. In the media there is nothing but garbage."
• "Why don't they report foreign criminals? I think it's simply the movement of money. The companies that sponsor the media want labour, and the government can't speak firmly either, because it can see Japan ending without labour. As for the government, I feel Japan's low voter turnout is showing up in full force."
• "Well obviously cheerful news is preferable, and it's not as though they haven't reported it at all."

Kumamoto's multicultural coexistence officers

Announced while earthquake recovery was still under way, the plan drew a fight about priorities.

Sources: Yahoo! news, 2ch

Comments:

• "This is hopeless. I'm stopping my donations."
• "We can't coexist with people who aren't prosecuted even when they commit crimes."
• "This is no time to be doing that. Are these people out of their minds?"
• "So for the locals it's multicultural coercion?" [Translator's note: "coexistence" and "coercion" are homophones in Japanese, both read kyosei.]
• "They just want workers, lol"
• "Before anything like that, put support for the people suffering from the disaster first."
• "Social burdens such as crime and accidents are not taken into account. The pain is dumped wholesale on residents."
• "> serious labour shortages across the industries in the prefecture — does that mean there are no healthy unemployed people in Kumamoto?"
• "This isn't something to be doing at a time of earthquake disaster."
• "Promotion of an other-culture-coercion society." [Translator's note: another play on "multicultural coexistence," with the characters swapped to read "other-culture coercion."]

A mosque imam's class at an Osaka primary school

Religious neutrality in public education was argued head-on, with a defence of Islam among the replies.

Comments:

• "Obviously it's not acceptable."
• "No, don't do it in Japan. Do it in your own country."
• "Oh great, it's begun. Cultural invasion. The beginning of the end."
• "Think what would happen if, say, Aum Shinrikyo or Soka Gakkai started doing this. There's no room for debate, is there."
• "In Japan politics and religion are allowed to be in bed together, so this much is no problem, surely."
• "You Japanese misunderstand Islam and speak of it with nothing but prejudice. Allah is merciful, the one God who shows the right path, and the Prophet Muhammad was sent to guide people toward good. To learn those teachings, to listen to the words of the imam, to keep the Sharia and live sincerely — that is the right path for a human being. Cast off prejudice and arrogance toward religion and ethnicity, admit your own faults, and face the truth. Believe in Allah, repent, and pile up good deeds..."
• "They only do the 'wonderful parts' and don't teach the 'not wonderful parts,' so it's unfair."
• "If you're going to do this you'd have to do the same for every religion or it doesn't hold together, which is exactly why it shouldn't be done at school."
• "Why not follow it up with a class on the bad parts of Islam?"
• "Did they do Buddhism and Christianity too? Or only Islam? That changes the discussion as well."

Haneda brings its baggage deadline forward

Readers answered a story about on-time performance by naming foreign passengers.

Sources: NHK ONE

Comments:

• "Well, it's mostly foreigners' fault."
• "It's the same with anything: some people don't keep the rules (no morals), things get stricter, and the burden falls on the ordinary majority."
• "Leave the idiots behind. That's what they do overseas."
• "I bet they say 'in my home country this much is no problem.'"
• "Poor Japanese people really are useless."
• "For Diamond-status me there is no such concept as being late. If anything I'm always in the airport two hours early 😎"
• "International flights have a higher standard of passenger, so this doesn't happen there."
• "Unlike Japan, there are plenty of countries where the trains running late is taken for granted. People who don't fly much often have a skewed sense of it."
• "The root problem is that the booking shows the departure time. Show the boarding time instead."
• "Even if you spend the money you can't add runways. Think how many problems there have already been just securing land for airports. Well, they're probably just fools, but it comes down to customers arriving on time, and people really do keep saying that…"