Professor's 'Just Naturalize Them' Immigration Fix Sets Off a Sharp Backlash in Japan

Why This Topic Landed in Japan

Kondo's framing — "if the foreigner ratio is the problem, naturalize people and the ratio goes down" — is the kind of statistical argument that registers as cynical rather than reassuring to Japanese audiences already nervous about immigration. The fact that the speaker is a tenured law professor and a member of the Immigration Services Agency's advisory panel made it easy to fold into a familiar online frame: "the experts inside the system are the ones dismantling the country." A separate point of friction reactivated quickly — Kondo's past public comments in the wake of a Vietnamese national killing a Japanese woman — and Japanese users used both data points to argue the position is ideological, not technocratic.

Key Reaction Themes

• "Origin laundering" analogy — Multiple users land on the same image: "Putting a Japan label on Chinese goods doesn't make it Japan-made; that's product-origin fraud." It's used to reject the argument as a statistical sleight rather than a real integration policy.
• European migration as the cautionary case — Commenters cite Europe's social-integration struggles to argue that following the same naturalization-heavy playbook is "deliberate self-sabotage," not policy learning.
• Citizenship as something not for sale — Phrases like "citizenship clearance sale" and dismissive labels like "so-called migration expert" frame the conversation as a values fight, not a numbers fight.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

• "Overseas, even when 20–30% are admitted, the foreigner ratio stays around 10% — because they naturalize. Japan should learn from this and just naturalize more, so the foreigner ratio doesn't go up (smug face)."
• "When that innocent Japanese woman was killed by a Vietnamese national, this same person made a public comment. That comment chilled me to the bone."
• "Knowing the chaos in today's Europe and still saying this — at this point it's deliberate. The moment ex-foreigners increased, those countries went off a cliff, and we know it."
• "People like this end up inside government and administration, and break Japan from inside."
• "'Put a Japan label on Chinese goods and it becomes domestic.' That's literally origin laundering. That's fraud."
• "This solves nothing."
• "Some screws are loose in this guy's head."
• "Bargain-basement sale of citizenship."
• "Yeah, arrest the spies."
• "Immigration policy 'expert' (laughs)."
• "Even with citizenship, a foreigner is a foreigner. What is this guy on about."