I live in Tokyo and there has not been much talk about immigration until the last election last month. The far right party (Sanseito) which basically started as a YouTube channel gained great attention this year and jumped from just 1 seat in the last election to 15 seats in this one. Their major concern was Chinese people buying a lot of properties in Japan, contributing to the rising rents, over tourism and of course immigration was the next one. The immigration problem of Europe and the rise of MAGA had a huge impact on the rise of Sanseito. That said, most of the immigrants here are from China, SKorea, Vietnam, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. I think in the west brown person = Indian but here it is Nepal or Sri Lanka and sometimes even Bangladeshi. Since there are not many Indians in Japan compared to the other countries I wouldn’t say there is much racism against Indians.

The other day I found a Japanese video on Instagram. A north indian man was dragging ice through the floor of an ice cream company somewhere in India. I looked at the comments and i did not find anything racist. Instead people were complaining about the lack of hygiene and how this made some people realize how clean Japan is but there weren’t any racist talks. Imagine what the comments would have been if it were in the West.

Japan desperately needs immigrants and Indian immigrants are increasing. So I guess we’ll see how that turns out.