Noah Smith always comes off as a very smart guy trying to mask the dark traits in his personality (or personal ideology)

The emotions he tries to express in his blog are no doubt mildly to very positive, in contrast to the stridently critical (uncooperative+nonconstructive) undertones

I'll admit, tho, rationalistic disses of Japan always get me. If you visit Tokyo often you'll notice that fashion trends are subject to hyperintense Darwinian competition (>> NYC). American trends failing to show up in Japan immediately is very much not evidence of their evolutionary fitness

>So the Sanseito backlash is still among a minority of Japanese people

Premise seems not quite right

https://youtu.be/racSKd7nv2k

In my humble opinion, any constructive blabber about JP need to mention Switzerland. They should be the ISO standard in handling both skilled and underskilled "assimilation", for a uh post-growth economy. (Norway if things are any healthier) We don't even know if immigration is all we need to stave off inflation here ;)

I thought Japan was always famously nationalist/anti-immigrant.

My understanding is that there were very few immigrants so immigration was not a political issue. Immigration has started to increase and tourism has boomed so those issues are also beginning to register in political campaigning.

I visited Japan about two years ago and was kinda shocked at the amount of foreigners (Indian, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese) working everywhere. I gathered from talking to locals that many of them work illegally.

I think it really depends on where you are. I visited Japan early last year and encountered a decent amount of foreigners when I went to the Snow Festival or when I was in Tokyo. But when I was visiting friends in Fukuoka I don't really remember seeing foreigners, and someone in an elevator seemed kind of shocked to see my wife and me. If you don't want to see foreigners, you need to stay away from Tokyo and visit the many, many other interesting places in Japan.

As someone who lived on a military base in Japan when I was a kid, the country does feel like it's changing in places. But other places that are more out of the way still feel like "home", almost unchanged from that time a couple decades ago. (sometimes literally: I visited the area around that base last year and found billboards that were exactly the same as a couple decades ago)

Hmm, the first city we visited was Fukuoka and basically all 7-11s and the other mini-market chains were staffed by foreign workers. Lots of (Asian) foreigners around the central train station as well. We saw the same in other cities as well - Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka.

It's true that once we went into the countryside there were a lot fewer foreign workers, but that is also how it is in western countries.

The ones working illegally will absolutely not be so publicly visible. They'll be doing construction, factory work, trucking, night work, etc.

I have no idea about stats of "illegal immigrants" in Japan, because that could mean working outside of your permitted work, having no or an expired residence status, etc.