Urmas Teder, journalist.
Amidst swelling electoral rhetoric and a intensifying debate over the boundaries of Japan’s foreign population, Sohei Kamiya, leader of the ultra-conservative Sanseito party, has deployed one of those inflammatory questions designed to capture cheap headlines and win the applause of misinformed spectators: By what right do foreigners use Japan’s infrastructure?
To suggest that international residents are mere “free riders” on a system built exclusively by and for the Japanese is not only technically false; it represents a display of supine stupidity and extreme malice.
Foreigners in Japan do not live in a fiscal vacuum. They pay the exact same taxes as any native-born citizen—including consumption tax, inhabitants’ tax, and income tax—but with a stark caveat: they actually pay more. On top of ordinary taxation, they must purchase the very right to reside, bearing administrative fees, visa costs, and bureaucratic hurdles that the State imposes as an exclusive toll simply for the crime of not being born here. The right to use public transport, roads, the healthcare system, or the water grid is earned through hard work, direct contribution, and the financing of public coffers that benefit handsomely from this premium levied on the immigrant population.
The great paradox that this far-right rhetoric desperate tries to conceal is that the very design and physical maintenance of the infrastructure they boast about already depends heavily on foreign labor. Japan is suffering a demographic crisis that is bleeding the country in the present tense. Faced with systemic aging and a chronic lack of generational renewal, who cleans, maintains, and operates the train stations? Who works the overnight distribution networks that keep the nation’s logistics moving? Who handles the construction and paving of the roads that Kamiya himself uses to travel to his rallies? The answer is incontestable: an ever-increasing percentage of foreign workers under programs that, ironically, the right wing is quick to exploit on the premise of “making them work temporarily and discarding them when they grow old.”
The notion of treating foreigners as a sort of invisible gear—expected to generate wealth for the country, clean up the remains, and vanish upon leaving the factory or office without ever setting foot in public space—reflects the true depth of this ideological cruelty. Human beings are not industrial supplies to be tucked away in a drawer when the shift ends.
Debating immigration management and integration is legitimate in any modern democracy. However, approaching it through the demagoguery of infrastructural exclusion merely exposes an intolerable cruelty: that for certain political factions, foreigners are viewed as mere living entities devoid of any rights, feelings, or dignity. This rhetoric is not only outrageous; it projects a deeply ugly face of Japanese society to the world, reducing it to an uncharitable caricature completely hollowed of any basic humanity. Japan in 2026 does not need invisible barriers on the asphalt that tarnish its prestige; it needs the intellectual and moral honesty to recognize that those upholding the nation, before being considered mere labor, are people.
