Diplomacy and Business

Urmas Teder, journalist. Kimi Onoda’s recent remarks claiming that permanent residency in Japan grants “no rights” would already have been controversial on their own. But placed alongside the recent case of Manish Kumar -and even the ongoing controversy surrounding rugby international Lomano Lemeki- the comments become far more revealing. Together, these episodes expose a deeper anxiety inside contemporary Japan: the growing insistence that foreigners, no matter how integrated, should never be considered entirely part of the national community. Kumar, an Indian national and long-term resident of Japan, became the target of public and political scrutiny after a series of controversies…

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…

Urmas Teder, journalist. The 2026 Reporters Without Borders index confirms a broader and increasingly uncomfortable trend: press freedom is no longer a dividing line between democracies and authoritarian regimes, but a gradient that cuts across both. In this shifting landscape, Japan and Estonia stand out not because they are comparable, but precisely because they are not. One is a mature, established democracy with deep institutional continuity; the other a relatively young state that has turned digital innovation into a structural democratic asset. Japan remains positioned in the middle tier of the global ranking. Formally, it guarantees press freedom and maintains…

Urmas Teder, journalist. The 2026 World Press Freedom Index has once again drawn a quiet but consequential line between two of the world’s most advanced digital democracies: Estonia and Japan. For policymakers and investors alike, this is not merely a question of civil liberties. It is a measure of institutional credibility—and, increasingly, of economic competitiveness. Estonia’s performance is not accidental. In Tallinn, transparency is treated as infrastructure. The state’s digital architecture is built on the assumption that information must circulate, be audited and, when necessary, challenged. This approach has yielded what might be called a “transparency dividend”: a reputational premium…