TOKYO, Sept. 24, 2024—As they have successfully executed in forcing the world to rely on Chinese-made solar panels and now weighing on doing the same on EV batteries, the Chinese have been building intra-Japan communities in Japan where Japanese are unwelcome, the Japanese language need not be spoken and everything is completed by China hands.
That’s hardly a surprise given that more than 820,000 Chinese – one-third of all ‘official’ registered foreigners – were registered with the Japanese immigration office as of the end of 2023 as the number continues to bloat. Kei Nakajima’s book, titled the ‘China inside Japan (Nihon-no nakano Chuugoku)’ describes how the Chinese have achieved the iron-strong intra-Chinese communities that offer all conceivable services and generate enviable mounds of income.
The Chinese population – 820,000 – is a formidable number exceeding those of several Japanese provinces such as Yamanashi (803,000) and Sago (801,000). By province, Tokyo has the largest number of Chinese residents followed by the neighboring provinces of Saitama and Kanagawa. In most provinces, Chinese residents began growing visibly after 2000.
The Japanese government has been implementing more stringent immigration controls on Chinese people than for other nationalities, yet that does not deter the Chinese to enter Japan: They arrive for ‘permanent residency’ as relatives of resident Chinese, ‘academic learning’ at Japanese schools, engineers and other skilled ‘for contributing to Japanese society,’ according to Nakajima.
Those jobs can range widely, mostly far from the images of wearing spiffy clothes in neat offices and instead metal and other industrial recycling, construction, and varieties of other ‘dirty’ work that young Japanese shun, plus of course Chinese restaurants. More recently, they are expanding into tourism, hotels and other hospitality businesses for Chinese tourists visiting Japan – where Japanese language is hardly spoken.
In other words, many of the 820,000 Chinese residents are building intra-Chinese circular economy structures where almost everything is procured from Chinese suppliers to make ends meet without relying on Japanese transactions.
Rich Chinese visitors to Japan often buy old, decaying Japanese old and historic accommodation facilities for almost nothing and then invest to reform them as hotels and inns for incoming Chinese tourists. They are doing exactly that in Kyoto and other famous tourist spots.
In the past, local Japanese would object to selling historic facilities, but now such voices are rarely heard. Residents are getting too old to take action, and municipal office bureaucrats also do not want to stand in the way of foreign acquisitions that give them much-needed tax revenues.
So, it’s a win-win, anything goes for the Chinese situation. In fact, the Chinese now are operating Uber-like taxi services without Japanese transport ministry registration but the Japanese government is giving a blind eye to it because of worsening taxi driver shortages.
International and language schools have become an easy-to-apply visas avenues for the Chinese. In a matter of several years, many of those schools’ Chinese enrollment skyrocketed. Over the next decade, the Chinese population may double, no matter how tense the Japan-China relationship becomes, analysts said.
###