Immigration to Japan

According to the Japanese Ministry of Justice, the number of foreign residents in Japan has steadily increased in the post Second World War period, and the number of foreign residents (excluding illegal immigrants and short-term foreign visitors and tourists staying less than 90 days in Japan) was more than 2.23 million at the end of 2015. With an estimated population of 127.11 million in 2015 the resident foreign population in Japan amounts to approximately 1.75% of the total population.

Due to geographic remoteness, and periods of self-imposed isolation, the immigration, cultural assimilation and integration of foreign nationals into mainstream Japanese society has been comparatively limited. Historian Yukiko Koshiro has identified three historically significant waves of immigration prior to 1945; the 8th century settlement of Korean artists and intellectuals; the asylum offered to a small number of Chinese families in the 1600s; and the forced immigration of up to 670,000 Korean and Chinese laborers during the Second World War.

After 1945, unlike the Gastarbeiter immigration encouraged in advanced industrial economies such as Germany, Japan was for the greater part able to rely on internal pools of rural labour to satisfy the manpower needs of industry. The demands of small business owners and demographic shifts in the late 1980's however gave rise for a limited period to a wave of tacitly accepted illegal immigration from countries as diverse as the Philippines and Iran.

Production offshoring in the 1980s also enabled Japanese firms in some labour intensive industries such as electronic goods manufacture and vehicle assembly to reduce their dependence on imported labour. In 1990, new government legislation provided South Americans of Japanese ancestry such as Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Peruvians with preferential working visa immigration status. By 1998, there were 222,217 Brazilian nationals registered as resident in Japan with additional smaller groups from Peru and Argentina. In 2009, with economic conditions less favorable, this trend was reversed as the Japanese government introduced a new programme that would incentivise Brazilian and other Latin American immigrants to return home with a stipend of $3000 for airfare and $2000 for each dependent.

...
Wikipedia