> Immigration authorities say the move is aimed at preventing cases in which foreign workers obtain visas under one category, but then engage in unrelated or lower-skilled work.

The claim appears to be that people were using up visa slots for things like interpreters or other jobs where clearly you'd need good language skills to actually do the job, including in Japanese, with the intent all along of doing some other job instead. An up-front test should let through almost all of the legitimate claimants of these visas, and stop almost all the fraudsters. Probably a lot cheaper than a similarly-effective level of after-the-fact auditing, or more-extensive checks into applicants' work situation.

[EDIT] I mean, in the framing provided by the government, the above appears to be what's going on. Governments may lie, of course.

And second - it’s really hard to participate in society if you can’t speak the language. I think this creates resentment for both Japanese citizens and foreign residents alike.

I regret not studying sooner and harder, and a clear language requirement probably would have influenced me to try harder.

Permanent residency applications are being judged incredibly strictly. Citizenship applications need 10 years of continuous residence up from 5. Business manager visas have gone from needing 5m yen of capital to 30m yen.

It seems pretty clear that the goal is to get workers in for some productive years but make the path for staying difficult. I guess that's one way to solve an aging population problem.

To put things in perspective, Japan is an island and has entry and exit controls on the borders, so it is estimated that 0.05% of the population is illegal immigrants (people not leaving when their visa runs out). And the police can and do stop visible minorities to confirm their residence status on the spot. It is compulsory to carry identification documents if you are a foreigner. (There are questions about the legality of this but it is common and widely practiced).

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/10/27/india-valua...

B2 is upper intermediate. Probably 2-5 years of study

https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-referen...

If I'm applying for a work visa where the work I'm doing would require me to know Japanese, I should know Japanese.

On the other hand, I don't like immigration control as a concept - countries should not operate like hereditary country clubs, and people should not have less freedom of movement than bags of money. More self-interestedly, I'm an American, and I know my country's infrastructure - both political and otherwise - is failing horribly. I don't want out yet, but I know I'm going to need out at some point in my lifetime. So every time I see a favorable country locking their doors, I shudder.

There's probably going to be at least one reply from a European saying this is a good thing - that American citizens (or, if things get really bad, American refugees) should be denied entry, under the theory that immigration is a welfare / free money for thieves program and that letting people leave destroyed countries just rewards people for destroying them.

This is, of course, bullshit, both because it's victim blame-y, AND because it covers up a shortcoming of the country making the excuse. The real reason countries try to avoid taking in refugees is that most countries are built like hereditary country clubs. They don't take in immigrants, so they don't know how to integrate immigrants. Japan in particular has a community of poorly-integrated American emigrants that largely just stick to themselves.

America, ironically enough, is one of the few countries that actually cracked the code on immigration. We used to have really generous family reunion visa programs, we have basically every immigrant population you can think of in every major city, and immigrants that come here integrate way better than ones that go to Europe. So it's not like countries have to be restrictive on immigration.

Instead, what I'm seeing is that immigration is being used by politicians to distract from their own countries' failings. It's the same story as what happened in America[1]: when shit breaks, people get rich off selling the fix, and so they pay[0] politicians to keep the system broken enough that they can continue profiting off of it. But this only works if you give the people some kind of excuse. The politics of scarcity are brutal, but scarcity becomes a far easier sell if you have a scapegoat. Some magical source of systemic burden you can shed without backlash. "The state-run insurance system isn't broken because we don't pay our doctors, it's broken because we have too many poor patients from other countries!"

[0] Not necessarily in the "bribery is free speech" way America does it, of course.

[1] Which would indicate to me that perhaps leaving the country is a fool's errand, if every other country is on the same curve.