Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government has raised residency fees by 2,000 percent, a move the New York Times reports is drawing criticism from those who say Japan cannot afford to repel the workers it needs.
The mechanism is straightforward. A country that has spent years acknowledging a demographic crisis — a shrinking workforce, an ageing population, and sectors that cannot fill roles — has chosen to make legal residency materially more expensive for the foreigners already inside it. The New York Times reports that Prime Minister Takaichi frames the increase as a response to public anxiety over immigration, a political calculation that trades a long-run economic problem for a short-run approval signal.
The unresolved tension is the one Japan's own critics are now articulating: a 2,000 percent fee increase does not reduce demand for labour, it reduces the supply of people willing to navigate a legal residency system that has become costlier without becoming clearer. Sectors already flagging shortages absorb that constraint quietly, until they do not.
What the fee increase confirms is a policy direction. What it cannot yet confirm is whether the economic cost will arrive quickly enough, or visibly enough, to shift the political calculation that produced it.
Ryan C 
Gabriel Fenech 
Isla Camilleri