Replies mentioning foreign citizens surge on Takaichi’s X account

The number of replies mentioning foreign citizens or immigrants to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s posts on X has surged since she took office a year ago, with a notable surge starting late last month.

In some cases, comments against immigrants were repeated even when the prime minister did not mention policies pertaining to foreign nationals.

These replies appear to suggest a growing interest in and anxiety about foreign residents in Japan, whose number reached a record 4,281,026 as of the end of June.

Over the year since her inauguration on Oct. 21 last year, Takaichi has made a total of 868 posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. As of Friday, there were 1,502,698 replies to those posts, with 112,481, or 7.5%, of them mentioning foreign nationals or immigrants, according to a Jiji survey using the social media analysis tool Brandwatch.

This compares with only 16, or 1.8%, of the prime minister’s posts that included either term.

On Sept. 27, Takaichi posted an explanation of policies related to foreign nationals, including tightening the requirements for obtaining permanent residency.

The same day, the number of comments related to foreign nationals jumped to 4,908 from 216 the previous day.

Many comments expressed concerns about increased strain on the social security system, and some made unfounded claims that there are too many cases in which foreign citizens escape indictment.

Before that day, the daily number of replies related to foreign nationals had exceeded 1,000 for only eight days. However, the figure exceeded 1,000 for four consecutive days through Sept. 30.

The post by Takaichi that received the most comments related to foreign nationals was about ensuring the safety of children.

This post, published on Oct. 18, was unrelated to foreign citizens and introduced a plan to prevent crimes when children commute to and from school.

Nevertheless, 6,505 comments, or more than half of all replies to the post, mentioned foreign nationals or immigrants. Most of these comments claimed that the government’s immigration policy threatens the safety of children and that Japan should stop accepting immigrants.

The Brandwatch analysis showed that negative comments were about three times more prevalent than positive ones among all replies mentioning foreign nationals or immigrants.

Initially, negative and positive comments were balanced after the launch of the Takaichi administration, but the proportion of negative comments has been increasing.