A Boom of "Foreigner-Only" Establishments in Japan Shows an Entrenched Foreign Community in the Country?

Foreign residents make up a little more than 2.5 million of Japan's 130 million people, making up less than 3% of the country's population. And these 2.5 million foreigners include many that have been in the country for generations, born and raised to speak no other language fluently than Japanese and identify their cultural allegiance with no other than the mainstream Japanese one. Among those who do not identify themselves as culturally Japanese, the foreign community is diverse, spanning dozens of nationalities and ethnicities, not to mention professional, social, and religious affiliations. 

Any business seeking to target this diverse community can expect no better than to serve a niche market, with the potential customer base limited to perhaps a few hundred in any geographical vicinity. Yet, increasingly, some of the neighborhoods frequented by foreigners in Tokyo and its surrounding satellite cities are home to many many supermarkets and restaurants catering almost only to the highly fragmented foreign community. These little shops often do not have any Japanese signage, menus, or staff members who can converse in proficient Japanese, making it amply clear that they do not need Japanese customers.

At first sight, the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for new foreign residents to come in means that the future prospects of these shops catering only to foreign residents could be rather dim. Japanese law stipulates that the country's blue-collar workers renew their visas once every few years with an upper limit on how many times the renewal can be done. The legal hurdles make the foreign community at the lower part of the socioeconomic hierarchy highly transient, with shops needing to rely on a continual influx of new residents to sustain their customer base. Fewer newcomers mean fewer sales.

Yet, the fact that, anecdotally, the number of "foreigners-only" shops in Japan continues to increase speaks to just how rooted the foreign community in the country has become. The owners of these shops are now confident enough that demand is consistent enough for them to build up inventories of goods sourced from across the world, no doubt not as a one-time thing, and invent in shopfronts and human resources for the long-term. Without a sanguine assessment of the size and stability of the foreign population in Japan, they would not be so confident.

The behaviors of the shopowners suggest that the foreign community in Japan is hitting some sort of inflection point, in which the community is no longer dependent on constant newcomers, made impossible by COVID-related restrictions, to one that is based on organic growth of foreign residents that are already in the country. That growth can come from the higher income of each individual foreign resident, based on the accumulation of work experience and thus higher salaries and spending power. And perhaps they are giving birth to a new generation of foreign residents in Japan.

But as these foreigners build up their riches and families in Japan, the fact that they remain dependent on "foreigner-only" supermarkets and restaurants shows that Japan has not been able to institutionally assimilate them over time, both in the physical aspect of the Japanese language education and the mental aspect of getting to adopt a Japanese lifestyle and palate. Similarly, the fact that these shops remain "foreigner-only" in practice shows that the average Japanese has refused to partake in the cultural practices of their foreign neighbors, despite years, if not decades, of co-habitation.

It is hard to say whether the continuing invisible wall between the ever-richer, more established foreign community in Japan and the Japanese majority will break down further. Stories abound of second-generation immigrants falling behind in Japanese public schools, due to a lack of extra help on schoolwork that they cannot receive from their linguistically challenged family members, combined with casual racism and outright bullying that they receive from their Japanese schoolmates. Assimilation over generations is not a foregone conclusion in an exclusivist Japanese society.

And perhaps they may be a more physical wall that separates the foreign community from the Japanese one. As foreigners move into certain neighborhoods, Japanese residents move out, citing cultural differences, and more nefariously, the likelihood of more crime and undefined social ills. Greater physical distance will not make assimilation any easier as the average Japanese becomes even less likely to come into day-to-day contact with an average foreigner. The formation of ethnic ghettos on the peripheries of Japanese cities is no longer unthinkable.