SNA (Tokyo) — Japanese have long tended to view foreigners as sources of crime within their communities, but in recent years Vietnamese, the nation’s fastest-growing foreign community, have begun to be singled out by rightwing commentators as posing the most serious alleged threat.

One of the most prominent recent examples is that of Genki Fujii, a veteran rightwing political scientist who maintains the website World Forecast. Fujii has been running online advertisements on YouTube and elsewhere promoting the notion that resident Vietnamese people pose a special threat to Japanese society.

Visitors to the link will find a promotion for a booklet titled Understanding Immigrants: The Dark Side of Making Big Concessions. The advertising blurb for the booklet attempts to entice Japanese readers with statistics attributed to the National Police Agency showing that Vietnamese nationals account for 38.4% of crimes committed by foreigners in Japan.

Some questions to the curious readers are proposed: “Why are number of crimes by foreigners in Japan increasing? Why is it Vietnamese and not Chinese? Is it because their culture is different? Is it because they have a ferocious national character? Are they devoid of morals?”

No, the reader is then assured, they are in fact decent human beings. The problem, the text continues, is immigration itself, which makes the rise of Vietnamese crime “just the tip of the iceberg” and threatens to create “a darkness that Japanese cannot even imagine.”

It continues, “If left as it as it is, in the not too distant future there will be competition for work with foreigners. Crimes will increase, our security will worsen, and we will be left with a society in which people cannot live with peace of mind.”

Any potential positive aspects of foreign immigration–such as helping to finance social services and pensions for the elderly through tax payments, supplementing the disappearing national labor force, or contributing to Japanese education and cultural development–are left unaddressed in Fujii’s account.

His only conclusion is that “It may be hard for island people Japanese to understand it, but this issue is treated seriously in the rest of the world, and in just a few years could completely change our nation.”

Fujii’s campaign is actually on the more “respectable” end of Japanese rightwing commentary about the threat allegedly posed by Vietnamese criminals in Japan. Scanning through online forums such as Hoshu Sokuho (Conservative News Flash) reveals unvarnished versions of the same sentiment.

Our own quick survey revealed gems such as…

—“You’d better start learning Japanese language or go back to your country!”

—“For now, why don’t we just ban anyone with the name Nguyen for entering the country.”

—“Japan is too soft on foreigners and let’s them do whatever they want. I wish I was born in the era of national isolation.”

—“You see? This is why the coronavirus has spread!”

Sentiments of this nature are hardly new within Japanese society, but with Vietnamese immigrants consisting mainly of disadvantaged laborers and having become the fastest-growing foreign community within Japan–in numbers behind only the long-established Chinese and Korean communities–they now appear to taking the brunt of Japanese racist commentary and paranoia about foreign crime.

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