A view of the town of Niseko, Japan, near the internationally renowned Niseko ski slopes and resort. Some residents in the area are protesting against a planned housing facility for foreign workers, exposing the conflict between Japan’s need for labour and anxieties over immigration. Photo / Kentaro Takahashi, The New York Times
In the small town of Kutchan, near the internationally renowned Niseko ski slopes in Japan, a barren field once planted with potatoes has become a flashpoint for a national conflict over labour, tourism and immigration.
On that plot of land, developers are planning to construct lodging for up to 1200 seasonal workers, most of whom will be foreigners.
These labourers are needed to operate the area’s resorts and construction sites.
Local residents are petitioning the Government to block the facility, citing concerns over safety and a perceived decline in social order.
The tensions in Kutchan, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, underscore a dilemma for the country’s booming US$50 billion tourism sector, which is now its second-largest export after cars.
Japan’s population is shrinking and ageing rapidly, emptying out many small towns like Kutchan.
Spending by tourists is propping up the economy in Kutchan and the surrounding area.
At the same time, the town lacks the workers needed to staff the hotels, resorts and restaurants that cater to those visitors, meaning that it has had no choice but to open its doors to an influx of foreign workers.
Depending on the time of year, foreigners can account for up to about 22% of Kutchan’s 17,000 residents — one of the highest such ratios in Japan.
This demographic reality positions the small town as an early, visible test case for the social and political frictions expected to proliferate nationally in a country wary of immigration but increasingly dependent on it to keep its economy afloat.
Across Japan, the pick-up in foreigners has been felt more acutely since the Covid-19 pandemic, with tourism surging just as new policies allowed more foreign workers into the country.
It has also spurred the rise of far-right nationalist parties, which managed to weaken the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party’s majority in Japan’s upper house election in July.
The party last Saturday voted in a new leader, hardline conservative lawmaker Sanae Takaichi, putting her on track to become Japan’s next prime minister.
Takaichi focused heavily on migration in her campaign, calling for a crackdown on illegal immigration and restrictions on property purchases by non-Japanese people.
In Kutchan, residents tell the local story of immigration like this: Foreigners began to arrive in the early 2000s when Australians discovered the area’s powder snow.
After Covid, developers from Hong Kong, Singapore and China moved to the area and began purchasing land. More recently, the town has seen more visitors and workers from Southeast Asia.
“They are quite different to the Westerners and the rich people that we had seen before,” said Yuka Nakano, 44, who started a petition with some 4000 supporters to block the development of the seasonal worker lodging facility.
Nakano said she hadn’t had “direct troubles”, but has heard from other people in town that foreigners have broken into garages and disposed of bottles on footpaths.
The mayor rebuffed Nakano’s attempt to stop the lodging facility, so she attended a town-hall meeting for the local far-right candidate, Yoshihito Tanaka, during the national election period.
She said Tanaka — whose party, the Sanseito, warned against a “silent invasion” of foreigners — had told her that, if elected, he intended to address issues like the construction in Kutchan.
In the July election, he narrowly lost an upper house seat to an incumbent candidate from the governing party.
Tanaka, who during his campaign protested against the foreign influence of China in Hokkaido, declined to be interviewed.
“I just want them to stop with this kind of development,” Nakano said.
There are too many hotels being built in Kutchan and the area generally, she said. “It’s getting harder to live. It’s almost like we’re becoming like foreigners in our own town.”
The dilemma is that foreign visitors and workers are powering the Kutchan economy.
Rural Japan is emptying. With birthrates dropping and younger generations increasingly migrating to bigger cities, a recent study predicted that nearly half of the country’s local municipalities were at risk of disappearing by 2050.
Kutchan stands in stark contrast.
In its resort areas, glamorous glass and wooden hotels line the foothills of the surrounding slopes. Restaurants light up the town roads at night, and newly built breweries welcome tour groups.
Supermarkets feature packs of delicacies, like sea urchin, that shop owners say are rarely purchased by Japanese shoppers.
“I think many of the townspeople think that they are not benefitting from the tourism industry despite the fact that they are,” said Takashi Hayakawa, a Kutchan town councillor and a director at the local tourism-promotion association.
Kutchan has the second-lowest rate of ageing among Hokkaido’s roughly 180 towns and villages, according to the group.
“We need foreign workers,” said Kazushi Monji, the Mayor of Kutchan. He estimates that up to 80% of ski resort visitors are foreigners who need employees to accommodate them. They, in turn need places to reside.
“It is a proposed solution for the lack of housing issues,” Monji said. “There is nothing illegal about this.”
To ease local concerns, he said, the facility is planning to do things like install security cameras. He is also commissioning a survey to calculate tourism’s contribution to Kutchan’s economy to show residents.
Several people involved in the housing project said it might simply be the latest focal point for long-brewing anxieties over the town’s growing number of foreigners.
“I have the impression that the petition against the lodging facility was a ‘no’ to the total movement happening in the town at the moment,” said Kunihiro Kondo, a senior project manager at Nisade Services, the developer behind the project.
He cited a case this year in which a Chinese developer had deforested a large plot of land in Kutchan for a potential project without permission.
Since United States President Donald Trump was elected, “the anti-foreigner voice was really amplified in Japan as well”, Kondo said.
The US political situation propelled the popularity of parties, like Sanseito, espousing “Japan first” policies, he said.
Kondo said he personally agreed with some of the sentiments of the petitioners against his project.
“The rapid increase in foreigners, for locals like myself who until now had wanted to live slowly in the countryside, it does feel too sudden,” he said.
Still, he has experienced a backlash for his involvement in the project. Videos about the development drew anti-foreigner comments. Kondo said his name was released online, and people began writing negative things about him and his family.
What most people in Kutchan appear to agree on is that the migration of foreign workers should be slowed to allow time for local officials to take steps to help new arrivals better integrate.
In July, Japan’s central Government launched a command centre to manage national immigration policies and ensure “social stability”.
Because of its relatively early experience with large numbers of foreign residents, Kutchan could become a model for all of Japan as it begins welcoming more foreigners, said Shigeki Sakui, the chair of the Kutchan town council.
For now, however, “I think we are the opposite, with people trying to not be like us,” said Seiko Kimura, another council member. “We need to change this.”
Measures Kutchan has already taken include creating a “Kutchan ID” that offers discounts to local residents at supermarkets and resorts, a measure aimed at encouraging them to stay.
Other ideas include allocating tourist revenue to local services like snow removal.
Monji noted an effort he said was already bearing fruit: the expansion of English curriculum in primary schools using English-speaking staff. “There are more and more opportunities to commingle,” he said.
“When we were young, we would see foreigners and to be honest we would get spooked,” Monji said.
“Kids these days see them in town, and if they’re spoken to, they don’t think anything of it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: River Akira Davis and Kiuko Notoya
Photographs by: Kentaro Takahashi
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