Does Japan have "one of the strictest immigration policies in the world?"

I'm going to take a little bit of a different tack for this next post that belongs in the "Misinfo" section. The article itself really isn't about obtaining Japanese citizenship or naturalizing to Japanese, but about Japanese immigration as a whole. As "naturalization to Japan" is a form of immigration, though, I figured tallking about it is appropriate.

On CNN's blog, Indian-American CNN reporter Fareed Zakaria does a comparison between the three countries immigration systems to contrast them with the United States: Japan, the European Union, and Canada. His opinions on both the EU and Japan are mixed, while he gives high praise to Canada's system. While there's nothing wrong with that, I did take exception to the particular examples he used to make his point with Japan.

To begin with, let's take a look at the very first sentence of his section entitled "Japan: A Cautionary Tale":

Japan has one of the strictest immigration policies in the world and has historically been closed off to outsiders.

 "Historically been closed off to outsiders" is true. If you flip back in the history book by a century. Or two. He's talking about historical policies before the existence of the modern government of Japan. And before even the government that preceded it: Imperial Japan. He's referring to the time of shogunate in the early 19th century. Americans like to think that the rest of the world, and in particular, the United States, has been immigrant friendly since the beginning of time, but the reality is, just like Japan, history is a bit more complicated than that. For example, Asians weren't allowed to become U.S. citizens until after World War II, and Chinese were literally excluded from America from 1882 to 1943. Thus, if you're going to use examples from history to prove a point about immigration, it would be fair to look at all countries attitude towards equal immigration. Over the period of history, immigration has always been very complicated, even for countries that are considered by modern standards to be "open".

The second part of the sentence, "has one of the strictest immigration policies in the world" is one you often hear. For the purposes of the article, it's supporting point is the percentage of foreigners in Japan (less than 2%) and a comparison to this percentage in the U.S.

The theory is this: Japan is a rich country, so everybody must want to immigrate to it, but the only reason so few immigrate to it must be because the government process for immigration must be incredibly tough.

If you look past aggregate statistics, though, and look at the actual published procedures for various forms of immigration, you'll see that Japan's immigration requirements, as well as its acceptance and rejection rates, are pretty much in line and are modeled to closely resemble other countries in the world. The only outlining exception I see to this is permanent residency for non-married individuals, where the 10 year requirement is greater than most North American countries as well as European countries.

However, the requirements for visas related to skilled labor (Instructors/Professors, Engineers, Journalists), are not very different from most developed countries with controlled immigration policies. In particular, Japan's naturalization procedure is rather liberal (permanent residency isn't a requirement, and it can require as little as one year of residency depending on your circumstances), on the whole, compared to that of the United States and even Canada, which is held as the model for immigration in the above CNN article.