Emerging anti-immigration sentiment in Japan obscures a surprising history of strategic engagement with Islam

(The Conversation) — A recent increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in Japan has led people from some religious and ethnic groups who were not born in Japan to face hostility. Hate speech has spread on social media, and some mosques have been targeted with abusive messages.

Over the past five years, the number of Muslims in Japan has nearly doubled , from 230,000 in 2019 to 420,000 at the end of 2024. Most Muslim immigrants are workers from Southeast Asia and South Asia .

All this has been unfolding amid a larger demographic change. The population of mixed-race Japanese children, known as “hafu,” or half, has also increased in Japan over the past three decades. The number of children born in Japan who have one or two non-Japanese parents reached 4.66% in 2023 , up from just 1.3% in 1987.

A long-standing myth that Japan is a homogeneous society , which has often been linked to Japanese “racial purity,” has exacerbated anxieties over demographic change. This is despite the reality that Japan has its own indigenous population in the north of the archipelago, known as the Ainu , as well as generations of Japanese of ethnically Korean, Chinese and Ryukyu, or Okinawan, heritage to…