So I’ll start off by saying that the premise of this post may very well be wrong since I don’t speak Korean, and haven’t lived in Korea for a long time like I have Japan, but I saw a post recently that mentioned how rural Korea was actually becoming increasingly diverse as the government imports more immigrants to fix the labor shortage. Statistically this bears out, with foreigners making up an even higher percentage of the population in Korea compared to Japan.
However, something extremely interesting that I’ve noticed is that I don’t seem to see nearly the same amount of backlash towards this immigration as Japan. I’m sure if you follow Japanese politics, you’ve seen the rise anti immigrant parties such as Sanseitou, Takaichi becoming the new PM etc, and having lived in Japan for about a year, can definitely confirm that there are a lot of people unhappy with the amount of foreigners in their country whereas in Korea, the current leadership actually seems a bit more open to immigration.
Why I find this so interesting is that both Korea and Japan are known for being relatively xenophobic, and both economies are doing pretty badly right now. That’s not to say I don’t see any backlash at all (any content about Chinese/Chinese Koreans is always filled with pretty racist comments), but compared to Japan, people seem to be relatively okay with the immigration situation.
Curious as to people’s thoughts on why that may be. My theory is that since a lot of the immigration is in rural areas, it’s not as visible compared to Japan but I’m not too sure.
submitted by /u/yoloswaghashtag2
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