On June 17, 2026, the opposition party Sanseito submitted a bill to Japan's Upper House proposing something no governing party has attempted: abolishing the Immigration Services Agency outright and replacing it with a new Cabinet Office body, led by its own dedicated minister, with authority extending beyond immigration control into foreign residents' labor conditions, welfare access and public order. "Extremely insufficient," party leader Sohei Kamiya called the current government's foreign-national policies, telling reporters Japan needs "stronger and clearer policies," including an explicit cap on the total number of foreign nationals allowed to live in the country. The bill has little chance of passing on its own — Sanseito holds a small fraction of Upper House seats — but its significance isn't legislative. It is a signal that Japan's immigration debate has found room to move further right than the government currently sitting in office, which is itself already running the most restrictive immigration platform of any postwar Japanese administration.
That government's own record makes Kamiya's "insufficient" charge a genuinely awkward one to level. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi took office on October 21, 2025, after junior coalition partner Komeito abandoned a partnership with the Liberal Democratic Party that had lasted 26 years; the LDP regrouped with Nippon Ishin no Kai instead, and Takaichi called a snap election on February 8, 2026 that delivered 316 of 465 lower-house seats — the first postwar single-party two-thirds supermajority in Japanese political history. Since November 2025, her government has run a dedicated ministerial portfolio for what it calls "a society of well-ordered and harmonious coexistence with foreign nationals," held by Kimi Onoda, who has pledged "firm action" against foreign nationals who violate the law. In October 2025, the government sextupled the capital requirement for the Business Manager visa, from 5 million to 30 million yen — a change one advocacy outlet estimated could threaten as many as 90 percent of Tokyo's small, foreign-owned restaurants, though that specific figure traces to a single source and has not been independently confirmed.
A Government Popular Enough to Be Outflanked
Cabinet approval reached 68 percent in a Nikkei/TV Tokyo poll taken June 29, 2026 — the ninth consecutive month Takaichi's government has polled above 65 percent, an unusually durable run for any recent Japanese administration.
That popularity complicates the instinct to read Sanseito's proposal as a fringe provocation. A government already running a restrictionist immigration policy, and still gaining two points of approval on the eve of a fresh round of visa fee increases, suggests the underlying public appetite for a harder line runs wider than any one party — which is precisely the terrain Sanseito is now competing on, positioning itself as the more consistent version of a position the LDP itself already holds, rather than as an outsider challenging it.
The fee increases Sanseito's bill arrived just before are substantial and land on the same date this article publishes. An Immigration Control Act revision passed the Diet on May 29, 2026, and takes effect July 1: single-entry visa fees rise from 3,000 to 15,000 yen, multiple-entry visas from roughly 10,000 to 30,000 yen, and residence-status application fees — previously capped around 10,000 yen — can now run as high as 100,000 yen for renewals and 300,000 yen for permanent residency applications, with exact operating amounts still to be set by cabinet order before March 2027. The same law introduces an online pre-entry screening system, modeled on similar programs elsewhere, expected to launch in fiscal 2028.
The Backlash Underneath the Policy Fight
The policy shift has not gone unanswered. On June 21, 2026, roughly 650 people rallied outside the Diet building, organized by a coalition of eleven civil-society groups under the banner "NO to Hate!", after submitting a petition with some 140,000 signatures three days earlier. "Migrants aren't criminals," Miguel, a 58-year-old Brazilian resident of Tokyo, told reporters at the rally. "Working hard and supporting a family isn't a crime." Nui Tatsuo, representing the group With Kurdish Residents in Japan, described a climate of everyday fear: "Every election, xenophobic candidates give speeches... There are children who are afraid just to use train stations." Those accounts, reported by the independent outlet Unseen Japan citing Japanese-language originals from Tokyo Shimbun and Kyodo, have not been independently re-verified by The AP Herald against the original Japanese-language wire copy.
What happens next depends largely on arithmetic Sanseito does not control. The LDP-Ishin coalition holds 351 of the Lower House's 465 seats between them, more than enough to block or ignore Sanseito's agency-abolition bill entirely if it chooses to. The more consequential fights are the ones already in motion: whether the cabinet-order fee schedule due by March 2027 lands closer to the low or high end of the new statutory range, and whether Takaichi's approval holds above 65 percent once the July 1 fee increases and the coming Diet debate over Sanseito's proposal give both supporters and critics of her immigration policy a fresh, concrete target to react to.