Report an “undocumented” foreigner every three days to earn an annual salary of approximately 30,000 euros. It is not the script of a futuristic dystopia, but the calculation that circulates strongly on social networks in Japan.
Under the Prime Minister Sanae Takaichithe country of the rising sun has stopped looking the other way in reference to foreigners without their papers in order. The slogan is clear: “Zero illegal residents.”
The engine of this machinery is not only ideological, but monetary. Protected by Article 66 of the Immigration Control Law—a 1951 regulation now rescued from oblivion—Japanese citizens are discovering that reporting illegal residents pays off.
The Immigration Services Agency offers up to 50,000 yen (about 300 euros) for each complaint that results in a formal deportation order. What was once a discreet administrative procedure has become an unprecedented economic incentive for citizens in the Japan of civil liberties.
However, this “reporting business” is not a blank check.
To prevent the system from becoming a tool of vendetta staff or collapse immigration offices, the Government has imposed severe filters: false or malicious accusations can lead to serious criminal sanctions for the complainant.
Furthermore, the law explicitly prohibits public officials from collecting these rewards in the performance of their duties.
To pass through the box, the “hunter” must renounce anonymity and provide his real identity, a barrier that Takaichi’s cabinet considers sufficient to deter pranksters, but that does not stop those who already see neighborhood watch as a way of life.
While official spokespersons defend the program as an essential tool to guarantee security and order, human rights associations and foreign groups warn of an irreversible social fracture.
The risk, they denounce, does not fall only on those who are in an irregular situation, but on the millions of residents who live and work legally in Japan.
This policy threatens to turn any foreign face into a target of suspicion, where a neighbor’s daily routine can be monitored by a citizen’s simple desire to round out the month with the 300 euro reward.
Kimi ‘La Mestiza’ Onoda
Behind this crusade lies the minister who has broken the molds of traditional Japanese conservatism.
Onoda’s harshness has deep and, for many, paradoxical roots.
With an American father and a Japanese mother, her childhood was marked by absence and stigma: her father abandoned her mother and her when Kimi was barely two years old, leaving her in a society that, at that time, did not make things easy for single-parent and mixed-race families.
In a rural town in Okayama Prefecture, Onoda suffered daily harassment from her schoolmates, who threw stones at her shouting “foreigner, go to your country!”
However, some analysts interpret that his personal biography has reinforced a strictly legalistic vision of the immigration issue.
Her appointment by Sanae Takaichi in November 2025 was no coincidence: Onoda is the architect of the “Zero Illegal Residents” plan, a policy that seeks the systematic expulsion of those who have overstayed their permitted stay, eliminating the gray areas that the country maintained for decades.
Onoda has made immigration “cleanup” her personal workhorse: with a constant presence on social networks and a tone that many call populist, the minister has defended that “the law does not allow exceptions” and that Japanese hospitality is only valid for those who scrupulously respect the terms of their visa.
Under his command, what was previously a discreet administrative management has become a State mission with police overtones.
Its strategy is not limited to strengthening the borders, but to “clean up the interior”, activating legal mechanisms such as economic rewards to encourage civil society to become an extension of immigration patrols.
“Constant fear”
The impact of this speech is not measured only in yen, but in the daily terror of those who have been trapped on the margins of the system.
It is the case of Pablo (not his real name), a 32-year-old Latin American who has lived in Japan for four years. His “overstay” situation was not a premeditated decision, but the result of an administrative error by his company that left him in a bureaucratic limbo just as he was trying to renew his contract.
“You live in constant fear. It’s not just of the police, but of citizens who feel legitimate to hunt you,” he explains. “You think twice before getting on the train or entering a hospital… You don’t know if a hostile face in the neighborhood is just distrust or someone looking to feel like a hero by collecting the reward.”
Pablo recounts situations that already border on civil harassment: “A man followed me out of the station asking me very specific questions about my visa without identifying himself. Another time, a stranger was recording a group of foreigners in a park with his cell phone, asking loudly if we had papers.”
For him, the word “illegal” has come to define his entire existence.
“You feel guilty even if you try to regularize yourself with a lawyer. You feel that your personal history has no weight compared to the political objective of ‘zero illegals’. Cleaning up with that slogan means, in practice, breaking lives without listening to them.”
Pablo’s fear is not unfounded: unlike other countries, Japan does not establish a maximum limit for the administrative detention of foreigners, which can lead to indefinite confinement in detention centers while the expulsion is processed, a ‘limbo’ that international organizations have repeatedly denounced as a violation of human rights.
This institutionalization of suspicion occurs, paradoxically, at a time when Japan is beginning to lose its capacity for international seduction.
According to data revealed this February by the Ministry of the Interior, the “promised land” of Tokyo is showing signs of exhaustion.
For the first time in four years, excess arrivals in the capital have been drastically reduced and, in an unprecedented turn, the number of foreigners leaving the city exceeded that of new arrivals.
Statistics show a metropolis that is emptying of children, retirees and, now, international residents, with a negative balance of almost 400 people at the last count.
Even in prefectures like Shiga, which survived exclusively thanks to the arrival of foreigners to compensate for depopulation, the new climate of denunciation threatens to dynamite the socioeconomic balance.
Japan thus faces an existential contradiction.
While Minister Onoda encourages citizens to scour neighborhoods like Ikebukuro or prefectures like Saitama in search of “illegals” to collect their 300 euros, the data suggests that the country is scaring away the human capital it needs for its own survival.
The 50,000 yen counter is still ticking on social media, but the real cost to Japan’s future could be incalculable.
In the end, history has shown that encouraging neighbor reporting is opening a Pandora’s box that is difficult to close.
Although in the darkest episodes of the European 20th century the denunciation of the ‘other’ was fueled by ideology or the plundering of the properties of those accused, the Japan of 2026 has introduced a ‘mercenary’ nuance: direct payment in cash. By putting a price on the deportation of a neighbor, the State not only seeks police efficiency, but also alters the moral structure of coexistence.
In its efforts to secure its borders and ‘clean up’ its interior, Japan runs the risk of winning the legal battle against immigration at the cost of losing the war for its own survival.
By monetizing suspicion, the country will not only expel residents like Pablo, but it will send a message to other foreigners with temporary residence and to the world: hospitality has a price and coexistence has an expiration date: the one that appears on the Zairyu Card (residence card) of each of them.