What does it take to get ahead when college admission rules change? Who has the resources to anticipate risks and adapt, and who is left responding after opportunities have already slipped away?

These questions lie at the heart of Ruo-Fan Liu’s research. As APARC's Taiwan Program postdoctoral fellow 2024-2026 – the first scholar to serve in this role since the program’s launch two years ago – Liu examines how young people navigate educational transitions in Taiwan's college admissions landscape, which has shifted from an exam-centered system to holistic screening in recruiting elites. Her work shows that inequality is not simply a matter of who succeeds or fails, but of who can mobilize support early enough to stay ahead of unexpected challenges.

We spoke with Liu about her work and fellowship experience at APARC. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Could you describe your research briefly?

My dissertation examines how young people navigate contingency in college admissions: what kinds of support they seek, how they mobilize resources, and how these processes shape postsecondary transitions. I situate this puzzle in Taiwan, where the state has implemented admissions reforms intended to level the playing field, including holistic admissions, school-based nominations, and test-optional and dossier-based application routes. Although these reforms open new opportunities, they also introduce different forms of uncertainty into students' college pathways.

As a sociologist, I care deeply about how people exercise agency under different forms of constraint and opportunity. In asking why class reproduction persists amid contingency and uncertainty, I find that middle-class students preserve class privilege not because they avoid setbacks or always get what they want, but because they anticipate risks early and coordinate familial and school support before risks become failures. I call this process “anticipatory coordination.” By contrast, working-class students are more often reactive mobilizers, seeking help after problems have already crystallized into adverse outcomes. This temporal dimension – who can act early enough to get ahead – shapes who can get around unexpected hurdles.

I use a wide range of methods, but ethnography remains my favorite method. Talking with people, reading social cues, and capturing unspoken assumptions are the moments I have found most meaningful in the research process.

What challenges have you encountered in researching this topic?

One of the major challenges I have encountered is the scarcity of Taiwan-based cases published in general sociology journals. Sociology remains highly U.S.-centered and theoretically demanding, which makes publication difficult, especially during peer review.

As a Taiwan-focused researcher, I am still learning how to make the case for the broader significance of this work in different publication outlets: how to frame Taiwan’s relevance, address concerns about generalizability, and explain empirical evidence in depth without creating unnecessary confusion.

That is why I cherish APARC and FSI as my institutional home at Stanford, where faculty members and mentors value international work and underrepresented cases and support researchers throughout the process.

Tell us about your work at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL).
 
At SNAPL, I co-led a project with Professor Gi-Wook Shin that examines how migrant scholars and transnational elites institutionalize cross-border exchange, negotiate with state officials and other key brokers, and produce knowledge across multiple languages.

Since 2024, our team has collected network, interview, archival, and organizational data, working with two postdoctoral fellows and two research assistants. The project has generated several papers in progress. In the first paper, we find that migrant scholars play crucial intermediary roles in facilitating cross-border exchange, a mechanism we call the “transnational pipeline,” which extends beyond individuals’ sporadic efforts. In the second paper, we turn our teamwork into a methodological technique for studying transnational elites.

We are currently comparing Taiwan’s and Korea’s funding infrastructures and developing a comparative model that contrasts “state sponsorship” and “state capitalism” to explain how states extend their power beyond national borders.

How has your time at APARC supported your research and professional development?

Stanford has helped me become a more collaborative scholar.

My first cultural shock was Stanford’s lab culture, where scholars often do not work alone but make decisions together as a team. I also learned how closely people back each other up. In many moments when I needed help or had to step away from a project briefly, someone was there to take over and support the work.

I learned from this culture and have applied it to my own team-leading skills in other collaborative projects. I learned how to divide labor across different team compositions, recognize collaborators’ strengths and weaknesses as scholars, support a team, secure funding for future research, and resolve tensions across different writing styles.

What advice would you give to prospective APARC postdoctoral scholars?
 
Many young scholars spend a lot of time chasing trends. The current job market exacerbates this dynamic, because there are fewer available positions. Trendy research can be valuable, but it may become outdated by the time scholars enter the job market.

I am not saying we should ignore research trends. Rather, I believe an academic journey should be your own path: developing the skills you want to invest in, cultivating the networks you are part of, and taking time to work through the puzzle you cannot let go of. In short, take your time to develop your expertise, fields, and intellectual craft.

At the same time, be strategic about your time as you approach graduation. Manage reviewing commitments, submission timelines, writing schedules, and publication timing carefully so that you have more tools when you begin a faculty position. And enjoy this transition, because once you are on the tenure track, the clock starts ticking again, and you may no longer have the same freedom you had as a doctoral candidate.

To put it simply: take your time during graduate training, be a strategic planner about timing when you are on the market, and protect your time once you become a junior faculty member.

What’s next for you?
 
I will join National Chengchi University, a leading research-intensive university in Taipei, Taiwan, as an assistant professor of sociology.

I will continue collaborating with APARC and SNAPL at Stanford while also bringing my three international research collaborations to NCCU: First-Generation Students in the United States, Organizational Change and College Admissions Under Changing Ranking Systems, and Stanford’s Transnational Project. I hope to involve my future students in these projects so that they can gain valuable experience in collaborative research.

I am excited to apply for my own grants, teach courses in the sociology of education, and cultivate a new generation of Taiwanese scholars. Please stay tuned to my personal website, and feel free to reach out if you are interested in any of these research themes.

South Korea's stock market has been the world's hottest over the past year, with the Kospi Index surging 165% on the back of the country’s two semiconductor powerhouses, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. This new territory "is creating a lot of issues within Korea," Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, director of APARC's Korea Program, tells Barron's.

The magazine's story – South Korea Has a Chip Conundrum – Huge Profits and a Serious Selloff – highlights how the two companies' mind-boggling earnings and bonuses have opened something of a Pandora’s box of social and economic friction. For example, disgruntled employees at less-privileged Samsung divisions are leaving their union and trying to form a new one, Shin says.

The story notes, however, that these controversies "might look like a mild kerfuffle if the chip makers’ shares keep falling back to earth." Despite a 150% year-to-date gain, Samsung shares dropped 16% last week amid foreign investor sales and leveraged local buying.

What can the history of Islamic Singapore teach us about one of the most important eras of Indian Ocean connectivity? And what do Islamic traditions in Southeast Asia reveal about everyday ethics for living responsibly on a damaged planet and navigating our relationship with the more-than-human world?

These are some of the questions Teren Sevea, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, explores in his research. Sevea recently completed his residency as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC. A scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, he investigates the region’s distinctive Islamic practices and intellectual traditions, revealing both its centrality to the study of Islam and the reasons it has often been marginalized within the field, despite its vast Muslim populations.

We spoke with Sevea about his work and fellowship experience at APARC. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Could you describe your research briefly?

Very briefly, I’m close to finishing a monograph on Islamic Singapore and the Sufi networks that connected this port city to Muslim and non-Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world, from its revival as a British port right up to the present. At the same time, I’m developing a second project on land, extraction, and natural resources, where I look at how multispecies religious worlds – which include animals, trees, waters, and spirits – offer different ways of thinking about ethics, vulnerability, and what it means to live through times of climate crisis.

What initially drew you to these topics, and how did you develop your methods?

I’m trained in history and anthropology, and these projects really emerged from a worry that the histories I was reading – and sometimes writing – were too narrow. By focusing on certain texts, elites, and official archives, these histories risked overlooking the working-class believers, community‑based scholars, and the graves, ruins, trees, animals, and waters that sustain devotional life. So my methods have become necessarily interdisciplinary and site‑centered. I read multilingual texts and study official documents and elites, but also sit at shrines, in cemeteries, on coastal edges, and in plantations, listening to oral traditions, dreams, and visions, and paying close attention to the research practices of community‑based scholars and caretakers of the landscapes I study.

In my project on multispecies religious worlds, I’ve tried to extend this approach to track how communities’ accounts of charismatic animals, trees, groves, rocks, and islands help us think about ecological responsibility in an age of rapid development, industrial expansion, climate catastrophe, and faith in technological “fixes.” This has pushed me to learn from interviews, environmental histories, flood narratives, and what I have called interspecies communities.

What challenges have you encountered in studying this topic?

One of the challenges is that the histories I study are often deliberately forgotten or actively erased. Graves are relocated or demolished, ruins are converted into “useful” secular spaces, interspecies communities are displaced by development, and the archives of working‑class believers and community‑based scholars are fragile and dispersed. In certain Southeast Asian settings, the practices and sites I study have also been treated as superstitious or as “not really Islam,” which shapes how they are documented – or not documented – both bureaucratically and academically.

Another challenge is a methodological one. Much of my work relies on community‑based scholarship, popular histories, oral traditions, dreams, visions, and other stories that are supposedly not easily translatable into standard scholarly categories. The question for me, though, has not been whether to “believe” them or not, but how to learn from them. How do we, for instance, write histories that take seriously trees that bleed and overturn bulldozers, or animal saints and ancestors who enforce ethical codes, without reducing them to fantastical allegory on the one hand or romanticizing them on the other?

Finally, there is the challenge of working across scales. I am always moving between very local sites across Southeast Asia – graveyards, mangrove forests, crocodile ponds, palm oil estates – and global processes: colonial hunting regimes, plantation capitalism, petrochemical infrastructures, climate departure, and technocratic fantasies of overcoming the climate crisis. Holding these together, while remaining grounded in the voices of community‑based scholars, caretakers of these sites, and devotional communities, is demanding but, I think, necessary.

How has your time at APARC supported your research?

My fellowship at APARC has really allowed me to place Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia much more firmly within broader conversations on Asia and the Pacific. It has given me the time and space to finish my monograph on Islamic Singapore, while also thinking seriously about how questions of land, extraction, and resource futures in Southeast Asia resonate with debates across the region. Practically, APARC has given me access to an extraordinary community of scholars working on politics, economics, demography, human rights, political and comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, and political economy, as well as climate, energy, migration, and religion.

Conversations here have sharpened my thinking about technofixes and “green developmentalism” – from Singapore’s petrochemical complexes and reclaimed islands to the shifting of Indonesia’s capital to East Kalimantan – and about how to foreground vulnerability and multispecies responsibility in these discussions. It has also pushed me to reframe my materials for different audiences: not only historians of Islam or Southeast Asia, but scholars of climate, religion, environment, and contemporary Asia more broadly, who are grappling with similar questions from very different sites and through very different approaches.

Discussions with APARC colleagues I have learned from have moved across so many themes: the ethics of representing vulnerable communities in climate research, the politics of palm oil and coal, how to think about interspecies responsibility alongside state-led sustainability agendas, but also migration and development, transnationalism and diaspora, labor and governance, care work and health, children and youth, legacies of the 1947 Partition of South Asia, Singapore’s governance, the state of higher education and its pressures, and the precarious lives of migrant and transient workers in Southeast Asia. We also talked a lot about the Bay Area itself as a site in its own right.

Many of these exchanges have unfolded in multilingual conversations that drift very naturally between scholarship and everyday life. That has reminded me how tightly intellectual and everyday life are braided together. It has been a real privilege to be in a community where so many people are thinking about overlapping questions of environment, religion, political economy, migration, and social change in Asia, and to learn from students who bring their own experiences – from Jakarta’s and Karachi’s floods to Singapore’s “garden city” – into the room. In many ways, being here has felt like a truly Asian experience, but one unfolding in the Bay Area.

Have you discovered anything surprising while you were here?

What has surprised me most is how deeply these seemingly “local” stories I work with – about environments in maritime Southeast Asia – have resonated with scholars here who focus on very different places and issues. Colleagues and students have generously responded by sharing their own “tree stories,” “animal stories,” flood memories, or accounts of sacred animals and groves from other parts of Asia and beyond.

I have also been struck by how quickly conversations here turn to technofixes: mechanical trees, negative‑emissions technologies, desalination plants, and “smart” eco‑cities. Encountering these discussions up close, within a community that is rigorously engaged with policy and practice, has sharpened my sense that there is a real need to tell other kinds of stories: stories that foreground vulnerability as situated and context-specific, that ask whose futures are being secured or sacrificed, and that insist on multispecies response‑ability rather than relying only on technological rescue. Those exchanges have been some of the most intellectually and personally rewarding moments of my time at APARC and Stanford.

Living in the Bay Area has also opened up new dimensions of my research. It has enriched my work on anti-colonial, revolutionary, left‑wing connections between Singapore, Java, Burma, and the Bay Area itself. I had not expected, before coming here, to be pursuing research at religious sites in the Bay Area as part of this project. 

What is your advice to young scholars in your field?

I doubt I am one to offer advice – I am mostly in the business of receiving it. But if pressed, I might say a few things.

Firstly, try to listen very carefully to the people and places you work with, including the non-human ones. Let scholars from the communities you study, their caretakers, storytellers, animals, trees, and waters unsettle your concepts and teach you more than you expected to learn. For those working on religion and ecology, it helps to be suspicious of ready‑made binaries – monotheism versus “animism” or “nature worship,” religion versus environment, indigenous versus cosmopolitan – that flatten lifeworlds grounded in multispecies relatedness and kinship.

Secondly, consider taking communities’ histories, oral traditions, dreams, and visions seriously as forms of knowledge and research practice, even when they do not sit easily within disciplinary expectations. At the same time, be reflexive about your own position, your archives, and your responsibilities to the communities you write about, and be rigorous about how you document, interpret, and present those materials.

Thirdly – and this I can say with a bit more certainty – do not be afraid of interdisciplinarity. To understand Islamic Singapore, charismatic animals, or climate vulnerability in Jakarta and Karachi, I have needed history, anthropology, religious studies, environmental humanities, and sometimes hydrology, forestry, and energy politics. Let the questions you ask guide you across disciplinary lines, and be willing to speak to area studies and to broader debates on politics, environment, and society in Asia and beyond.

The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS), the flagship peer-reviewed publication in the field of Korean studies, returns to Stanford University’s Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) with the publication of Volume 31, Issue 1. JKS publishes a broad range of original scholarly articles related to Korean history, culture, politics, and society. The journal also publishes reviews of new Korea-related books, making it both a venue for original research and a guide to the field’s expanding literature. Its contributors and readership span disciplines and continents, bringing together historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists representing the wide range of disciplinary approaches in Korean studies.

The journal’s institutional history traces the arc of Korean studies in the United States. The journal was originally established in 1969 at the University of Washington in Seattle, the early center of gravity for Korean studies in America. After the publication of two standalone volumes (1969, 1971), James Palais, an influential historian of premodern Korea, shaped the journal's intellectual character through serial publication (1979-1987). Michael Robinson, at Indiana University-Bloomington, carried the journal forward as editor (1988-1992) before a long publication hiatus. In 2004, JKS was revived at Stanford University by co-editors Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Korea Program at APARC, and John Duncan, professor of Korean history at UCLA and former director of its Center for Korean Studies. It was housed at Stanford until 2008. The journal has since been guided by editorial leadership at the University of Washington (Clark Sorensen), Columbia University (Theodore Hughes), and The George Washington University (Jisoo Kim). JKS returns to Stanford under the new editorial team of Paul Chang (Shorenstein APARC), Yumi Moon (Department of History), and Dafna Zur (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures).

JKS welcomes manuscripts from researchers at all career stages, working across the full range of topics, periods, and methodologies reflected in the field of Korean studies. Korean studies is undergoing genuine growth with new generations of scholars producing compelling work that is reshaping our understanding of Korea’s past and present. The Journal of Korean Studies exists to support and disseminate that work.

Kerstin Norris is a research associate at APARC’s Korea Program and managerial editor of The Journal of Korean Studies.

This story first appeared in Japanese in Asahi Shimbun's GLOBE+. The English translation below was machine-generated and lightly edited for accuracy. You can also read a related news article about the Stanford Japan Barometer's experiment discussed here via our website.

The Japanese are currently very cautious about accepting foreign workers, a trend that has intensified especially in recent years. Among foreigners, those from China tend to be less favored, while those more readily accepted are immigrants from Europe, the United States, or Vietnam who work in fields such as medicine, research, or science, speak Japanese, and have high academic qualifications. The Stanford Japan Barometer is an online public opinion survey conducted by Kiyoteru Tsutsui, professor of sociology at Stanford University and director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and political scientist Charles Crabtree of Monash University in Australia, covering a variety of themes including Japanese society, economy, and politics. While it boasts one of the largest respondent numbers in Japan, this time the survey focused on the themes of "immigrants" and "foreigners."

The survey was conducted from February 6-8 and 13-16, 2026, with the aim of examining changes in public opinion before and after the House of Representatives election held on February 8, 2026. The number of respondents was slightly over 4,000 in each period. However, the results were almost identical before and after the election.

The survey explored the extent to which Japanese people support or oppose the acceptance of foreign workers. Respondents were asked to answer "agree," "somewhat agree," "somewhat disagree," or "disagree" for 16 policies, including "climate change/global warming," "declining birthrate," "aging population," "social security for the working generation," "national budget cuts," "economic inequality," and "AI strategy."

In the first survey, when asked about "accepting foreign workers," 46.9% answered "agree" (first two groups), and 53.1% answered "disagree" (last two groups), indicating that opposition was the highest percentage. The second survey yielded similar results, with 46.6% agreeing and 53.4% ​​disagreeing.

Regarding policy priorities, including "acceptance of foreign workers," surveys were also conducted in 2022 and 2023. These surveys covered 14 policy items, and while the response categories differed slightly, the content is comparable. In 2022 and 2023, broadly speaking, opposition accounted for 35.5% and 36.6% respectively. This represents an increase of approximately 18 percentage points between 2022 and 2026. This is a significant change compared to other items, where the opposition rate either decreased or remained unchanged, or increased by only a few percentage points. In the following text, the researchers explain the experiment further.

Popular among Westerners and Indians

We also investigated what kind of immigrants are preferred. To do this, we asked people to "make judgments from the perspective of an immigration officer." We asked them about nine attributes: gender, educational background, country of origin, Japanese language ability, reason for immigration application, occupation, length of previous work experience, work plan, and travel history to Japan.

The research method involves randomly combining these nine attributes to create two "candidate profiles," and then asking respondents to choose one of them in a two-option format. The same question is repeated a total of six times with variations in the options, and the responses obtained from all respondents are compiled and analyzed. This method allows for a statistically closer understanding of the respondents' true feelings.

The educational background ranges from "no formal schooling" to "equivalent to a Japanese graduate degree" (7 categories), and the applicants come from eight countries: the United States, India, Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Vietnam, China, and South Korea. Japanese language proficiency is categorized into four levels, from "spoke through an interpreter during the interview" to "spoke fluently in Japanese during the interview." The reasons for applying are categorized into three types: "to live with family already in Japan," "to escape political/religious persecution," and "to seek better employment in Japan." The occupations are categorized into 11 types, including IT engineers, convenience store clerks, caregivers, childcare workers, doctors, research scientists, and financial consultants. Work experience is categorized into four types, from "no experience" to "more than 5 years." Employment plans are categorized into four types: "no plans to look for work at this time," "plans to look for work after arriving in Japan," "no contract with an employer in Japan, but has had job interviews," and "has a contract with an employer in Japan." There are five types of travel history to Japan: "Entered Japan once without legal permission," "Spent six months with family in Japan," "Never visited Japan," "Entered Japan once on a tourist visa," and "Visited Japan multiple times on a tourist visa."

The analysis revealed that the most popular responses for each of the above categories were: "female," "graduate degree," "German," "spoke fluent Japanese during the interview," "to live with family already in Japan," "doctor," "more than 5 years of work experience," "has a contract with an employer in Japan," and "spent 6 months with family in Japan." The countries of origin where they were most likely to be accepted were Germany, followed by the United States, then India, Vietnam, Turkey, Brazil, South Korea, and China.

Furthermore, we investigated whether the ease of accepting immigrants changes depending on the preconditions. Focusing on three areas—the Japanese economy, the culture of Japanese society, and the governance and public safety of Japan—we asked participants to choose from "agree," "somewhat agree," "somewhat disagree," or "disagree" regarding Japan expanding immigration after reading statements such as "increased immigration will benefit the Japanese economy" or "will be a burden," "will enrich the culture of Japanese society" or "will be detrimental," and "will bring stability to the governance and public safety of Japan" or "will cause chaos." The results showed that the most significant increase in support for immigration was when the precondition of economic benefits was read. Conversely, the most significant increase in opposition was when the statement that increased immigration would cause chaos to governance and public safety was read.

"The impact of political public opinion arousal"

Regarding these results, Professor Tsutsui commented, "The acceptance of foreign workers has become a major concern for Japanese people. Previously, it was probably not such a significant issue for the average Japanese person, but interest in accepting foreign workers has rapidly increased following the 2025 House of Councillors election and the subsequent gubernatorial elections. This can be attributed to the influence of political public opinion-raising efforts by parties such as the Sanseito party. Although the proportion of foreigners in Japan is on the rise, it is still low compared to Western countries, and it was surprising to see such a shift in public opinion through a political campaign, even in a country that hasn't received a large influx of immigrants."

Regarding the unfavorable perception of people of Chinese descent, the author states, "The tendency to dislike minority groups that become competitors and threaten one's position is quite widespread. For example, in the United States, after the Civil Rights Movement, when Black people began to enter white residential areas and schools, white people felt their space was threatened and that Black people were becoming competitors, leading to resistance. For Japanese people, even among Asian foreigners, Vietnamese people are seen as people who fill jobs in areas with labor shortages, such as elderly care, and are viewed more as complementary than competitive. This is in stark contrast to the perception of Chinese people."

Furthermore, the survey indicated that foreigners who are easily accepted by Japanese people are "individuals with high levels of education, work experience, and Japanese language proficiency, who possess the ability to contribute to Japanese society and who are prepared to do so. A similar trend has been observed in the United States, where ability is highly valued."

Learn more about the Stanford Japan Barometer's research and insights >

Japan is confronting an intensifying national debate over outsiders, including tourists, immigrants, and foreign workers, fueled by concerns about social cohesion, national identity, and economic stagnation. A three-wave panel survey of the Stanford Japan Barometer (SJB), fielded around the February 8, 2026, Japanese general election, reveals that Japanese public opinion on immigration is highly conditional on the attributes of immigrants considered for admission and the framing of the immigration debate.

The findings show a strong preference for high-skilled, Japanese-speaking professionals and suggest that framing immigration as an economic benefit can boost public support, while invoking security and cultural rhetoric has the opposite effect.

SJB is a large-scale, multi-wave public opinion survey on political, economic, and social issues in Japan. A project of the Japan Program at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), SJB is led by Stanford sociologist Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC and the Japan Program, and political scientist Charles Crabtree. 

To identify what drives public attitudes toward potential immigrants and the arguments that resonate or backfire in the public debate over immigration, SJB conducted a series of experiments across a three-wave panel: before the 2026 Japanese general election, a week after the election, and a month after the election.

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An Experiment in Preferences

Using conjoint experiments, the survey presented respondents with pairs of hypothetical profiles of potential immigrants and asked them to choose which one they preferred for admission to Japan. Each immigrant profile varied randomly across nine attributes: country of origin, reason for application, prior visits to Japan, occupation, work experience, employment plan, sex, Japanese language ability, and education. By analyzing thousands of these choices, the researchers can precisely measure how much each attribute drives public preference.

Key Finding 1: Strong Preference for Highly Skilled, Japanese-Speaking Applicants

The findings reveal that occupation and language skills rank top of mind in determining public attitudes toward potential immigrants. Respondents overwhelmingly favor high-skilled professionals – physicians, IT engineers, and research scientists – over care workers, construction laborers, cleaners, and convenience store clerks.

Japanese language ability proved to be another critical gateway. Fluency in Japanese was one of the single most powerful positive traits an applicant could have, suggesting that language integration is a cornerstone of public acceptance.

Key Finding 2: Clear Preference for Western Applicants

Respondents strongly favor immigrants from Germany and the United States (around 55%), with Vietnam, India, Turkey, and Brazil close behind (51–53%). South Korean applicants fall slightly below average (48%).

Applicants from China, however, are chosen only 37-39% of the time, a dramatically lower percentage than every other origin country tested. This gap persists even when controlling for occupation, education, and language ability. Thus, for Chinese applicants, Japanese language fluency provides a much smaller boost than for applicants from other countries. These findings suggest the resistance to Chinese immigrants stems from geopolitical concerns rather than doubts about skills or integration.

The February 8, 2026, election and the subsequent government formation do not appear to have meaningfully shifted the conjoint-measured immigration preferences by occupation, language ability, and national origin.

The Power of Framing

In a companion experiment, the researchers tested how framing influences the Japanese public’s opinion on immigration. Participants were randomly assigned to read a short article framing immigration as an economic benefit, a cultural challenge, a security concern, or using no framing at all. They were then asked to answer a question about their views.

Key Finding 3: Economic Framing Opens Minds; Cultural and Security Fears Close Them

The way immigration is discussed matters immensely. The results show that positive economic framing significantly increases support for immigration, but positive cultural and security framings had no such statistically significant effect in any wave. By contrast, fear appears to be a powerful motivator, as negative framing of immigration reduces public support, with security-negative framing showing the largest and most consistent effect observed. 

Furthermore, the February 8, 2026, election and the subsequent government formation appear to have had a meaningful impact on immigration preference by framing. The impact of negative framings has become measurably larger one month after the election, suggesting that the Japanese public may be more responsive to anti-immigration rhetoric.

"The election — and the subsequent government formation — does not appear to have meaningfully shifted conjoint-measured immigration preferences," the researchers write on the SJB website. "The framing experiment tells a somewhat different story, however: while the direction of all effects is consistent, negative framings have become numerically larger in the third sub-wave, suggesting that one month after the election, the Japanese public may be more responsive to anti-immigration rhetoric."

Immigration Becomes Key Issue in Japan’s Gubernatorial Races

In a March 2, 2026, report on the prominence of the "foreigner problem" in Japan's gubernatorial races, the Asahi Shimbun cited the latest data from SJB.

The Asahi Shimbun reporter, Mari Fujisaki, writes:

“Data also shows heightened election interest in ‘foreigner issues.’ The Japan Barometer – a Stanford University Japan Program online survey of thousands on Japanese society and politics – presented over 10 policy options in November 2022, April 2023, and February 2026 (twice), asking respondents to rate their level of support or opposition. Regarding one policy, ‘accepting foreign workers,’ opposition stood at 35.5% and 36.6% in 2022 and 2023, respectively. By contrast, in the two surveys conducted in February 2026, opposition rose to 53.1% and 53.4%, marking an increase of approximately 17 percentage points between 2022 and 2026. For most other items, opposition rates either decreased or remained unchanged, with increases limited to a few percentage points at most.”

You can view a PDF version of the article. The online version and further reporting by the Asahi Shimbun on the SJB’s latest survey findings are forthcoming. 

SJB has published findings on Japanese public opinions on issues ranging from national security policy and the Taiwan contingency to same-sex marriage, marital surname choices, and women's leadership. Learn more  >