It might be racism. But those thoughts aren't going to be undone with visas for rich nomads/tourists who'll stay for 6 months and dip. It's only accelerating justification for racism amongst locals.

And lumping any sort of economic concerns a country has into racism, then considering it something that shouldn't even be talked about because it's "racism", is how these issues start to snowball fast and more extreme racist reactions grow. A few European countries have taken hard right swings because people who said anything about immigration policies were shut down as racists. Now people don't even care about being called racist because the word is normalized. And that's a dangerous path to have started treading down. Japan is a country where being said to have some prejudice isn't something people will shamefully back away from; things could snowball much faster than in Europe.

It’s exactly the same in Germany. It’s not that the system is designed against foreigners, but that it’s not designed for them at all. It’s a sort of “Falsehoods states believe about people” situation . This leads to a lot of Catch-22 situations where you need A to get B and B to get A, and the only way to fix it is to go through expensive loopholes.

It's not a 'Japan thing'. I pay a higher rate on my mortgage because my spouse was not a citizen of where we live when we took it out. There are fewer providers willing to offer mortgages in this situation but, presumably, there's still enough of a price incentive that the premium isn't pulled out of thin air.

It's also common for landlords to ask for higher deposits or months paid up-front.