President Joe Biden lumped in longtime ally Japan with Russia and China, denouncing them as “xenophobic,” which drew widespread outrage.
Speaking at a campaign fundraiser on Wednesday that marked Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Biden credited the United States’s economic power to immigrants, using China, Russia, and Japan as a contrast.
“Why is China stalling so badly economically, why is Japan having trouble, why is Russia, why is India, because they’re xenophobic,” he said, according to Reuters. “They don’t want immigrants. Immigrants are what makes us strong.”
Since the end of World War II, Japan has served as one of the U.S.’s closest allies, particularly in serving as a key bulwark against China following its takeover by the communists in 1948. Biden’s comments mark one of the harshest criticisms of the country by a U.S. president since the end of World War II.
Jeffrey Hall, Japanese studies lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba, Japan, told NBC News that the comments weren’t diplomatically wise.
“It’s not something diplomatic to say about one of America’s closest allies, especially because America has its own problems with xenophobia that Japanese are seeing on the news all the time,” he said. “So it just strikes me as something that was unnecessary to say in this context.”
“It will sound like America is once again talking down to the Japanese,” he continued. “And that’s not really an effective way of getting Japan to fix various problems with its society that even Japanese people would agree are problems.”
The president was also hit by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).
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“Biden included an important ally Japan along with China & Russia as a ‘xenophobic’ country,” he said in a post on X. “That is why his staff doesn’t want him speaking without those note cards.”
Japan is moving to accept more foreign workers in an effort to stimulate its stagnating economy, which has failed to recover from an economic crisis beginning in the 1990s. The former second-largest economy in the world declined to fourth place this year, falling behind China and Germany.