Constella Security Japan traced the clip to an Instagram post from August 2025 that circulated mainly in Arab countries and had nothing to do with theft or Japanese railways, Kyodo News reported on Sept. 26. The views were tallied across X, YouTube and other platforms through Sept. 15.

Posts that spread in Japan from March swapped the Arabic text for captions such as "metal theft by foreigners." Many of the accounts sharing them had previously posted messages opposing the acceptance of foreign workers, according to the firm, which is developing disinformation countermeasures under an Internal Affairs Ministry program.

Researchers warn that such fabrications are pulling Japan into a spiral of disinformation about foreign crime that stokes xenophobia and plays into the hands of the far right.

"This sort of thing can be extremely damaging," Yo Nonaka, an associate professor at Keio University who studies Muslim communities in Japan, told the South China Morning Post. She said fake news on social media is "deliberately designed to show foreigners doing wrong."

Nonaka said right-wing social media and political parties feed off each other. "Influencers who want to spread fake news for clicks are helping to move Japanese society further to the right," she said. "Far-right parties then spread the fake news to get more voters."

The anti-immigration Sanseito party, which campaigns under a "Japanese First" slogan, won 15 lower house seats in a February snap election, up from two, Bloomberg reported. The result built on its breakthrough in the July 2025 upper house election.

People attend a campaign event for Japan’s far-right Sanseito party in Tokyo, in January. Photo by AP

On July 24, Kimi Onoda, the cabinet minister in charge of policy on foreign nationals, told reporters that about one in four inmates at Tokyo's Fuchu Prison were foreign, legal news site Bengo4.com reported. She said her tour of the prison two days earlier had reinforced the need to deal strictly with crimes by foreigners.

Nationwide, foreign nationals made up 6.6% of inmates at the end of 2024, according to Bengo4.com's calculation from Justice Ministry correctional statistics.

In August, online commenters blamed foreigners for thefts of metal taps from farmers' fields, calling it a crime almost unheard of "before there were this many foreigners," the SCMP reported.

In Ibaraki prefecture, thefts of brass water valves from rice paddies reached 111 by the end of August, up 46 from a year earlier.

Police there arrested a 31-year-old local construction worker on Aug. 30 and rearrested him on Sept. 28 on suspicion of stealing 91 valves in total and selling them to scrap dealers. He admitted the latest theft, telling investigators he needed money for living expenses, the Sankei Shimbun reported.

Makoto Watanabe, a professor of communications and media at Hokkaido Bunkyo University, told the SCMP that false reports fuel distrust at a time of rising tensions and are being used as a political tool by parties that campaign primarily on the issue. "These are criticisms based on lies and I wonder why more Japanese do not realize that," he said.

He likened the hostility to sentiment in the U.S. under President Donald Trump, the rise of far-right parties in the U.K., France and Italy, and recent election wins by the far-right AfD in Germany.

Japan had 4.03 million foreign residents as of Jan. 1, or 3.3% of its population, the Nikkei reported, citing Internal Affairs Ministry data.

Japan is "desperate for more workers as the population continues to fall," Watanabe said. "Treating all foreigners like criminals is only going to convince them to find work elsewhere."

"Fake news is only going to hurt us by damaging our economy over the long term," he said.