Japan is super racist.

I honestly did not think this point was up to any debate at all.

I deal with this problem by not trying to move to Japan, they can be as racist on their own island as they want.

Yeah, but that hits a wall under the modern moral climate, where it’s implicitly argued that foreigners have a right to immigrate to, essentially, anywhere, but particularly to developed nations.  The idea of “the Japanese on their own island” has the audacity to suggest collective ownership of a nation-state for the benefit of an exclusive group - the old Nationalist model.

A model that I actually approve of, minus the racism, but one that now would mark me as right-wing, even though I don’t consider myself right-wing.

Yes, this is my view.

The Japanese don’t have the “right” to “be racist on their own island”, if that means excluding immigrants. All this amounts to is placing the whims of the collective (the alleged ownership of the islands by the Japanese race as a whole) over the rights of the individual: i.e. the right of individual Japanese to invite immigrants to work for them and to sell or rent property to them.

Suppose a group of Japanese racists get together and start a corporation. That corporation buys a small island, and and allows its owners to live on the island, so long as they are Japanese. Land is portioned out based on stake in the corporation.

This is not a covenant, because owners of the corporation can sell to whoever they want. Similarly, the corporation could, by majority vote, sell the island, or allow non-Japanese owners to live there. There is no condition that restricts the use of the land in perpetuity ( @theunitofcaring raised this objection the last time this came up).

However, so long as a majority of the owners of the corporation don’t want non-Japanese living on the island, they can’t. And practically, the rule won’t change unless the owners become less racist over time and generations, or wealthy anti-racist activists buy them out, fairly compensating the racists for being prevented from satisfying their preference. Or somewhat fairly, anyway; I’m not quite sure how only needing a majority stake affect the cost of buying them out. That’s a question for someone in murders and executions.

Do the Japanese racists have the right to do that? If not, why not? And what is the minimum change to the scheme that would make it within their rights, in your opinion?

Conversely, if your do think that would be within their rights, I suppose your objection to the current restriction on immigration to Japan is that it’s not the Japanese’s island?

That would be fine, if they acquired the land voluntarily.

What’s not fine with the Japanese government doing that is that it didn’t acquire the land that way.

And a big difference is that if they are restricted to acquiring the land voluntarily, that would greatly limit the amount of it that they could practically obtain. But supposing hypothetically that this weren’t true and that freedom of contract led to one private “government” owning all the land, then that would be a strong point of having a “public” government to limit their ability to do that.