The number of replies to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s posts on X that mention foreign citizens or immigrants has surged since she took office a year ago, with a notable increase starting late last month.

In some cases, comments against immigrants were repeated even when the prime minister did not mention policies pertaining to foreign nationals.

These replies appear to suggest a growing interest in and anxiety about foreign residents in Japan, whose number reached a record 4,281,026 as of the end of June.

Over the year since her inauguration on Oct. 21 last year, Takaichi has made a total of 868 posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. As of Friday, there were 1,502,698 replies to those posts, with 112,481, or 7.5%, of them mentioning foreign nationals or immigrants, according to a Jiji survey using the social media analysis tool Brandwatch.

This compares with only 16, or 1.8%, of the prime minister’s posts that included either term.

On Sept.…