Kari comments

Someone please explain to me why an overcrowded nation like Japan needs more people

Japan is only overcrowded if you live in Tokyo. There are large parts of the country that are only sparsely inhabited.

Outside of teaching English, the great majority of jobs should require foreigners to have a degree of Japanese language proficiency.

I don't see how anyone should interpret this as discrimination.

I agree with that much. If the company is operating in German, a job applicant should be expected to know German. If the company is operating in Japanese, a job applicant should be expected to know Japanese.

If a Japanese person went to America with extremely limited English proficiency, is it realistic to expect anyone to hire them for a decent-paying job?

I sympathize with people who want to work in Japan and don't know Japanese, but it's not discrimination if no one will hire you because you can't communicate with the employer. What is discrimination is if you speak Japanese flawlessly or near-flawlessly and they still won't hire you or if they treat you as an inferior even if they do.

Bold words. But unless your government actually plans on doing something to make the Japanese immigration process less ridiculous and confront the xenophobia among J-people, you're not going to encourage any gaijin to live in Japan.

You're not wrong, Hatoyama. Immigration is generally viewed as positive overall. (There are some negatives, but the positives outweigh them.) But your government will have to encourage a paradigm shift in the way J-people view foreigners for there to be significant improvement there.