I hope you don't mind me adding a concrete example because some people don't process this fully
I have a friend who is a Westerner with a Japanese family, 2 young kids, has been there decades... she couldn't risk leaving the country to visit her own parents in an emergency because she would be prohibited from reentering Japan and seeing her husband and young children again for an undefined period of time. Ultimately that period ended up being something like 6~8 months before they finally changed the freaking law. The policy was unprecedented and illogical, I don't think any other extreme covid prevention countries went that far. Slightly mistiming a trip pre-covid and she would have been kept from her children for that many months, completely crazy
I have a friend who is a Westerner with a Japanese family, 2 young kids, has been there decades... she couldn't risk leaving the country to visit her own parents in an emergency because she would be prohibited from reentering Japan and seeing her husband and young children again for an undefined period of time. Ultimately that period ended up being something like 6~8 months before they finally changed the freaking law. The policy was unprecedented and illogical, I don't think any other extreme covid prevention countries went that far. Slightly mistiming a trip pre-covid and she would have been kept from her children for that many months, completely crazy