In this thesis, I analyse media and political discourses surrounding the acceptance of refugees in Japan from 1975 to 2021. Despite an increasing number of refugees worldwide due to protracted conflicts and persecution, Japan has almost closed its borders to refugees. In 2019, before international travel was heavily restricted by the pandemic, there were 10,375 asylum applications in Japan, but the number of people who were recognised as refugees was only 44. Although Japan is one of the largest donors to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the country has been criticised internationally for its reluctance to accept refugees. Although Japan’s reluctance to accept refugees has not changed in decades, there have been diverse discussions in the media and politics about how Japan should respond to refugees. In this thesis, I focus on discourses about the acceptance of refugees in the media and politics and explore the rationale behind the discursive responses. For this purpose, I analyse media articles, the proceedings of the Diet and its committees and government documents from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. By referring to the concepts of national identity, state identity, governmental belonging, kokusaika (internationalisation) and tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence), I aim to decipher ideologies embedded in Japanese responses to refugees. I argue that, on the one hand, concerns about Japan’s international status and slogans such as kokusaika and tabunka kyōsei have promoted generous attitudes toward the acceptance of refugees. On the other hand, unequal relationships between Japanese people, many of whom perceive themselves as ethnically homogeneous, and non-Japanese people, including refugees and asylum seekers, have impeded drastic changes in Japanese responses to refugees.