Probably because you could end up losing your visa and get sued by the Olympic Committee if you say 'Shinzo Abe is suppressing covid-19 research because of the Olympics.' Maybe even jail time.
Also, tons of people have been saying that for months, both native and foreign.
There is a difference between someone with a big internet presence and someone without one saying something.
Assuming someone at immigration would take the time to look into his background (not just his paperwork), find out that he wrote a Covid-19 white paper with higher projections than the government at the time and then blacklist him for it is such a mischaracterization of Japanese process, I don't know where to start. It's not like there's a source I can reference, but I also have a lot of knowledge of Japanese immigration through knowing plenty of foreigners on different visas in Japan and have never heard of anyone getting rejected if they meet the conditions.
I can share one interesting anecdotal counter-example to show how easygoing Japanese immigration is. Someone I knew was on a fraudulent work visa "working" for a friend. He was actually creating a startup. By the time immigration found out, he had the necessary scale to sponsor his own work visa, so he wrote an apology letter and then switched to his own work visa even though the foundation of the company was built on a fraudulent visa.
I don't know anything in particular about his concerns about his own status. I have, on the other hand, known many LPRs in the US who were extraordinarily careful about their engagement in public matters out of concern about their status.
If your argument is that protection for PRs in Japan is stronger than that of US LPRs, I'm going to go ahead and call that an extraordinary claim. At some point, though, probably rapidly approaching, litigating this point becomes ghoulish. I haven't heard Patrick say he's specifically concerned about his own status, but he's clearly concerned about some of the people he worked with.
That has to be a function of knowing a particular variety of (however reasonably) paranoid LPR's, though, no? I can't imagine it being a core concern for the vast majority of LPRs.
Please enlighten us. How does public defamation work in Japan then? I don't know much but I did just google it right now[0] and to my layman eyes it looks bad:
> “(1) A person who defames another by alleging facts in public shall, regardless of whether such facts are true or false, be punished by imprisonment with or without work for not more than three (3) years or a fine of not more than 500,000 yen.”