A large number of Airbnb hosts were using this Business Manager Visa as a way to stay in Japan.
People in China realized they could just buy/lease a guesthouse in Osaka / any tourist hotspot, and rent it out on Airbnb. Then they become a "business manager" and get a Japanese resident visa within 3 months. All you needed is to invest 5million yen, which is like 31k USD, which isn't much. People wrote entire online guides on how to do this. They even had brokers/agents helping people with the process [0].
Approximately half of all business manager visas went to Chinese nationals. In Osaka, 41% of all short-term rentals were operated by Chinese individuals [1]. The visa practically turned into an Airbnb host visa.
It's not surprising at all that Japan made the rules stricter.
Yep. There was also a proliferation of Indian restaurants in the major cities, for the same basic reason. (Though I have to say that seems like a much harder road than operating a guesthouse for people from your own country, which is what I presume was the Chinese approach.)
Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. There have been stories in the Japanese press about long-time restauranteurs being shut down by the new rules.
> Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”.
Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. The New York Times did a good podcast on how uncapped family reunification ended up being a loophole that totally overturned all the limits and compromises in the 1965 immigration reform laws in the U.S.: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
It's a contentious issue in Canada, too. There are legit reasons families may want to bring in certain extended family members (grandparents for childcare, etc), but it becomes a chain. Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services.
IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to sponsor 2 others on long term VISAs. But there would still be fraud (there always will be I suppose).
> Canada's elderly benefits are designed for people that have lived here all their lives, so it adds a strain to healthcare and other services.
In Germany, the benefits are tied to contributions, and after 45 years old, having some sort of pension is a requirement for getting a residence permit.
That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Those workers will have demands too.
> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it.
I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse.
There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.
> Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it.
It's a huge benefit, giving more people the benefits of freedom, bringing the country benefits of more free people (including economic growth), and bringing families together.
As there is little documented downside, it's a huge win. I want people to have freedom and families to be together. What's the downside?
I have to say though, the abundant authentic, high-quality and low-cost Indian and Nepalese restaurants across the country was a real quality of life benefit for people living in Japan.
I feel like letting people buy their way in to visas is actually a pretty good system from a strictly pragmatic standpoint but 5 million yen seems far too low.
>I feel like letting people buy their way in to visas is actually a pretty good system
That depends of what you're hoping to prevent.
If you want to filter out people who can't sustain themselves, petty crime or the like, it works. But it can open the door to a lot of unwanted effects.
A foreign national that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.
> A [person] that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.
The short answer is this an exemplar of the distinction between generating income by producing vs generating income by rent-seeking.
Producing something, goods, services, useful information, etc. is a net plus for society, adding value for both the producer and the consumer, making the society overall richer.
Rent-seeking is purely extractive - it extracts value from the consumer, and in the cases where the extractor is outside of the society, e.g., a foreigner or oligarch-type, it extracts value from the society, leaving the society poorer.
Many positives. For example, the buildings get to be maintained and left in a better condition, rather than deteriorate. Streets look better too, and landrods have an interest that their assets are located in areas with low crime and adequate public services, as that improves the value of their properties. Often airbnb properties are well maintained, and I've seen a few examples where derelict properties were turned into nice looking houses in my town.
Landlords such as Airbnb hosts usually invest a lot in furniture and equipment, helping to keep the producers in business. Not to mention provide employment thanks to renovations, cleaning and maintenance. I'd say it leaves the economy more vibrant and benefits all. A classic example where landlords were banned was the Soviet Union, and all the housing problems that followed. Although the USSR finally collapsed, people there still live in the old Khrushchevkas...
The general feedback loop is "have lots of money === easier to make more money", and doing so via passive approaches like "own property, rent it out" basically spirals out of control to a few owning a lot, unless you try to restrict it somehow. Add in that "vacation rentals" is hugely interesting for real estate owners as you get so much more per owned property, and suddenly local residents are even harder hit by property not being available even for long-term rent anymore. Final drop being that the real estate owner doesn't even live, work or spend their money in the country of the property itself, and suddenly it's basically all downside for the country and the people living there.
The notion of earning "passive income" as a landlord is a total fantasy. The reality is that it takes a lot of work. Otherwise tenants, vendors, and property managers will wreck the assets and rob you blind.
You can outsource pretty much the entire thing, and just be a name on a paper, and receive money in your bank account, that's as close to "passive income" as you can get. Lots of people do this today, pretty common for landlords to do so in Spain for example, and I'm sure all around the world.
I tried this once and it wasn’t great. It was a single home, and in a college neighborhood (house was cheap, ergo rent was low).
The rent paid the mortgage, but that was about it. Repairs were more or less out of pocket.
I gave it up because I didn’t live locally and got raked over the coals on repairs a couple times. I finally quit because the property managers had an “emergency repairs” clause where they could do repairs without my approval and bill me.
One of the renters clogged the toilet at 11pm on a Saturday, moron decided to call the property management because I guess plungers are confusing, they decided that was an emergency, and I got a $700 bill to send a plumber out at midnight to plunge a toilet. Like not even a roto rooter or something, just a generic grocery store plunger.
Became clear I was either a) going to have to be much more involved, or b) accept that the returns are basically just equity in the house on a 15 year mortgage, minus overpriced repairs.
My parents had a beach house for a while. It was rented May-Sept every year. They'd visit for a week in each shoulder season, spend half the time doing major cleaning/fixing, and left the day-to-day during rental season to a management company (same one that managed bookings for the house).
It wasn't 100% passive, but it was about as close as you can get as a retired upper-middle-class couple.
> A foreign national that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.
Is this a creative way of arguing that landlords are a net loss for the country? Because I would like to remind you that MANY people cannot afford to buy homes, and renting is how they make sure they don't become homeless.
Foreign capital is undesirable in the housing market because:
1) It raises demand (when buying a home as a local, you now also have to compete with foreigners "investing", and this raises prices).
2) It often develops housing in a very unhealthy direction: Airbnbs and vacation apartments are toxic for local society and must be kept in check, otherwise you end up with half the houses just being shuttered for the whole off-season, and towns becoming empty husks.
3) Rent is a lot of money, and its obviously beneficial if it stays in the local economy instead of flowing abroad.
Because that implies more supply and landlords are happy with the supply being restricted. The people that has the money to build won't, the government will follow the money, so the state doesn't help. That kind of question reeks to "why are you poor?", well, because I have no money!
So, you changed topics from airbnb, which removes units from the rental market, to landlords in general? I think I can play that game. Lets go for the easiest one against landlords: Renting being the alternative to homelessness isn't a feature, it's a failure of housing policy. Homeowners carry 400% more net wealth than renters with comparable income, normalizing a rental market just means normalizing a wealth gap.
If foreign nationals are able to extract a lot of capital through rents then that's a sign that the government has made it too difficult to develop new rental housing.
This really isn't the case in Japan. It's extremely easy to develop new rental housing, and rents are fairly low.
However, it can be difficult for foreigners without a Japanese support network (like a blue-chip employer) to rent property in Japan at market price, because of discrimination by landlords. This isn't because of government policy. It's because building managers have the impression, mistaken or otherwise, that foreign tenants won't respect the rules, will be difficult to communicate with, or might skip town with unpaid rent.
A number of European countries have allowed this; the 2010s were the heyday of this path. But it turns out that a lot of the people with big money to buy residence, got their money from organized crime, and it isn’t always easy to vet applicants (or corrupt officials could overlook the applicant’s background).
The Maltese route is still open but a bit different since 2025. It's now citizenship by merit (aka the old by investment, since dumping money is considered a cultural contribution).
It's not a popular opinion but I agree. As long as the price is very high, it is almost guaranteed to be a net social benefit. Even more beneficial is that people who are wealth enough to buy a visa will usually also consume a lot (paying a lot of consumption tax), stimulate the economy, create businesses, and invest. Wealthy people are also significantly underrepresented in crime.
5 million yen is the company capital requirement. They would form a company, invest 5 million yen into it, then the company would lease an apartment and rent it out on Airbnb.
Rent would cost ¥60,000–120,000/month, they would list it on Airbnb for ¥20,000/night, then assuming 50% occupancy the return is ~¥200,000/month.
It was very profitable. The payback period for the ¥5 million was 1.5 - 2 years.
>all aside from the cost of purchasing a home in Osaka
Which they were almost certainly divvying up. A bunch of people invest $32k each. Some management company buys the home, pays them all a cut of airBNB proceeds, etc. You don't "do" anything beyond put up $32k for your $31k piece of paper.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably not in most cases.
A lot of Chinese are cash rich (perhaps not on average but with 1.3 billion people the absolute number is large compared to other countries) and want to invest abroad, and are buying properties all over the place.
Another piece of evidence is the huge number of Chinese students in UK universities (from my experience) although the tuition fee alone is about £35k ($46k) a year.
And how are they not managerial, entrepreneur, doing business ?
Is there something illegitimate in doing an activity that yield profit when the national is Chinese ? Or when it's a short term let ? Or when it is something that doesn't directly contributed to innovation benefiting the nation ?
It’s the difference between setting up a system to encourage investment and hoping for a factory, or at least a large department store, and instead getting a DataCenter that employs 30 people total.
I don't think it's "illegitimate" as such, just parasitic behaviour the world probably needs less of. They buy up real estate, then rent it out, living in another country, basically just extracting wealth, and while it's legal, it's still lazy and kind of despicable behaviour from a "we're all humans on this planet" perspective. From the perspective of Japanese people, you see foreigners coming to where you live and strictly making things worse, not better.
But of course if we limit our perspective to an economic one, then it seems like a wise and sound approach to "escaping the hamster wheel" for the average Chinese person, easy money right? I think people in Japan probably don't have that perspective though, but instead look at the tail-effects of allowing that sort of behavior. That's why they changed the rules probably.
(These two videos are quite recent at the time of writing this here.)
Don't get fooled by the deliberate (but misleading) title(s). This is a narration of more and more restrictions coming. So the article here also taps into this 1:1.
In some ways it reminds me of Nigel Farage in the UK, though in Japan it is not quite as tied to an individual person.
I applaud the Japanese for being capable of recognizing that many parts of their culture are unique and worth preserving. That what makes Japan Japan is not just the land and the name, but the people and their culture.
> In one case, investigators in Kanagawa Prefecture found that a Sri Lankan national had set up roughly 600 shell companies. He also allegedly submitted business manager visa applications for at least six Sri Lankan nationals by listing them as company presidents on paper, even though they actually worked manual labor jobs.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government has a problem with this practice. The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable. When the issue was raised, the income requirements were changed as an immediate reaction, but the ISA has broad authority to grant or deny based on many circumstances.
Put differently, acts like this were already illegal, but difficult for the ISA to catch. So they changed the base requirements which are theoretically much easier to catch than the actual illegal behavior.
He also allegedly submitted business manager visa applications for at least six Sri Lankan nationals by listing them as company presidents on paper, even though they actually worked manual labor jobs.
As a Brit living in Japan (non-resident) I think they should protect themselves at all costs, lest what happened to my country happen to theirs. If the business visa was abused, that abuse should be stopped, not just allowed to happen like we would do.
Your point doesn't follow logically. If you're a non-resident living in Japan according to Japanese peoples' expectations, why can't you criticize other non-residents who aren't living in a way that's consistent with Japanese peoples' expectations?
Because someone who's not a resident in Japan, and claims to be living here, is fundamentally either also abusing the system, or not actually living here.
In fairness, there are a lot of Japanese people who feel they were not consulted on the scale and scope of "Japanese peoples' expectations". So many such people that they could get a Prime Minister elected. I wouldn't assume that living according to the laws that exist currently means that you're living in accordance with "Japanese peoples' expectations". That's the whole reason the laws are being changed at the moment.
That said, as a foreigner right now the best thing to do is to watch the legal environment as it shifts so that you don't fall afoul of it. And to be extra mindful of adhering to Japanese customs, which boils down to being nice along with things like realizing some places may not look on your tattoos the same way those tattoos are looked on in the West.
What’s rich about it? You can live in Japan as a non-resident and still be following 100% of the rules.
I agree with the GP. It’s their country. They set the rules. If they want to change the rules because those rules aren’t working for them, that’s their prerogative. As a USian, I’m actually sort of jealous that they have the ability to make changes so quickly.
Well, it depends a little on what OP meant by “resident” - often that gets used by expats to mean “permanent resident”, which is a pretty high bar.
But even if you just assume that OP
is here on the digital nomad visa thing, you’re effectively living here. More to the point, you’re following the rules, and it’s not at all ironic or contradictory to have an opinion that the rules can be changed by the host.
If they meant "permanent resident" when they said "resident" that'd be a pretty weird, given, you know, our 在留カード literally say "residence card" on them; but perhaps this actually common, and I'm one of today's lucky 10,000.
But if they're here on a Digital Nomad visa, then their stay is limited to 6mo with no pathway to extending this — _I_ personally don't think that qualifies as "living" in a place, but perhaps reasonable people can disagree on this point.
Yes, I knew as soon as I wrote that that someone would chime in with the English definition of 在留. I thought about deleting it since it isn’t important to the argument, but I left it in because it’s a thing I’ve heard expats say here.
Look, even if OP is just living here on a tourist visa and doesn’t have any form of residency at all, and (s)he’s still following the rules as established, it’s not even remotely ironic to say that the rules are the rules, and the host has the right to change the rules.
It would be ironic if OP did that while admitting to violating immigration law.
It’s not the point. If you’re following the rules, you can call it whatever you like.
It’s a weirdly motivated form of pedantry to get angry at someone for using the word “living” when you know nothing about their situation. It’s almost like you’re looking for a reason to be upset.
Double standards. He is an immigrant in Japan but he doesn’t want immigrants both in his host (Japan) and home (UK) countries. Pretty ironic come to think of. I guess he thinks his type are “good” immigrants, others are not so much.
The UK isn't exactly an assimilation success story.
As someone with potential aspirations of moving to a different country I don't mind it if they tried to avoid that kind of scenario and to retain their state's character to some extent.
The irony comment comes across somewhat innefective and petulant when I and others i've encountered with such views hold them in spite of the effects it could have for us. I don't see the point in laughing at that any more than i see it in calling out irony when a rich person calls for tax hoops to be closed and taxation to be fair.
Many countries are tightening the immigration screws. For example, Thailand just reduced visa exempt stays for most countries from 60 to 30 days and have been going hard after illegal foreign businesses set up under Thai nominees.
While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.
This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.
The problem is that identifying who the "best" immigrants are for your country can be very difficult when thousands upon thousands of people are trying to game the system.
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
Do people starting an 'airbnb' business help with the aging problem? Same thing with some of the other immigrants. They're not really creating economical value as much as they're competing with natives taking the 'easy part'.
immigration does fuck all to alleviate demographic collapse. Canada, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and all the other countries who have enriched themselves into double digit percentage of their population being alien and some of their cities being majority minority, what exactly do they have to show for it? their TFR is below 1.5 and continues to rapidly decline.
Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is?
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.
Don't mistake what the elites want with what working class people want. Elites want a higher population - even if they're immigrants - so the market grows bigger for their businesses. But immigrants come with many problems for the working class people.
The elites aren't going to have a house next to immigrants. They don't feel the effects in their castle.
Anyways, this change is to target only the best immigrants. There are still ways for them to immigrate to Japan. This change just closes the loophole for lower quality immigrants.
This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals are not just producers and consumers...
Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.
"Social homogeneity" is how you get suburban shitholes in Utah where the police trip over themselves to defend a LEGO pawn shop owner from being served papers. People blamed the "Mormon Mafia[0]" for that, but the real problem is just that social homogeneity sucks, especially if you're on the receiving end of it.
As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound.
Anyway, migration is a human right.
What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny.
For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"!
So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right.
Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them.
But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it!
[0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are.
[1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.
If you attack people as soon as they say that perhaps Japanese (or insert any other country) want to preserve their culture and who they are (which makes it a "shithole" according to you) and immediately label them racists and take the extremist view that it is your "human right" to be let in any country you please then perhaps the issue is not others...
Yeah, but folks doing scams to get visas are hardly the "best immigrants", rather amoral scum that is largely incompatible with mentality and moral values of host country. Clearly not the type of immigration they desperately want, can't blame them
Anyone who is at the top of the ladder (educated, wealthy) will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. You can't fake it with incentives, America doesn't have to offer immigrants anything it simply exists as the global centre for tech, finance, medical etc. - nobody is lining up to move to China, India or Germany.
Anyone who is at the bottom of the ladder is, as Bernie Sanders put it, a pawn in the Koch brothers conspiracy to reduce wages. These countries don't care about quality they just want to jack up housing demand and bottom out wages because thats great for the asset class and big business (until they automate and ditch all these people)
The immigration narrative is BS. The idea that we're aging out so must desperately bring in more UberEats riders is nuts. Nobody in my country can afford to be a nurse - I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country because after 20 years working for the NHS she simply is not paid enough to live.
We're absolutely obsessed with immigration and all we are doing is lining the pockets of corporates, brain-draining countries that desperately need skilled people and blurring the lines of social responsibility in a globalist economy.
>will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US.
What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.
Not even close. There's actual data on this, and more high net worth individuals go to UAE, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia and even Israel than the US.
Fundamentally the issue is that visa requirements are restrictive creating concentrated demand for labor. There are countries with higher paying jobs that can done online, but every position doesn't just shift overseas. We put the onus on the individual to stop illegal activity, but it’s the business owners that hire and sustain this kind of employment. A high minimum wage would negate the need and desire for irregular migration. It would also provide good paying jobs for migrants who could afford to live in the country.
For Southeast Asia specifically, they've been battered by low quality, trashy tourists - more so after Covid. Locals are respectful but many tourists are entitled in SEA. You see plenty of videos on social media of tourists starting fights with locals, being disruptive in public areas, and generally doing something illegal.
A lot of trashy tourists are moving from Bali over to Vietnam. I few sorry for the locals. Yes, they'll make a few extra bucks a week from more tourists but at the cost of seeing your society get destroyed slowly.
Dear Vietnam, please do not try to become the next Thailand and Bali for tourism. Do not welcome sex tourists, criminals, crypto bros, begpackers. Don't sell your soul for a few extra dollars.
Thought the name seems familiar: Jake Adelstein got his 2009 memoir Tokyo Vice turned into a (fun to watch, apparently very dramatized, though that was already criticized for the memoirs) 2 season HBO series in 2022.
The newspaper he apparently worked in stated that he was never part of the reporting teams for organized crime and had written only a very few articles about the yakuza during his time there.
He got called out several times about his stories so I wouldn't be surprised if he's making stuff up again.
The book is far more interesting than the drama. In fact I'd go so far to say that the drama has really nothing much to do with the book besides the title and some superficial characters.
> Foreign business owners could lose their residency status after the government increased the capital requirement from 5 million yen (approx. $31,000) to 30 million yen (approx. $187,000).1
A $31,000 capital requirement for a "business" is a joke. A food cart--not a truck, just a cart--requires more capital than that.
Nippon Kaigi friendly are mostly trad big corps. These days the anxiety came from everyday folks that are starting to consider Sanseito vs good ol' LDPJ.
While not 100% the same, I do think that the last LDPJ huge victory reminds me of 2019 UK election, the last big hurrah for Conservative, before Reform starts seeping in.
A dying country that doesn't want small business to continue, that's not something I had in my 2026 bingo card collection. Be that as it may, I would just close down the business and incorporate elsewhere. Let them sort out their population crisis on their own, I'm sure children will magically pop out of nowhere.
I was surprised when I first heard of that. I actually noticed this
on Paolo from Tokyo's youtube channel first. The vibe was strange,
because Paolo seemed happy about stricter controls. I was baffled
about that, since it ran counter to the rest of Paolo's channel
(which is actually best with regards to the series "A day in the
life of a japanese xyz"; this is actually insightful and even
historically important). So Japan sending the message "gaijin
leave now" kind of would make me reconsider where to go - aka
not Japan. If it is in Asia, well, there may now be friendlier
countries. And the technological gap isn't that huge anymore;
South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan - these are almost equal to
Japan. Even some parts in mainland China (but who wants to
live in sinomarxistic-capitalism - that's such a weird psycho
combination). Even Thailand, while it is not on the same
standard as the other countries, may seem friendlier now than
Japan with his anti-foreigner's policies. It seems their
true mindset has never really changed. That may also explain
why the english language is still regarded as a hostile
entity to many; contrast this to Singapore please.
It will become increasingly difficult to police international borders. On the other hand, commercial space travel will create new states that can police there borders. The borders don’t disappear but they will change
People in China realized they could just buy/lease a guesthouse in Osaka / any tourist hotspot, and rent it out on Airbnb. Then they become a "business manager" and get a Japanese resident visa within 3 months. All you needed is to invest 5million yen, which is like 31k USD, which isn't much. People wrote entire online guides on how to do this. They even had brokers/agents helping people with the process [0].
Approximately half of all business manager visas went to Chinese nationals. In Osaka, 41% of all short-term rentals were operated by Chinese individuals [1]. The visa practically turned into an Airbnb host visa.
It's not surprising at all that Japan made the rules stricter.
[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/06/05/japan/immigrati...
[1] https://chinatravelnews.com/article/186285/
Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. There have been stories in the Japanese press about long-time restauranteurs being shut down by the new rules.
Family reunification is a gaping loophole in any skilled immigration law and developed countries need to seriously limit it. The New York Times did a good podcast on how uncapped family reunification ended up being a loophole that totally overturned all the limits and compromises in the 1965 immigration reform laws in the U.S.: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
IMO it should be immediate family (spouse and children) and then maybe one should be able to sponsor 2 others on long term VISAs. But there would still be fraud (there always will be I suppose).
In Germany, the benefits are tied to contributions, and after 45 years old, having some sort of pension is a requirement for getting a residence permit.
That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train. It's getting a good deal, but it's not getting a free meal. Those workers will have demands too.
If you want to attract skilled labour, you must allow them to bring their dependents. They come as a unit.
I don’t know if I’d go that far. I tend to think it’s kind of cruel to separate families indefinitely in the name of labor, but I do see that restrictions are necessary to prevent abuse.
There’s an entire spectrum of reasonable debate here.
It's a huge benefit, giving more people the benefits of freedom, bringing the country benefits of more free people (including economic growth), and bringing families together.
As there is little documented downside, it's a huge win. I want people to have freedom and families to be together. What's the downside?
That depends of what you're hoping to prevent.
If you want to filter out people who can't sustain themselves, petty crime or the like, it works. But it can open the door to a lot of unwanted effects.
A foreign national that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.
Even to their home country.
Producing something, goods, services, useful information, etc. is a net plus for society, adding value for both the producer and the consumer, making the society overall richer.
Rent-seeking is purely extractive - it extracts value from the consumer, and in the cases where the extractor is outside of the society, e.g., a foreigner or oligarch-type, it extracts value from the society, leaving the society poorer.
Landlords such as Airbnb hosts usually invest a lot in furniture and equipment, helping to keep the producers in business. Not to mention provide employment thanks to renovations, cleaning and maintenance. I'd say it leaves the economy more vibrant and benefits all. A classic example where landlords were banned was the Soviet Union, and all the housing problems that followed. Although the USSR finally collapsed, people there still live in the old Khrushchevkas...
You can outsource pretty much the entire thing, and just be a name on a paper, and receive money in your bank account, that's as close to "passive income" as you can get. Lots of people do this today, pretty common for landlords to do so in Spain for example, and I'm sure all around the world.
The rent paid the mortgage, but that was about it. Repairs were more or less out of pocket.
I gave it up because I didn’t live locally and got raked over the coals on repairs a couple times. I finally quit because the property managers had an “emergency repairs” clause where they could do repairs without my approval and bill me.
One of the renters clogged the toilet at 11pm on a Saturday, moron decided to call the property management because I guess plungers are confusing, they decided that was an emergency, and I got a $700 bill to send a plumber out at midnight to plunge a toilet. Like not even a roto rooter or something, just a generic grocery store plunger.
Became clear I was either a) going to have to be much more involved, or b) accept that the returns are basically just equity in the house on a 15 year mortgage, minus overpriced repairs.
My parents had a beach house for a while. It was rented May-Sept every year. They'd visit for a week in each shoulder season, spend half the time doing major cleaning/fixing, and left the day-to-day during rental season to a management company (same one that managed bookings for the house).
It wasn't 100% passive, but it was about as close as you can get as a retired upper-middle-class couple.
Is this a creative way of arguing that landlords are a net loss for the country? Because I would like to remind you that MANY people cannot afford to buy homes, and renting is how they make sure they don't become homeless.
Foreign capital is undesirable in the housing market because:
1) It raises demand (when buying a home as a local, you now also have to compete with foreigners "investing", and this raises prices).
2) It often develops housing in a very unhealthy direction: Airbnbs and vacation apartments are toxic for local society and must be kept in check, otherwise you end up with half the houses just being shuttered for the whole off-season, and towns becoming empty husks.
3) Rent is a lot of money, and its obviously beneficial if it stays in the local economy instead of flowing abroad.
I guess that’s a good thing (for voluntary renters… not so much for involuntary renters) but not really supposed to happen.
2) rent being the only way to afford shelter has zero relation to whether it is a net loss or not
However, it can be difficult for foreigners without a Japanese support network (like a blue-chip employer) to rent property in Japan at market price, because of discrimination by landlords. This isn't because of government policy. It's because building managers have the impression, mistaken or otherwise, that foreign tenants won't respect the rules, will be difficult to communicate with, or might skip town with unpaid rent.
Rent would cost ¥60,000–120,000/month, they would list it on Airbnb for ¥20,000/night, then assuming 50% occupancy the return is ~¥200,000/month.
It was very profitable. The payback period for the ¥5 million was 1.5 - 2 years.
Which they were almost certainly divvying up. A bunch of people invest $32k each. Some management company buys the home, pays them all a cut of airBNB proceeds, etc. You don't "do" anything beyond put up $32k for your $31k piece of paper.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably not in most cases.
A lot of Chinese are cash rich (perhaps not on average but with 1.3 billion people the absolute number is large compared to other countries) and want to invest abroad, and are buying properties all over the place.
Another piece of evidence is the huge number of Chinese students in UK universities (from my experience) although the tuition fee alone is about £35k ($46k) a year.
Is there something illegitimate in doing an activity that yield profit when the national is Chinese ? Or when it's a short term let ? Or when it is something that doesn't directly contributed to innovation benefiting the nation ?
But of course if we limit our perspective to an economic one, then it seems like a wise and sound approach to "escaping the hamster wheel" for the average Chinese person, easy money right? I think people in Japan probably don't have that perspective though, but instead look at the tail-effects of allowing that sort of behavior. That's why they changed the rules probably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGAmKqTWjxU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLOsYTfl7k
(These two videos are quite recent at the time of writing this here.)
Don't get fooled by the deliberate (but misleading) title(s). This is a narration of more and more restrictions coming. So the article here also taps into this 1:1.
In some ways it reminds me of Nigel Farage in the UK, though in Japan it is not quite as tied to an individual person.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government has a problem with this practice. The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable. When the issue was raised, the income requirements were changed as an immediate reaction, but the ISA has broad authority to grant or deny based on many circumstances.
Put differently, acts like this were already illegal, but difficult for the ISA to catch. So they changed the base requirements which are theoretically much easier to catch than the actual illegal behavior.
From Asterix & Cleopatra (1965): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSL0D_ZUAAAvbeM.jpg
Relevant as ever.
That's pretty rich, gotta say!
That said, as a foreigner right now the best thing to do is to watch the legal environment as it shifts so that you don't fall afoul of it. And to be extra mindful of adhering to Japanese customs, which boils down to being nice along with things like realizing some places may not look on your tattoos the same way those tattoos are looked on in the West.
He still can think objectively, that's what it means.
I agree with the GP. It’s their country. They set the rules. If they want to change the rules because those rules aren’t working for them, that’s their prerogative. As a USian, I’m actually sort of jealous that they have the ability to make changes so quickly.
Not for any reasonable definition of "live in", you can't.
But even if you just assume that OP is here on the digital nomad visa thing, you’re effectively living here. More to the point, you’re following the rules, and it’s not at all ironic or contradictory to have an opinion that the rules can be changed by the host.
But if they're here on a Digital Nomad visa, then their stay is limited to 6mo with no pathway to extending this — _I_ personally don't think that qualifies as "living" in a place, but perhaps reasonable people can disagree on this point.
Look, even if OP is just living here on a tourist visa and doesn’t have any form of residency at all, and (s)he’s still following the rules as established, it’s not even remotely ironic to say that the rules are the rules, and the host has the right to change the rules.
It would be ironic if OP did that while admitting to violating immigration law.
>if OP is just living here on a tourist visa and doesn’t have any form of residency at all, and (s)he’s still following the rules as established
No, I don't think they are. I think if you're _living_ here on a tourist visa, that's very much "abusing the visa".
It’s a weirdly motivated form of pedantry to get angry at someone for using the word “living” when you know nothing about their situation. It’s almost like you’re looking for a reason to be upset.
Except that’s not what he said at all. He said if there’s visa abuse, the abuse should be stopped.
How one gets “doesn’t want immigrants” from this is beyond me.
The irony comment comes across somewhat innefective and petulant when I and others i've encountered with such views hold them in spite of the effects it could have for us. I don't see the point in laughing at that any more than i see it in calling out irony when a rich person calls for tax hoops to be closed and taxation to be fair.
> at all costs
That’s with nearly 100% certainty always wrong at leads to disaster
Second
I doubt the new requirements will hinder shell companies that much. The honest people on the other hand will be screwed.
Thank you taking this "ex-pat" off our hands.
Cheers.
While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.
This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is?
The elites aren't going to have a house next to immigrants. They don't feel the effects in their castle.
Anyways, this change is to target only the best immigrants. There are still ways for them to immigrate to Japan. This change just closes the loophole for lower quality immigrants.
Population has also exploded in never seen before proportions everywhere on Earth (Japan had a population of only 45 million in 1900...) and it is probably a blessing in disguise if it reduces.
As for population decline, I will give you that all the people who are currently very loud-mouthed about it are also far-right grifters who think The Handmaid's Tale is an instruction manual and want to turn America back into a shithole slave-breeding colony. The underlying concern is basically "I won't have enough cheaply-hired peons if people don't breed like rats". But, notably, all those people are also anti-immigration and basically want every country to be a closed off ethnostate breeding compound.
Anyway, migration is a human right.
What do we mean when we call something a "human right"? Well, usually, it's to mark some activity as sacred and untouchable. Like, when we say free speech is a human right, we're saying that speech is untouchable by law. But there's a deeper understanding embedded in this: humanity has been doing this activity freely since before we could remember, therefore anyone trying to restrict it deserves scrutiny.
For speech, we have documented evidence of people treating speech as a human right for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the history of human migration goes back orders of magnitude further. A constant of human civilization is that when people don't like what is happening, they leave. Humanity's motto is "If it sucks, hit the bricks"!
So personally, I don't see this as a case of "people are abusing poor Japan's visa programs", but a case of "you built a dumb system of selling visas for money and were surprised that people figured out how to cough up the cash". Of course that was going to happen. People are going to bend over backwards to comply with your visa requirements no matter how stupid the visas are, because, again, migration is a human right.
Hell, I doubt Elon Musk is going to argue he should be sent back to South Africa. The rich racists don't even think the racism should equally apply to them.
But sure, yes, "cultural preservation" is important. Let us not ask too closely what that culture is, or if it's worth preserving[1]. Or even if it is being preserved. Because in the specific case of Japan, the population decline is primarily happening in remote rural towns. That culture is dying, today, because they are running out of people. Would having foreigners move in change that culture? Sure. But culture changes all the time! Trying to preserve a culture by sealing it off from foreigners is like trying to preserve a river by sealing off the water flowing through it!
[0] American Fork is something like 90% LDS members. If you go a little more north to anywhere in Salt Lake County, it's more like 50%. And my personal experience as a church member is that American Fork members do not recognize anyone from out-of-town as a member, even if they are.
[1] Likewise, the Japanese countryside has its own small town dynamics that are equally as shitty as American Fork, Utah. Go look up the story of Rin Japanese Country Life if you're curious.
Not having states with citizenship is not a human right.
>Sure. But culture changes all the time!
Not even remotely at the current speed. If it did many of the cultures and ethnicities in europe simply wouldn't exist.
Also your image of free unlimited migration runs into endless historical examples to the contrary.
Anyone who is at the top of the ladder (educated, wealthy) will move wherever is most desirable, and thats pretty much only the US. You can't fake it with incentives, America doesn't have to offer immigrants anything it simply exists as the global centre for tech, finance, medical etc. - nobody is lining up to move to China, India or Germany.
Anyone who is at the bottom of the ladder is, as Bernie Sanders put it, a pawn in the Koch brothers conspiracy to reduce wages. These countries don't care about quality they just want to jack up housing demand and bottom out wages because thats great for the asset class and big business (until they automate and ditch all these people)
The immigration narrative is BS. The idea that we're aging out so must desperately bring in more UberEats riders is nuts. Nobody in my country can afford to be a nurse - I know an eye doctor at a major London clinic who is leaving this country because after 20 years working for the NHS she simply is not paid enough to live.
We're absolutely obsessed with immigration and all we are doing is lining the pockets of corporates, brain-draining countries that desperately need skilled people and blurring the lines of social responsibility in a globalist economy.
To go to the USofA or to, say, Australia?
What? Do you seriously think that wealthy people only want to move to the US? It's a wild claim, especially considering we're in a comment section of a post about immigration to Japan.
https://m2now.com/this-is-where-the-rich-are-leaving-and-goi...
Recent example in Vietnam: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DY_-NcwDTaJ/
A lot of trashy tourists are moving from Bali over to Vietnam. I few sorry for the locals. Yes, they'll make a few extra bucks a week from more tourists but at the cost of seeing your society get destroyed slowly.
Dear Vietnam, please do not try to become the next Thailand and Bali for tourism. Do not welcome sex tourists, criminals, crypto bros, begpackers. Don't sell your soul for a few extra dollars.
He got called out several times about his stories so I wouldn't be surprised if he's making stuff up again.
Good point, WP [0] has some details, looks like pretty credible call outs.
I did read about that when I watched the show, but proceeded to forget because I didn’t actually care that much ;)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Adelstein#Career
A $31,000 capital requirement for a "business" is a joke. A food cart--not a truck, just a cart--requires more capital than that.
In a country with a population of 123 million, that's a non issue just for pleasing far right Nippon Kaigi friendly voters.
*Sanseito.
Nippon Kaigi friendly are mostly trad big corps. These days the anxiety came from everyday folks that are starting to consider Sanseito vs good ol' LDPJ.
While not 100% the same, I do think that the last LDPJ huge victory reminds me of 2019 UK election, the last big hurrah for Conservative, before Reform starts seeping in.