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.
> 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.
Canada’s moribund GDP per capita suggests they’re not getting a good deal. One big problem is that foreign education is worth very little because the standards are so much lower. Half my extended family in my parents' cohort moved to the U.S./Australia/Canada. They all had college degrees from Bangladesh, which was very favorable under the point-based immigration in Australia and Canada. Out of a dozen people, only my dad got a college-required job without further education. My uncle became a doctor after redoing medical school. And two cousins went to college in Australia and got professional jobs. That was it--everybody else got permanent residency based on paper credentials then took non-college jobs. And they lived in subsidized housing, and got a lot of support from the government.
I would be curious to see the statistics for what fraction of Canadian/Australian skilled immigrants actually get a job that requires their skills and credentials. I suspect that there's a high percentage of people who get permanent residency based on paper credentials, but who can't actually get a job. The American system of tying the visa to a specific job solves at least that problem. I suspect the rate of return for the Canadian/Australian system is poor outside of medicine + people who immigrate to attend college in Canada/Australia.
I'm not complaining myself, but the system has broken down due to abuse (and outright fraud) of student visas, where the "students" then started working front-line retail and delivery jobs. We stopped getting the skilled workers and got a lot of fraudulent ones, and there was a path to permanent residency/citizenship, which then became a pipeline for their families.
There's been a crackdown as of late, but it's significantly impacted the perceived benefits of immigration here (and significantly increased south-asian racism). I know this problem wasn't unique to Canada (AU/NZ/UK all had similar issues) as many countries felt it was better to get these immigrants educated here where their credentials could be recognized, but they underestimated the demand via diploma mills.
>That being said, Canada is also getting skilled workers it did not pay to raise, educate and train.
As raynier said, Canada's diminishing per-capita GDP does not in any way reflect this. It is not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the country's post-2015 GDP growth has come from massively increased immigration.
Indians in the US are by are large filtered for ability, and contribute to legal immigrants in the country being of high quality in the aggregate (although H1B visa abuse has changed this view).
Canada has seen a colossal recent influx of Chinese and especially Indian immigrants, the latter group now twice as large as in the US per capita.
Like the US, Canada allows international students to work. Unlike the US, Canada allowed those students to work off campus (!) for up to 40 (!!) hours a week. This caused the rise of an entire industry, in which so-called institutions of higher learning (Conestoga, Lambton, Confederation) have 99% Indian "students" that work off campus, destroying the local job and housing markets.
While they are (mostly) legal, unlike the influx of Latinos streaming uncontrolled across the Mexican border until the Trump crackdown, the numbers are still staggering for a country of Canada's size. And at least those illegal aliens entering the US are looking for manual labor, with the men going into construction and other trades. The Indians in Canada aren't nearly so willing to get their hands dirty, working at Tim Horton's ("Timmigrants") and as truck drivers (causing havoc on highways).
Under the UAE's Golden Visa scheme, it's parents, children and any dependent siblings, which I think is an optimal balance. The person who sponsors the rest is/are the primary visa holder(s) and the authorities only take their situation into account when assessing lifestyle.
So your parents don't need to have a pension or an income source if they want to live with you, and you can sponsor any disabled siblings (who get massive benefits from the UAE government whether citizen or non-citizen). But you cannot support an able-bodied male sibling above the age of 25. You can sponsor female unmarried siblings regardless of age as long as they are unmarried (realities of that region I guess). But more importantly, you cannot sponsor just about everyone and anyone, so it stops becoming a chain of sponsorships like it is in the West. There are some workarounds to this system though (e.g.: you can hire one as a personal driver and another as an administrative assistant staff for your company) but they're still very restrictive.
Citizenship is obviously not at all a given, even for long term Golden Visa holders. But at least they don't tax you either which is still a reasonable balance altogether. You will get considered for citizenship though if you have a stellar track record (research, entrepreneurship, sports, govt service).
> 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?
> 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.
It's not about "abuse." It's that family reunification undermines the filters that are at the heart of every immigration law. My dad came over from Bangladesh on an H1 and he's the guy you put on the brochure when you market skilled visa programs to voters. He's a public health expert who had a job in-hand in the U.S. And he moved his kids to a neighborhood without any other Bangladeshis and raised us without any foreign attachments or sympathies. Because that's the kind of person who self-selects into leaving everything behind to undertake an arduous immigration process.
But none of those filters apply to family reunification. You don't need skills, you don't need a job. You're making much less of a sacrifice in terms of leaving your family behind, since by definition you already have family in the U.S. You can move into an enclave with people from your country and live your life and raise your kids the same way you were doing back home. You just enjoy the benefits of living in a richer country.
The result of all that is you end up with this bizarre system where you apply intensive screening to select 65,000 H1Bs, 19,000 O-1s, etc. But then you hand out hundreds of thousands of greencards to people who meet no criteria other than having family who is already here.
Is that really so bizarre? You're framing it as some sort of fundamental policy failure but isn't it better viewed as the cost of doing business?
Sure, you could propose an alternative regime where that isn't permitted. But that's a competing proposal for how to structure things and has (I think) legitimate tradeoffs. While there might well be practical problems with any given implementation I don't think there's any fundamental issue with handling immigration on the level of the nuclear family.
- Immediate relatives of US citizens have no quota. Immediate relatives include children under 21 (it's complicated), parents and spouses only;
- Siblings of US citizens have a quota. the wait is almost 20 years currently;
- Unmarried children of US citizens and green card holders who are over 21 have a wait of 8 to 20 years depending on country of birth;
- Spouses of green card holders and unmarried children under 21 of green card holders have a wait of 1-2 years generally;
- Married children of US citizens have a wait of 10-25 years;
Additionally, the president has broad powers to limit giving visas (nonimmigrant or immigrant) for consular processing thanks to Trump v. Hawaii [1] that mostly cannot be challenged in court. There are various bans on this for 19, 39 and 75 countries. It is unlikely many of these people will not be able to get a visa at all at least until Trump leaves office.
Immigration has become a political scapegoat for many things from housing prices to crime to unemployment. There's no evidence of any of this. Housing is particularly funny. Migrants (undocumented or documented) aren't the reason your rent is through the roof. Also, migrants of any type commit fewer crimes on a per-capita rate than US citizens [2].
If you want to look at actual immigration abuse, I'll give you two examples:
1. There are credible allegations Elon Musk was out-of-status after leaving Stanford [3]. This matters because, if true, it makes him ineligible to adjust to an employment-based green card and, by extension, it means he can be denaturalized. USCIS under this administration is more aggressively pursuing denaturalization. Do you think that includes Elon Musk? Yeah, me neither;
2. Melania Trump, a model from Slovakia, came to the US on a tourist visa in 1996 and allegedly worked on that visa, which is unauthorized. She later got an EB-1 green card in 2001 [4], colloquially known as an "Einstein visa". Again, unauthorized work here would make her ineligible to adjust status and could be grounds for denaturalization as well. Do you think USCIS will pursue that? No, me neither. Also, she engaged in the Republican sin of "chain migration" by sponsoring her parents in 2006.
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.
Rent extraction is bad, since it hurts productivity. Ill admit I am an unabashed Georgist, but the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George is pretty accessible. But basically this: Capital and Capitalists are good, they have money, then lend it for ownership, this creates innovation. Labor is good, you need workers, they work, they produce, its good. But Rent (extracting value from land, patents, etc.) is just a negative drain, labor has to pay rent, capital has to pay rent, but they don't really innovate and grow the economy.
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.
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 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.
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.
>Is this a creative way of arguing that landlords are a net loss for the country?
Not landlords as a general concept, but there are many categories that are:
- Investors buying areas in bulk to monopolise available living space and manipulate prices
- Demand of renting space by investors making purchases unaffordable
- Temporary living space (Airbnb, etc) removing long term residence offer.
- Foreign investors exploiting living space from abroad, since the money extracted from rent will not be reinvested in the country.
The usual free market response to this is "more offer will even out demand". But there's lots of obstacles to this in real life. Regulatory capture, high upfront costs that limit builders, near inhexaustible demand by investors and tourism, etc.
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.
> 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.
> The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable.
... and fair, just, and respects freedom and other rights. Telling people one thing in 2015, giving them a decade to build a life in Japan, and then a decade later telling them they have to leave violates many of those things.
Obviously the political subtext is contempt for fairness, justice, and human rights. It's not hard to see how destroying the foundations of freedom and prosperity will turn out; you can see it already in the impact on many people who are immigrants and others outside a certain power structure (conservative, racially dominant, wealthy) in many countries. Removing human rights is license to act with contempt for others.
> In one case
One case doesn't indicate a problem. I don't believe it's dependent on any problem: Is it coincidence that xenophobia is suddenly popular in all these countries around the world, simultaneously?
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
What? No…I am not suddenly forbidden from using the English language because of visa status. What is one supposed to say? Temporarily residing?Extended vacationing?Work-visa-free inhabiting? Come on.
You’re hanging your hat on the OP’s use of the word “living”, which is so weirdly pedantic that I think you’re just looking for a reason to be upset that they had the temerity to defend the rule changes.
For all we know, OP is living here on a perfectly valid visa.
Sure. I think it's meaningful to distinguish someone staying for six months, and someone staying for years; but if that's weirdly pedantic, so be it.
(Maybe it's also a cultural difference?
My native language distinguishes between the kind of "living" somewhere where you're just "staying" somewhere and where that place is the center of your life. I would not use the "I built my life here" verb for a 6mo stay.
Perhaps I'm letting that color my English a bit more than I should.)
It’s not rich to recognise your own ship is sinking and want others to save themselves from sinking theirs. I truly love Japan and the last thing I want is the same cultural dilution to happen here. Deport me if that’s what it takes. Japan must invest in itself and not give in to the temptation of unlimited cheap foreign labor.
Yes, a country should want to keep out people with negative fiscal impact and bring in people with a positive fiscal impact. Isn’t that obvious?
By all means bring in people to run businesses in Japan. Legitimate businesses, not visa mills. This increase in capital requirements stamps out the visa mills.
> This increase in capital requirements stamps out the visa mills.
No, it doesn't. The rich people abusing the system just deposit more money and get their checkmark. Small businesses cannot raise and float this kind of cash quickly.
Also, the policy change is being applied retroactively to visa renewal applications that had already been filed, before the policy change was even announced. So if you filed a few months ago, before any of this was announced, now you're getting rejected and sent home. If the govt was actually interesting in getting rid of illegitimate businesses, they could just go to them and see if they're real or not. All businesses that qualify someone to get a business manager visa have to be in commercial spaces, with signs with their name on it, and accessible.
They usually come with tax exemptions (so not really good fiscal impact), and make prices climb like crazy. See Portugal and their remote worker visa, they outpriced most Portuguese people out of every city slightly near an airport.
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.
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.
And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation. Your best prospects have lots of options and can take a path of lower resistance.
Just as in sports, if you’re trying to draft a top kicker/thrower/catcher/goalie/whatever, they’re going to avoid onerous terms and outsized effort.
> And as you put up more roadblocks, the more you select for desperation.
This isn't actually true in all instances. You can literally buy residency (or even citizenship) in numerous countries, so anyone who is optimizing for the path of least resistance will always have options.
Japan is a very unique destination. It's one of the most developed countries in the world, with world-class infrastructure, a super interesting culture, great food, abundant nature, etc. For Westerners, housing is relatively inexpensive in much of the country, with tons of akiya (empty houses) available for purchase because foreigners can (at least for the time being) buy property with few restrictions. Due to the weak currency, very few developed countries (and basically none in Asia) are as affordable to Westerners.
The problem with the business manager visa is that many of the people obtaining it weren't really interested in running businesses in Japan. They were setting up shell companies to get residency.
Raising the capital requirement and adding new requirements around employment and language will no doubt hurt some legitimate business manager visa holders but realistically, the number of people running legitimate businesses in Japan who might have to leave will be dwarfed by the number of people who used the visa as a workaround to get residency.
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'.
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...
I did not label you as a racist, I labeled the pro-natalist far-right as racist, and argued that social homogeneity sucks for people in the outgroup. I do not believe you are pro-natalist, you even argued against it. So I'm not sure why you think I'm labeling you as a racist.
Human rights are descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, your right to speak does not come from a piece of paper signed by a bunch of 18th century politicians; the Bill of Rights is a recognition of what people have always believed. Likewise, I am not saying that I, personally, deserve the legal right to move to this one specific country. I am saying that human migration is an activity people have been doing for tens of thousands of years and that restricting it is as much of a folly as restricting speech is.
In the realm of speech, we have the concept of the Streisand Effect, where even the smallest attempts at restricting speech immediately backfire by creating more discussion about the speech. And likewise, with immigration control, attempting to keep entire groups of people out also creates a paradoxical reaction. Namely, you create a black market for access, as criminals will organize themselves around figuring out how to evade the system. If your legal immigration system has reasonable paths to immigration that ordinary people can figure out and take advantage of, then nobody risks the illegal path, the state maintains effective control over the border, and we don't have this problem. But if you make your immigration system inscrutable for anyone outside your country's legal profession, set the visa requirements to be unmeetable by most people, or otherwise try to "keep them out", you are going to lose control over your borders purely from the economic demand overruling you.
How this works is that, because most people do not understand and cannot make use of the visa systems on their own, they rely primarily on employer sponsorship. As we've seen with the H-1B program in America, employee-sponsored visas create an underclass of golden-handcuffed visaholders who are only eligible for employment from the small handful of companies that specialize in visa sponsorship. In Japan, they have guest worker programs that are even more restrictive and funnel people into "black companies" (i.e. sweatshops). Some of them don't even bother with visa sponsorship and just rely on inducing well-meaning but law-illiterate people to work illegally.
To make matters worse, the state might even enjoy this state of affairs. As 400 years of American history have shown, it is politically expedient to have a permanent labor underclass. It lets politicians wriggle out of minimum wage, overtime laws, worker safety, and so on. For example, the US H-2A program is full of fronts for Mexican cartels doing human trafficking. The ICE raids on illegal immigrants have the paradoxical effect of giving those cartels more market power, creating a pliant underclass of agricultural slaves. Illegal immigrants could at least ghost farmers offering shitty work[0], but legal immigrants have a sponsor who knows where their family lives.
The things individuals care about with regards to immigration - i.e. damage to "culture" or "social homogeneity" - are downstream of the state deliberately creating this labor underclass. Politicians wouldn't care about them otherwise. Hell, Japan has a long history of denigrating its own traditional culture in favor of looking more western. The joke about any given traditional Japanese art is that its masters are four grandmas and one really passionate white guy. A lot of things we consider to be uniquely Japanese[1] are cultural hand-me-downs from other countries[2], because the Japanese government didn't care about culture until they realized they could use it to scare people into the ballot box.
[0] Again, "if it sucks, hit the bricks".
[1] Like the functioning train network
[2] Like how America threw away its functioning train network
> Not having states with citizenship is not a human right.
Double negatives in English are difficult to parse, and I can read this two ways:
- "There is no legal entitlement to migration."
- "Citizenship is a human right, and must be exclusionary lest new citizens dilute the value of existing citizenships, ergo any policy that makes citizenship easier to obtain is a violation of human rights."
As a statement of fact, the former is true, but I also wasn't arguing that you already have a legally recognized right to enter any country of your choosing. If you were arguing the latter, however, that is bullshit. Citizenship cannot be a human right because it is a status granted by a state. The state does not grant you your human rights[0], it can only promise not to interfere with them.
As for the historical counterexamples to migration as a human right, I can also bring up plenty of historical counterexamples to free speech as a human right. There have been just as many societies that tried to quell speech as there were societies that tried to quell migration. And, likewise, most people were not in a position to migrate, just as prior to the printing press and mass literacy, most people did not have an audience for their speech. But we would not say that "free speech is not a human right because a lot of countries tried to quash it", or "because most people in most times did not have the means to use it". That would be absurd.
Furthermore, we should keep in mind that when I talk of migration as a human right, I am not solely talking about immigration. Most historical examples of states suppressing migration were just as interested in keeping people from leaving as they were concerned with those entering. The king does not want his servants leaving for a better kingdom; so he welds the exits shut. This practice continued all the way until the Soviet Union made this policy so onerous that the US decided that it would only trade with "non-market economies" if they abolished their exit visas. Emigration is already a legally recognized human right and any country that does not let its citizens leave is rightfully attacked as despotic.
As for culture, uh... I'm not sure what kind of point you're trying to make. Even if every country in Europe were sealed off from one another, the culture of today would be dramatically different from 40 years ago, or 40 years from now. You just don't notice it because you're drifting along the same tide. Likewise, two different countries do not become the same merely because that tide is pulling really fast. France and Czechia were far more isolated 40 years ago, than they are now that the Iron Curtain is gone and the EU allows freedom of movement. They are still culturally distinct countries, even though they're moving in similar directions nowadays.
[0] There are countries in Europe that use their constitutions as a place to put general welfare and infrastructure goals. For example, in Finland, broadband Internet access is a "human right". For the purpose of this discussion we're going to only be talking about human rights as negative freedoms - i.e. the Anglo conception of human rights. I am not opposed to positive freedoms, but that's not what we're talking about.
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
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 assumes there is something wrong with immigrants. I've lived next to many immigrants. Almost everyone in the US is an immigrant or decended from them.
The problem is the hateful - they destroy the society and neighborhood.
> lower quality
Humans are not lower or higher quality - except arguably those acting on hate, who damage the social contract of liberty.
I'm explaining why Japan is doing this. A lot of people don't understand why Japan would do this when their population is already declining.
It's because to the working class, a declining population isn't the most pressing issue. In fact, some of them may even want that because it means more resources to everyone else. Mass importing immigrants causes many issues for locals. Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling.
To businesses and governments, a declining population means lower market size and lower tax income. They're incentivized to want a larger population - sometimes by any means necessary.
And no, you can't mass import high quality immigrants because high quality immigrants have options and generally don't want to move to a country that isn't their culture or speak their own language. You will always end up with lower quality immigrants from the 3rd world.
> Anyone who denies this is simply virtue signaling.
Dismissing other opinions in words but not arguments is vacuous. Fabricating and attacking their motives is more evidence (not fabrication) that the argument is nothing but bias plastered over with empty words. So is the parroting of the talking points of some social tide.
> quality
Human beings are not low quality or high quality - and especially not based on your preference or personal benefit - and economics and history clearly show the benefit of more people with freedom and opportunity, including to the people gaining freedom and opportunity. They are as important as, and have as much 'quality' as you - otherwise, you are not important either.
I'm sorry but you're spewing a lot of misinformation here.
Japan's relationship with immigration is complex but what you're talking about really has nothing to do with the business manager visa.
Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.
The problem with the business manager visa was that it was being abused by people who weren't actually running real businesses in Japan. They were setting up shells to obtain residency. Much of the abuse was by Chinese nationals, which was for obvious reasons especially disturbing to Japanese given the history between the two countries.
Japan isn't the only country in Asia that has been forced to revisit its visa policies due to Chinese abuse. For example, the Philippines has made changes and added oversight to its SRRV retirement visa program because of abuse by Chinese nationals, most of whom were younger males coming as "retirees" but working and running local businesses illegally.
So yes, immigration is a sensitive, complicated subject in Japan but you're reading way too much into the changes to the business manager visa.
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.
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.
They are not just asking for more money, from TFA they are imposting additional requirements like better Japanese fluency etc. In general they are raising the bar for who is allowed to live there, and all of that protects Japan.
No, that's not required for this visa. The capital requirement is the major change. Also, foreign restaurant owners are already fluent in Japanese, because they deal with Japanese customers every day. The language requirement change is for other visa types.
The rich people abusing this visa as second home have no trouble depositing a bit more money to meet the requirement. It only affects legitimate businesses that can't raise and float that kind of cash. It's performative punishment to appease the growing far-right sentiment. If they wanted to verify businesses were real, they can go there and foot and inspect. (They already have the right to do this, and all businesses that qualify for this visa must have a public office or commercial space with a clearly listed sign that can be accessed easily.)
Also, they enacted the change and applied it retroactively to existing visa holders who were waiting to have their visa updated. So people are now being rejected on new rules that were announced and enacted after they had filed to update their visa (which you must do every 1-3 years.)
Japan is not a theme park for foreign tourists to gawk at. It's a real place where people live and work.
I live in Japan, and this tracks with what I’ve seen over the past few years. There has been a noticeable increase in Chinese-run Airbnbs, especially in tourist areas.
I’ve also heard of quite a few problems with some of these properties, such as operators not meeting licensing requirements or causing issues with nearby residents.
Japan also has a relatively generous social security system, especially national health insurance, which makes medical costs extremely low compared with many other countries. So I can see why this kind of route would keep attracting people from overseas.
So sad to see the comments here from people who don't know any better cheering this on. They don't know what is actually happening. The rules change was applied retroactively to people who already had renewals filed (which you have to do frequently) but not yet approved, and are being rejected based on the rules change that was announced after having already filed. The new rules are being used as a way to visibly punish the (already very small, 3%) immigrant population in Japan to appease the growing number of people with far-right anti-immigration sentiment.
There is a Japanese-led movement attempting to raise awareness of this issue, at least as far as it affects ethnic restaurants, which I suppose is the most visible effect of it to regular Japanese people: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260529/p2a/00m/0na/00...
As they point out, the stated goal of this policy change was to clamp down on rich people from other countries buying a "second home" with a visa in Japan. But the policy change to increase the capital requirement does not stop this. It only affects legitimate business. Because the rich people just deposit more money and meet the requirement. As the people in the link above point out, if the government was actually serious about this, they could instead verify the businesses are real by going there.
The people running small businesses, especially restaurants, cannot raise that kind of cash very quickly. And floating that amount of money in cash is just a bad idea.
The people here cheering this on, saying "Japan should throw out more foreigners to preserve Japan" need to realize that Japan is not a theme park. It's a real place that people live and work. And this policy change doesn't even do what it claims to do.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Singapore is not a nation, singaporean not an ethnicity and even Lee Kuan Yew had serious doubts about what people they could integrate.
They also don't allow this kind of 'get in on a business visa by pricing out locals with some airbnb's bullshit'.
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/