Immigration to Japan

Based on Wikipedia: Immigration to Japan

The Island That Almost Nobody Wants to Move To

Here's a puzzle: Japan has the world's third-largest economy, some of the safest cities on Earth, universal healthcare, and a culture that has captivated billions through anime, cuisine, and technology. Yet when pollsters ask people around the world where they'd like to immigrate, Japan barely registers. Twelve times more people dream of moving to the United States. Three times more want Canada.

Japan doesn't just receive fewer immigrants than other wealthy nations. It actively struggles to attract them, even when it desperately wants to.

Consider the country's "specified skilled worker" visa program, designed to bring in exactly the kind of educated professionals every developed nation covets. The government set an ambitious annual goal: forty thousand overseas workers. Applications received? Fewer than three thousand.

This isn't about strict immigration laws. Japanese scholars who've studied the question point out that their country's policies toward high-skilled migrants are actually more lenient than those in the United States or United Kingdom. The problem runs deeper. Japan is, to put it bluntly, an exceptionally unpopular destination among the world's potential migrants.

And yet, Japan is running out of workers.

A Demographic Time Bomb

In 2023, the Recruit Works Institute, an independent research organization, published a study that should have made headlines worldwide. By 2040, Japan will face a labor shortage of more than eleven million workers. That's not a typo. Eleven million.

The country's working-age population is projected to shrink by twelve percent from 2022 levels. Meanwhile, demand for labor isn't going anywhere. Japan still needs people to stock shelves, build buildings, care for the elderly, and write software.

To hit even modest economic growth targets of about one and a quarter percent annually, Japan would need roughly 6.74 million foreign workers by 2040. That's nearly four times the number it had in 2020.

How did the world's third-largest economy paint itself into this corner?

The Path Not Taken

After World War II, while countries like Germany were actively recruiting "guest workers" from Turkey, Italy, and elsewhere to fuel their industrial revivals, Japan took a different path. It looked inward.

The strategy worked, for a while. Japan's own rural population provided a steady stream of workers for the factories driving the country's economic miracle. Young men and women left farming villages for assembly lines in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. The country industrialized without importing labor.

When that internal migration slowed in the late 1980s, Japanese companies found another workaround: they moved the factories instead. Production offshoring allowed manufacturers of electronics and automobiles to reduce their dependence on imported workers by simply building things in countries where workers were plentiful and cheap.

But you can't offshore healthcare. You can't outsource construction of buildings that need to stand in Tokyo. You can't move convenience stores to Vietnam and expect them to serve customers in Kyoto.

The Brazilians Who Went Home

Japan did try one immigration experiment, and it reveals much about the country's complicated relationship with outsiders.

In 1990, the government created a special visa category for something very specific: South Americans of Japanese ancestry. These were the descendants of Japanese who had emigrated to Brazil, Peru, and other Latin American countries in the early twentieth century. Their great-grandparents had been Japanese. They had Japanese surnames. Many had Japanese faces.

The thinking was elegant, if a bit cynical: bring in workers who would look like they belonged, who might assimilate more easily, who carried Japanese blood.

By 1998, over 222,000 Brazilian nationals had registered as residents in Japan, with smaller numbers from Peru. They worked in factories and manufacturing plants, filling gaps in the labor force.

Then came the 2008 financial crisis.

By 2009, with the economy contracting, Japan did something remarkable. It paid these Japanese-descended Brazilians and Peruvians to leave. The government offered three thousand dollars per person for airfare, plus two thousand dollars for each dependent. Take the money, go home, and don't come back.

Many accepted.

The Trainee System Nobody Talks About

Today, if you want to understand immigration to Japan, you need to understand the Technical Intern Training Program. The name is misleading. These aren't really trainees learning valuable skills to take back to developing countries, though that's the official justification.

In practice, the program brings hundreds of thousands of workers from Vietnam, China, Indonesia, and other Asian nations to work in Japanese factories, farms, construction sites, and retail stores. In 2022, nearly 328,000 people held these visas. Vietnamese made up the largest group at over 160,000, followed by Chinese and Indonesians.

The system has attracted persistent criticism for reported abuses. Workers are typically bound to a single employer for one or three years. They can't easily switch jobs if conditions are poor or pay is low. Reports of exploitation have been widespread enough that some workers found a creative, if desperate, escape route.

They applied for refugee status.

Japan is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and accepts almost no one as a refugee. Approval rates hover around 0.2 percent, compared to roughly forty percent in Germany or Canada. In 2016, Japan received over ten thousand asylum applications and approved exactly twenty-eight.

But here's what mattered to desperate trainees: asylum applicants could legally work in Japan six months after filing their applications. And unlike the trainee program, they could choose their own employers.

Applications for asylum spiked fourfold after 2010, driven largely by people from Nepal, Turkey, and Sri Lanka. Many were vocational trainees who had discovered the loophole. In 2018, the government closed it, ending the right to work while awaiting asylum decisions.

Marriage Migration and Its Decline

There's another way foreigners have historically come to stay in Japan: marriage.

In the 1980s and 1990s, increasing numbers of Japanese men married women from China, Korea, and the Philippines. By 2006, international marriages accounted for over six percent of all marriages registered in Japan. That's 44,701 couples in a single year.

Then the trend reversed. By 2013, international marriages had fallen to just 21,488, barely three percent of the total. Of these, about seventy-two percent involved a foreign bride marrying a Japanese groom, while only twenty-eight percent were foreign men marrying Japanese women.

Marriage migration once represented as much as a quarter of permanent migration to Japan. Today, it's a shadow of what it was.

The Koreans Who Never Left

To understand Japanese immigration statistics, you need to know about a category of resident that exists nowhere else on Earth: the Special Permanent Resident.

When Japan's empire collapsed in 1945, hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Taiwanese remained in Japan. They and their descendants were given a unique legal status. Today, over 277,000 people hold Special Permanent Resident status. Almost all are ethnic Koreans, born in Japan, often to parents and grandparents also born in Japan.

They speak Japanese as their native language. Many have Japanese names for daily use. Their families have lived in Japan for three or four generations. Yet legally, they are not Japanese citizens.

Until 1984, Japanese citizenship followed blood, not birthplace. A child born in Tokyo to Korean parents was Korean, not Japanese, regardless of having never set foot in Korea. That rule, called jus sanguinis in Latin, remains in effect. Japan-born children of foreign parents are still foreign.

Most of the decline in naturalization applications in recent years comes from this community. Historically, the bulk of people becoming Japanese citizens weren't new immigrants at all. They were Japan-born Koreans finally taking citizenship in the only country they'd ever known.

What Japanese Citizenship Means

If you want to become Japanese, you'll need to give something up: any other citizenship you hold.

Japan doesn't allow dual nationality. Those who naturalize must renounce their original citizenship. Those born with two citizenships, perhaps to one Japanese and one foreign parent, must choose by age twenty. You cannot be both Japanese and something else.

The application process takes up to eighteen months. Criteria are deliberately high, and immigration inspectors have considerable discretion in judging whether applicants meet standards of eligibility and "good conduct." There's no citizenship test, unlike in the United States, but about twenty percent of applications are rejected.

In 2015, just under 9,500 people successfully naturalized.

The Myth of Homogeneity

The Japanese language has a word that captures something important about how many Japanese people think about their nation: minzoku. It translates roughly as "ethnic group," but unlike English, it makes no distinction between racial, ethnic, and national identity. These concepts blur together into one.

Japan is often described, by Japanese themselves, as tan'itsu minzoku kokka: an ethnically homogeneous nation. Future Prime Minister Taro Aso, speaking in 2005, called Japan "one race, one civilization, one language, one culture." Former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara repeated similar claims in 2012.

This self-image persists despite centuries of mixing with Ainu in the north and Ryukyuan peoples in the south. It persists despite the Korean community that has lived in Japan for generations. It persists despite the hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, and other foreign residents now living in Japanese cities.

As of June 2025, nearly four million foreign residents live in Japan, about 3.2 percent of the total population. That's still low compared to other wealthy nations, but it's far from zero.

The Students

One significant stream of immigration that rarely makes headlines: international students.

As of 2023, nearly 280,000 international students were studying in Japan. Chinese students made up the largest group at about 115,000, followed by Nepalis at nearly 38,000 and Vietnamese at over 36,000.

Some will return home after graduation. Others hope to stay, converting student visas into work visas, then perhaps permanent residence. It's a slow path, requiring years of documented employment, tax payments, and demonstrated "contribution to Japan."

The country's permanent residence rules are actually less stringent than those in the United States or United Kingdom, according to the Migrant Integration Policy Index. The barrier isn't law. It's whether people want to stay, and whether they feel welcome.

Generous Abroad, Restrictive at Home

There's a striking paradox in Japan's relationship with refugees.

Internationally, Japan has historically been one of the world's most generous donors to refugee relief programs. In 2014, it was the second-largest financial contributor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Japanese diplomat Sadako Ogata led that organization from 1991 to 2000, overseeing its response to crises from Bosnia to Rwanda.

Yet Japan accepts almost no refugees on its own soil. Between 1982 and 2004, a total of 330 asylum applications were approved. That's an average of fifteen per year over twenty-two years.

Recent years show the same pattern. In 2014, more than five thousand people applied for asylum. Eleven were approved. In 2015, over 7,500 applied. Twenty-seven were approved. In 2016, over ten thousand applied. Twenty-eight were approved.

Japan is happy to fund refugee camps in Jordan and resettlement programs in Uganda. It is far less happy to welcome those same refugees to Osaka or Sapporo.

The Illegal Immigrants Who Aren't

When Americans think of illegal immigration, they often picture people crossing borders in the night. Japan's situation is different.

The country's geography makes unauthorized entry nearly impossible. It's an island nation with tightly controlled ports and airports. Border officials examine documents, take fingerprints, and photograph every arriving foreigner.

The result: almost all illegal immigrants in Japan entered legally. They came as tourists on ninety-day visitor visas and simply never left. As of July 2025, about 71,000 people were estimated to be living illegally in Japan, down from a peak of 300,000 in 1993.

That decline came through stricter workplace monitoring, expanded legal work programs, and enforcement. In June 2024, Japan revised its immigration law to allow deportation of anyone who has applied for refugee status three or more times without providing reasonable new grounds.

Where Things Stand

As of late 2024, China provides the largest number of foreign residents in Japan at over 844,000, followed by Vietnam at 600,000 and Korea at 411,000. Filipinos, Nepalis, Indonesians, and Taiwanese together account for several hundred thousand more.

The years 2022 and 2023 saw rising immigration after policy changes, particularly to fill shortages in retail and hospitality. The government appears to be slowly, reluctantly accepting that Japan cannot sustain itself without foreign workers.

But acceptance and welcome are different things.

An Uncertain Future

Japan faces a choice it has long avoided. By 2040, it will need millions more workers than its own population can provide. The math is unforgiving. Birth rates have been below replacement level for decades. The population is aging faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

Other wealthy nations facing similar pressures have opened their doors wider, for better and worse. The United States, Canada, Australia, and much of Europe have bet on immigration to sustain growth and fund retirement systems.

Japan has resisted this path, clinging to an image of itself as something pure and apart. An island nation. One race, one culture.

That image was always more myth than reality. Today, it's a myth Japan may no longer be able to afford.

The question isn't whether Japan will accept more immigrants. Demographics have already answered that. The question is whether Japan can become a place where immigrants actually want to go, and whether it can welcome them when they arrive.

So far, the answer to both questions remains unclear.