Moving to Japan

A country that spent decades refusing immigration and is now, quietly, competing for it.

Japan does not run a points-scored lottery or a general skilled migration queue. It runs a list. The Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act defines a fixed set of statuses of residence, each attached to a defined activity, and almost everything about a move here follows from which item on that list a person fits. There is no route that says simply “qualified professional wanted”; there is a status for engineers and humanities specialists, a status for students, a status for spouses, and so on.

The practical gatekeeper is not the embassy. It is the Certificate of Eligibility, a document that an employer, school, or family member inside Japan applies for at a regional immigration bureau on the applicant's behalf. The consular visa that follows is largely a formality once that certificate exists. This inverts the usual order of operations: the sponsor in Japan does the substantive work, and the applicant abroad waits.

The reason any of this is being loosened is demographic. The population has been falling for well over a decade and the working-age share is falling faster. The Specified Skilled Worker categories, the Highly Skilled Professional points system, and the J-Skip and J-Find routes are all products of that pressure. Japan has not become an easy country to migrate to, but it has become a country that is building doors it once refused to build.

Region	East Asia
Capital	Tokyo
Population	roughly 123 million
Foreign-born residents	around 3% of residents
Official language(s)	Japanese
Currency	Japanese yen (JPY)

Why people move to Japan

• Statuses of residence are defined in published law, so the criteria for each category can be read in advance rather than guessed at.
• The Highly Skilled Professional points system compresses permanent residence from roughly ten years to as little as one to three years for high scorers.
• Personal safety, public transport, and public infrastructure are of a standard that is difficult to match elsewhere.
• Health insurance is compulsory and near-universal, with a co-payment share that is commonly around 30% and capped for high monthly costs.
• Outside central Tokyo the cost of living is modest by developed-country standards, and a weak yen has made this more pronounced for anyone earning abroad.
• Labour shortages in care, construction, food service, and agriculture have opened routes that did not formally exist a decade ago.

What to know before you commit

• Japanese language ability, not qualifications, is the dominant obstacle to professional work; English-only roles are concentrated in a narrow band of employers.
• Most statuses of residence are tied to a defined activity, and changing career direction commonly requires a change-of-status application rather than simply changing jobs.
• Dependants hold a status that restricts work, and permission to work part-time must be applied for separately and is commonly capped at around 28 hours a week.
• Japan does not permit dual nationality for adults, so naturalisation generally requires renouncing the original citizenship.
• Working hours and unpaid overtime remain long by international comparison, and seniority-based pay structures can leave mid-career arrivals ranked below their experience.
• Ordinary permanent residence generally requires around ten years of continuous residence, which is long by comparison with most of Europe or North America.

The eight guides

Official sources

• Immigration Services Agency of Japan
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs — visa information
• Ministry of Justice

Checked against these pages in September 2026. Fees and processing times change without notice — confirm before you act.