As another Asia-based software dev (Vietnam), this was an interesting read. I am currently going the spousal visa route but this carries its own advantages and disadvantages. I've always loved Japan but generally unsure of living there due to high cost of living, aging population, and strict immigration laws. As least in the case of the latter, it's good to know a path exists!
Actually Japan is significantly lower cost to live than to live in SF. The average salary of a college grad that’s 30 years old is roughly $30K. Their prices are roughly the same because wages are the same, and they can’t afford to increase prices without causing huge systemic problems. As long as you’re not eating kaiseki or expensive sushi, Japan is absurdly cheap from USD standpoint, especially with recent exchange rates. 1 bedroom apartment might only cost you $600/month in more remote parts of Tokyo. A very filling yakitori meal might only be 1000 yen ($7-8) per person.
"non-residents": Did you mean non-citizens? Else, I do not understand the context of this term. Clearly, the OP was talking about living/working in Japan. That would imply residence. Yes, there is national health care. For working age people, it costs about 10-20k yen per month (many factors can change the final cost). Co-pay is 30%.
It's actually better in practice because the state puts maximum prices on all kinds of procedures, and IIRC there is also a maximum annual amount that you can be charged. IOW it's easy to ensure your care costs are bounded.
Great point! First, I didn't know that the national gov't is actively involved in medical pricing. I guess it makes sense when you have national health care. Second, to state the obvious, 30% would be insane co-pay for someone in the United States. However, in Japan, it is quite reasonable. Elderly only pay 10%, and most children pay nothing.
This is a bit of a misconception, at least by East-Asian standards: much easier than China, (surprisingly) easier than South Korea, and similar (maybe slightly stricter) to Taiwan.
Overall: This is a great article. I am not surprised that Japan granted the visa, considering his long work and live experience in Japan. It was relatively low risk for they to grant him the initial 4 month visa, followed by a 1 year visa. If his business failed, he would have closed up after 16 months and returned home.
To me, the most important part about why Japan continues to approve his visa extensions: He income is high enough and he pays local + national taxes. Paying your taxes is the number one reason why Japan will extend your visa! Even if you earnings are overseas, but you declare them while living in Japan and pay Japanese taxes, they will grant you visa extensions.
On a more personal note: It is interesting that he wrote "I have recently remarried, to a Japanese national". The term "~ national" is quite specific in North American English, as it implies the person's origin (and original nationality) is different than the country. For example, Canadian national, but born in Jamaica. This implies, at some point, that the person nationalised as a Canadian.
This is also the visa that many middle class Taiwanese and Chinese people use to move to Japan. It's basically a visa for sale under the auspices of a "business visa".
Can this strategy be used while working remotely as a regular employee for an American company? In other words, does the Japanese business have to generate any revenue?
How so? I’m genuinely curious as a current Tokyo resident.
The main issues Vancouver seems to face are:
Affordability and Housing Crisis: Tokyo is a remarkably affordable city given its status. There’s housing stock at pretty much every price level.
Homelessness and Street Disorder: not a problem in Tokyo
Drug Addiction and Overdose Crisis: not a problem in Tokyo
Traffic Congestion and Transportation: public transportation is stellar in Tokyo. Traffic can get pretty crazy at rush hour, but I hear that’s been the case for a long time and it’s not much of a problem if you use the aforementioned fantastic train system.
FWIW, I left San Francisco after close to 15 years due to the issues above. Tokyo has its problems, but they don’t seem to be in the same category.
Agree it’s not as bad as Vancouver, but housing costs in Tokyo are rising [1]. And speculation by Chinese investors is being blamed, similar to Vancouver.
And while I agree that public transportation is excellent, commuting every day on crowded trains, which can take an hour or more for many people, would be hell for me personally.
Only this year, did the most central parts of Tokyo finally return to their peak property prices from 1989. Tokyo is a steal compared to its "Global Alpha" counterparts.
Thanks for the great writeup! It’s good to know that this option exists for remote software developers who wish to live in Japan.
> My visa has been renewed four times now, with the most recent renewal being for three years (the first three were one-year renewals).
Having to renew every year sounds pretty inconvenient. How bad was the renewal process for the Business Manager visa, in terms of time and cost? Also, is it possible to apply for permanent residence after a certain number of years?
The actual visa renewal fee is only JPY4000 (for full-time employees, spending one of your limited days off going down to the immigration office stings a lot more than the monetary cost). If you want to pay an advisor to prepare the documents that will cost more, but you probably don't need to do that if it's a straight renewal where nothing's changed.
> Also, is it possible to apply for permanent residence after a certain number of years?
10 years generally; there's also a fast-track points system. (You can also naturalize after 5 years, but you have to renounce any other citizenships for that).
helped me put together a three-page document that I was sure wouldn’t be sufficient for the Japanese immigration authorities.
This struck me as a case of bureaucracies operating the same way everywhere (though I could be wrong).
The magic key to documents submitted to governments: don't say anything that requires denial.
So less is often more and it is critical to use the right words and not their apparent synonyms even when the synonyms mean pretty much the same thing.
I.e. if you plan to paint your shed green, don't mention that in your building department application. It doesn't help and can only hurt.
Can't speak for Japan, but in the US, the immigrant does have the burden of proof that all requirements are satisfied and not submitting enough evidence can lead to a request for evidence (RFE) or notice of intent to deny (NOID). And so the law firm we used had the opposite strategy: submit as much evidence as possible and really help the adjudicator check all the boxes. Our petitions tended to be 250-500 page documents.
Yeah, this part smells like the government agency needing a document with the correct contents so someone working there can tick several boxes saying "Requirement fulfilled". The post ends with him wondering why he got the visa, I suppose he just met all the requiments...
Modern Japan gov't agencies are much less adversarial than people imagine. The bad old days of 1990s are gone. Japan is much more liberal about work visas now. If you have a good reason to be here, you make good money, and you pay your taxes, short of a criminal act, you can renew your work visa forever, without issue.
Imagine running a business with a series of one-year guns pointed at your head, never knowing if they'll go off. Countries can and do summarily change the rules for work visas all the time: for example, in Singapore during COVID, the government decided to shore up local employment and score political points before an election by suddenly announcing that spouses of employees could no longer apply for work rights (Letter of Consent) and that existing LOCs would not be renewed, throwing a lot of families into disarray.
It's even worse for an unusual visa like this, where a lot is left to interpretation. You may get a different officer this year who is going to nix what the previous one allowed last year, and appeals are uncertain, cumbersome and may require you to leave the country.
Renewals in Japan are guaranteed if you meet the requirements. Japan foreign worker visa rules are very straightforward. The number one cause for concern would be if your business generates insufficient revenue to pay your a minimum salary required by the visa rules. And the minimum is rather middle class. Before you reply very quickly saying: "What if they business has a bad year?" ... please answer from the perspective of other highly advanced, wealthy nations: Do they want to allow people to stay who are running weak/failing businesses? Probably not.
> in Singapore during COVID ... suddenly announcing that spouses of employees could no longer apply for work rights
This is the reason that I never recommend to live in Singapore as a foreigner, unless you are working as a senior manager for a very large corp.
> Countries can and do summarily change the rules for work visas all the time
Not in Japan. In the last 50 years, they have universally become more liberal about allowing highly skilled people to live and work in Japan.
Maybe things are different with Japanese immigration authorities, but posting this feels dangerous.
In other countries there's a lot of attention on "fraudulent" visas, and it's often vague what "fraudulent" means. I'd be worried that some of the 'tricks' in here (the admission that the business doesn't really need to be in Japan, the office arrangement, etc.) could make immigration authorities revoke the visa if they feel it was done under false pretences.
While I agree if he were doing anything questionable, IDK, my reading is that he's exporting software development services from Japan and paying taxes in Japan correctly on both business income and personal income incident to doing this.
Yup I agree. Japan sets and enforces the requirements as they see fit. It sounds like they are pretty much happy to let anyone in as long as they’ve got ¥5,000,000 and a plan to start a business in Japan.
They clearly keep you on a short leash with the yearly renewal requirements to ensure you are paying taxes, following laws, and are unlikely to become a burden on society.
They may change the requirements in the future, but in a country facing severe population decline, just paying taxes, supporting the health care and social security systems, and spending money with local businesses may be sufficient to justify handing out the visa.
> How is he marrying Japanese nationals so quickly?
Interestingly phrased question, but I will bite:
1. We don’t know how long the courting period was for any of his marriages (he mentions two).
2. For women who are disposed to getting married, my direct and indirect experience is that they often make the go / no-go decision fairly quickly — think weeks (or even days) rather than months or years.
3. As another poster said, he probably has relatively high income and decent social status in Japan.
4. The marriage market is not very good in Japan right now. The changes that led to the lost decade in the 90s is starting on its 4th decade (imho). Significant aspects of the social contract that bound Japanese society together from post-ww2 to the late 80s was largely destroyed, with young people (many of whom are not so young now) left to pick up the pieces. Marriage, much less kids, seems daunting when one’s income is not stable, and this economic instability is not uncommon.
5. A less popular observation is that there is no shortage of Japanese women, especially in Tokyo, who want to marry foreign men. There are a variety of potential reasons for this disposition, with self-serving interests being a non-zero percentage of these reasons across the population. Common self-serving reasons I have seen or heard are things like escape Japanese society, escape family, get a US green card, milk a sugar daddy, etc. On a rare occasion there are very (what I call) cosmopolitan women who quite naturally fit into an international oriented lifestyle and/or community.
> do you mean lifetime employment or something else?
Lifetime employment was certainly part of it.
In the late 80s and (especially) the 90s, there were some changes that Japan made. Many of these changes were encouraged or pushed by western countries. Here is a list of a few that I think were important that changed the social contract:
- Decreased obligation of large corporations to hire “lifetime employees”, especially salarymen. These days, many of the spots that would have been salarymen jobs (permanent positions) are now much less stable contract positions. Folks in the less stable contract positions seem to be less confident in making life-long choices like marriage and kids. In this case, the system of employment made a huge change, almost overnight, but the world around them (e.g., housing, banking, dating, job market, etc.) did not adjust with it.
- Deregulation of distribution (maybe some other things). There were many, many jobs in Japan that were basically make-work jobs. The example that I’m most familiar with is alcohol distribution, because my buddy was a distributor. Pre-change, a case of beer from the factory would touch something like 7-9 hands, with each taking a small cut, before reaching the consumer. After deregulation, it was more like 3-4. All of those middlemen basically just vanished and/or consolidated over a short period of time. Part of this was good, since the population was decreasing. But the number of jobs lost seemed to rapidly outpace the decrease of eligible workers. Many western countries considered the pre-deregulation to be “unfair trade practices” and “economically inefficient”. They were not wrong, but I think that these makework layers in the distribution system functioned as a kind of baked-in welfare system in the Japanese economy. People were doing something, they were making money, and they were spending it (especially with affiliated orgs, like their customers). All of this kept the velocity of money at a healthy level, which matters a lot for supporting parts of the economy. After deregulation, jobs were lost and the velocity of money dropped, and nothing in the market or in government policy was changed to address this.
- Women’s working rights. Prior to the 90s, most women were restricted to admin or service jobs like OL, bank teller, elevator girls, etc. Two things happened. First, women were not allowed to be excluded from salaryman jobs, so that applicant pool grew while the number of jobs decreased. Second, women in these jobs were often expected (to be very generous here) to leave their jobs once they got married, had a kid, etc. This is no longer the case. What has happened is that a lot of the women in the teller, OL, stewardess type of positions simply haven’t left their jobs (totally ok), but that leaves their juniors with far far fewer jobs (at least of similar quality/status) to go into. Basically the number of “good jobs” decreased substantially and started to have less turnover all at the same time. What were/are young people to do? Again, nothing in the market or in policy was done to address this.
To summarize these points, the labor market of jobs changed drastically during the 90s, but cultural attitudes did not. The ratio of jobs that were considered highly stable to the jobs that are unstable started to skew heavily towards the unsteady variety. The economy was deregulated to some extent, and prices fell quite a bit (perhaps too much), but at the cost of a built-in social safety net that was not replaced by very much in the market (e.g., competition for quality labor via wages or QoL) or in government policy (e.g., unemployment, housing assistance, job training, etc.).
Imho, the government bureaucrats in the 90s totally dropped the ball. They caved to western pressure to deregulate, they did it quickly, and they were completely blind or indifferent to what it did to the social fabric.
Note that I lean heavily towards preferring efficient markets over inefficient markets, but this transition by Japan as a country and as a government was just irresponsibly done. Either they should have left some of the things as is (like the regulated layers of distribution), or they should have implemented them more gradually.
This was typed on my phone, so I apologize if it’s not coherent. I’m happy to expand on any of these ideas if anyone is interested and has a question.
Edit: A great example of the failure of Japanese society to adapt is patio11 when he quit his salaryman job to work full time on BCC. He was living in a modestly-priced place in a provincial area as a salaryman. His employer was his housing guarantor. When BCC made as much (iirc, it was more) than his salaryman job, he quit. He asked his landlord about what changes needed to be made to the housing contract. His landlord said “none… you need to move out”. So despite having a better ability to pay his rent, and I assume having never missed his rent, he was unceremoniously asked to leave his apartment despite being better able to pay his rent. Laws/policy could have been made to make housing more friendly for entrepreneurs and contract workers. The government could have done a much better job at educating the general population and various sectors of the economy about what sorts of reasonable changes they could expect in the marketplace and (perhaps) what acceptable behavior would be moving forward. The best I can tell, the government just shrugged their shoulders and did little to nothing.
Overall, very thoughtful post. You must be someone with a lot of experience living in Japan.
At the end:
> So despite having a better ability to pay his rent
I disagree. From the perspective of the landlord, he was suddenly much less reliable as a counterparty, after leaving his stable job with a Japanese corporation. A huge deposit will fix this issue most of the time -- six months will suffice for most conservative landlords. This amount is unheard of for Japanese nationals, but will demonstrate your resolve to the landlord.
> You must be someone with a lot of experience living in Japan.
Lived there 8 years, and worked with things Japanese for longer.
> From the perspective of the landlord, he was suddenly much less reliable as a counterparty, after leaving his stable job with a Japanese corporation.
Yeah. I wasn’t going to expand on this, but since you brought it up…
1. The landlord’s behavior was fairly typical for the time. That doesn’t mean that it was reasonable. Keep in mind that this was small town Japan, and Patrick wasn’t some unknown rando.
2. Whether Patrick himself was actually a less reliable counterparty is… highly debatable. I would put him in the “really safe” category, even as a foreigner.
3. Iirc, he did offer to make a deposit or whatever (the rent was stupid low, so a 12-month deposit was very possible).
4. Given that his income went up while he had zero costs of being a salaryman, his cash flow situation was almost certainly quite a bit better.
5. I can’t remember all of the details of the story, maybe patio11/patrick can refresh our memory.
Anyway, regardless of what was standard at the time, this anecdote (and there are many like it) was a prime example of how Japanese society did not change and how the government did not give reasonable guidance.
I will also add that this is yet another way that Japan treated entrepreneurs as second class citizens, despite the employment landscape changing dramatically. The government would have done well to address this a long time ago.
Of course I can’t comment on his specific circumstances. But two things stand out for me:
First, he is a software developer working for international companies, which probably makes him a pretty high earner relative to most people in Japan. Earning a high income improves mens’ eligibility for marriage pretty much anywhere in the world.
Second, Japan places a high value on marriage - both culturally and legally. It’s less common to see people date/live together for many years before getting married than in say the US or Europe.
While I can’t really say whether it’s better/worse than elsewhere, I do know that divorce in Japan can be ruinous.
Horror stories abound on reddit forums for expats in Japan. Combine this with the fact that international marriages are more likely to end in divorce, and things can start to look pretty grim.
That being said, I still think marriage is worth it, provided both parties are willing and able to put in the effort to make it work. And I know many examples of couples in international marriages who have been happily married for decades or more (myself included).
And what makes it a “bad contract” anyway? The obligation to support one’s spouse and children in the event of divorce? I can see how this might be seen as a negative by the primary earner in a marriage, but on the other hand I can see clear societal benefits to this arrangement.
Yes, I was also bothered by the term "bad contract". The phrase feels a bit Red Pill to me.
Without children, there is essentially no alimony system in Japan. So, divorce for a middle aged housewife is essentially ruinous. It is awful. As a foreign parent, you are likely to lose 100% access to your children. It is demented.
almost like the aspiring housewife shouldn't sign a bad contract, or hedge the risk by getting her own income if she doesnt have capital or a support system
look at you immediately trying to use an ‘othering’ term for men, while proving the exact point that its a bad contract for a common subset of women and foreigners
shame that you’re so comfortable trying to ‘other’ men, too comfortable. the point is don't sign bad contracts
a bad contract is based on the probability of expensive clauses being activated. in any other financial arrangement, a 50% chance is a very bad contract that would just be avoided. a “30% chance amongst parties in their late 20s and older in higher socioeconomic brackets” is still a very bad chance in literally any other financial or business agreement and would be laughed at, as it would be devoid of all the cultural baggage and conditioning to engage with. a 10% chance would be bad too!
this is mutually exclusive of understanding the purpose of the clause and seeing the benefit of it.
this is merely saying, objectively, based on the aforementioned criteria, this is a bad contract.
Is it so quick? He talks about getting divorced in 2017/8, now in 2023 he's 'recently remarried'. Staying out of relationships for a year or two after a divorce seems wise, to deal with difficult emotions and get a fresh perspective. But life goes on.
