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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
Many countries are tightening the immigration screws. For example, Thailand just reduced visa exempt stays for most countries from 60 to 30 days and have been going hard after illegal foreign businesses set up under Thai nominees.
While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.
This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.
The problem is that identifying who the "best" immigrants are for your country can be very difficult when thousands upon thousands of people are trying to game the system.
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
Do people starting an 'airbnb' business help with the aging problem? Same thing with some of the other immigrants. They're not really creating economical value as much as they're competing with natives taking the 'easy part'.
This has to be balanced with preserving culture and social homogeneity. A country is not just an economic entity and individuals 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
People in China realized they could just buy/lease a guesthouse in Osaka / any tourist hotspot, and rent it out on Airbnb. Then they become a "business manager" and get a Japanese resident visa within 3 months. All you needed is to invest 5million yen, which is like 31k USD, which isn't much. People wrote entire online guides on how to do this. They even had brokers/agents helping people with the process [0].
Approximately half of all business manager visas went to Chinese nationals. In Osaka, 41% of all short-term rentals were operated by Chinese individuals [1]. The visa practically turned into an Airbnb host visa.
It's not surprising at all that Japan made the rules stricter.
[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/06/05/japan/immigrati...
[1] https://chinatravelnews.com/article/186285/
Since you can bring in relatives on this kind of visa, I’ve heard the expression “One curry pot equals three people”. There have been stories in the Japanese press about long-time restauranteurs being shut down by the new rules.
That depends of what you're hoping to prevent.
If you want to filter out people who can't sustain themselves, petty crime or the like, it works. But it can open the door to a lot of unwanted effects.
A foreign national that just extracts capital by capturing real state and collecting rent is a great example, this person is a large net loss for the country.
Even to their home country.
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.
Is there something illegitimate in doing an activity that yield profit when the national is Chinese ? Or when it's a short term let ? Or when it is something that doesn't directly contributed to innovation benefiting the nation ?
But of course if we limit our perspective to an economic one, then it seems like a wise and sound approach to "escaping the hamster wheel" for the average Chinese person, easy money right? I think people in Japan probably don't have that perspective though, but instead look at the tail-effects of allowing that sort of behavior. That's why they changed the rules probably.
Rent would cost ¥60,000–120,000/month, they would list it on Airbnb for ¥20,000/night, then assuming 50% occupancy the return is ~¥200,000/month.
It was very profitable. The payback period for the ¥5 million was 1.5 - 2 years.
Which they were almost certainly divvying up. A bunch of people invest $32k each. Some management company buys the home, pays them all a cut of airBNB proceeds, etc. You don't "do" anything beyond put up $32k for your $31k piece of paper.
If I had to guess, I'd say probably not in most cases.
A lot of Chinese are cash rich (perhaps not on average but with 1.3 billion people the absolute number is large compared to other countries) and want to invest abroad, and are buying properties all over the place.
Another piece of evidence is the huge number of Chinese students in UK universities (from my experience) although the tuition fee alone is about £35k ($46k) a year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGAmKqTWjxU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLOsYTfl7k
(These two videos are quite recent at the time of writing this here.)
Don't get fooled by the deliberate (but misleading) title(s). This is a narration of more and more restrictions coming. So the article here also taps into this 1:1.
In some ways it reminds me of Nigel Farage in the UK, though in Japan it is not quite as tied to an individual person.
That's pretty rich, gotta say!
> at all costs
That’s with nearly 100% certainty always wrong at leads to disaster
Second
I doubt the new requirements will hinder shell companies that much. The honest people on the other hand will be screwed.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government has a problem with this practice. The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable. When the issue was raised, the income requirements were changed as an immediate reaction, but the ISA has broad authority to grant or deny based on many circumstances.
Put differently, acts like this were already illegal, but difficult for the ISA to catch. So they changed the base requirements which are theoretically much easier to catch than the actual illegal behavior.
From Asterix & Cleopatra (1965): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSL0D_ZUAAAvbeM.jpg
Relevant as ever.
While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.
This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.
Countries should be competing for the best immigrants, not closing their doors.
Japan is a very attractive destination for a variety of reasons (highly-developed, safe, relatively "cheap", etc.) so you have lots of people who are willing to jump through some hoops and put up some capital for a chance to live there.
I wouldn't say that the changes to the business manager visa are going to help Japan attract the "best" immigrants. They will definitely hurt some good people who are contributing to Japan. But on the whole they will probably be reasonably effective in weeding out most of the abusers. Not all, but most.
It's a sledgehammer approach because a scalpel is very difficult to use when so many people want to live in your country.
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.
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.
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.
To go to the USofA or to, say, Australia?
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.
Recent example in Vietnam: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DY_-NcwDTaJ/
A lot of trashy tourists are moving from Bali over to Vietnam. I few sorry for the locals. Yes, they'll make a few extra bucks a week from more tourists but at the cost of seeing your society get destroyed slowly.
Dear Vietnam, please do not try to become the next Thailand and Bali for tourism. Do not welcome sex tourists, criminals, crypto bros, begpackers. Don't sell your soul for a few extra dollars.
He got called out several times about his stories so I wouldn't be surprised if he's making stuff up again.
Good point, WP [0] has some details, looks like pretty credible call outs.
I did read about that when I watched the show, but proceeded to forget because I didn’t actually care that much ;)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Adelstein#Career
In a country with a population of 123 million, that's a non issue just for pleasing far right Nippon Kaigi friendly voters.