Immigration to Japan

According to the Ministry of Justice, the number of foreign residents in Japan has steadily increased since 1949. According to the Immigration Services Agency, under the Ministry of Justice, there were more than 3.95 million foreign residents, accounting for approximately 3.2% of the total estimated population of 123.2 million as of June 2025.

Due to geographic remoteness and periods of self-imposed isolation, the immigration, cultural assimilation and integration of foreign nationals into mainstream Japanese society has been comparatively limited.

After 1945, unlike the guest worker immigration encouraged in other advanced industrial economies such as Germany, Japan was for the greater part able to rely on internal pools of rural labor to satisfy the manpower needs of industry. In the late 1980s, the demands of small business owners and demographic shifts gave rise for a limited period to a wave of tacitly accepted illegal immigration from countries as diverse as the Philippines and Iran.

Production offshoring in the 1980s also enabled Japanese firms in some labor-intensive industries such as electronic goods manufacture and vehicle assembly to reduce their dependence on imported labor. In 1990, new government legislation provided South Americans of Japanese ancestry such as Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Peruvians with preferential working visa immigration status. By 1998, there were 222,217 Brazilian nationals registered as residents in Japan, with a smaller number from Peru. In 2009, with economic conditions less favorable, this trend was reversed, with the Japanese government introducing a program to incentivize Brazilian and Peruvian immigrants to return home, with a stipend of $3,000 for an airfare and $2,000 for each dependent.

As of the second half of 2015, with an increasingly elderly Japanese population and lack of manpower in key sectors such as construction, IT services and health care, Japanese politicians are again debating the need to expand temporary foreign labor pools, through the use of short-term trainee programs. The years 2022–23 have seen rising immigration after policy changes seemingly in reaction to labour shortages, particularly in retail and hospitality industries.

According to a 2023 study by the independent think tank Recruit Works Institute, Japan may face a labor shortage of more than 11 million workers by 2040 due to its rapidly aging population and declining working-age population. The report projects that the worker supply will shrink by about 12% from 2022 levels by 2040, even as labor demand remains steady. To achieve the government’s target economic growth rate of 1.24% per year, Japan would need approximately 6.74 million foreign workers by 2040, nearly four times the number it had in 2020.

Resident foreign nationals in Japan that are counted in immigration statistics of permanent residents and mid-long-term residents (granted resident visas for 12 months or more) include individuals and their registered dependents with:

From 2013 published government reports, the proportion of foreign residents granted permanent resident status in Japan exceeded 30%. Although, if foreign residents granted permanent resident status, spouses of Japanese nationals, fixed domicile residents (those of Japanese ancestry) and ethnic Koreans with residence in Japan are included, the number of resident foreigners granted permanent residence effectively exceeds 60%.