Which countries are overrepresented in Japan's foreigner population?

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Paul McMahon

Founder of TokyoDev

As a Canadian, I noticed that we were relatively overrepresented her in Japan compared to our American neighbours. While the US’s population is about nine times of ours, their population in Japan was only five times ours. This got me curious, and so I did some number crunching, dividing the number of foreign residents in Japan by country by the population of their country of origin, and then multiplying the result by one million to get something easily comparable.

Not surprisingly, Korea was the most represented in relative terms, in large part owing to Japan’s wartime legacy. Other asian countries ranked high, as did South American countries such as Peru and Brazil, which boast large ethnic Japanese populations.

The surprising outlier was New Zealand. With 3,672 residents of Japan but a relatively small population of 5 million, it boasts the proportionally highest number of residents among English speaking countries.

If you’re curious, you can find the full data below.

Country Residents of Japan
Absolute Relative
Korea, Rep. of 446,364 8,632
Viet Nam 411,968 4,271
Mongolia 12,797 3,968
Nepal 96,824 3,384
Taiwan 64,773 2,746
Philippines 282,798 2,616
Peru 48,669 1,497
Sri Lanka 27,367 1,255
Korea, Dem. People's Rep. 28,096 1,095
Brazil 211,677 1,003
Cambodia 15,020 911
Thailand 54,809 787
New Zealand 3,672 737
Myanmar 32,049 593
China 813,675 582
Singapore 3,164 555
Bolivia 6,096 529
Australia 12,024 474
Malaysia 10,862 340
Canada 11,118 296
U.K. 18,631 279
Indonesia 66,860 247
France 14,106 210
U.S.A. 59,172 180
Uzbekistan 3,627 108
Bangladesh 16,632 102
Germany 7,782 94
Afghanistan 3,350 88
Pakistan 17,766 82
Italy 4,702 78
Spain 3,620 77
Argentina 3,077 68
Turkey 5,419 65
Russia 9,378 65
Iran 4,170 50
India 40,202 29
Nigeria 3,201 16

More about the author

Photo of Paul McMahon

Paul McMahon

Founder of TokyoDev

Paul is a Canadian software developer who has been living in Japan since 2006. Since 2011 he’s been helping other developers start and grow their careers in Japan through TokyoDev.

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