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When we first published this article, I had a knot of anxiety in my stomach, afraid that I had misread something or mixed up some numbers. No number of peer reviewers (in this case, at least three) ever makes that feeling go away for me.
A commenter on LinkedIn alerted us to a problem: the table I referred to on the Ministry of Justice website as representing the number of naturalizations per year is actually referring to the acquisition of Japanese nationality under Articles 3 and 17 of the Nationality Law, which includes by acknowledging a child, reacquiring nationality, or “other cases.”
My mistake was twofold: I assumed “other cases” included naturalization by application, and I also overlooked the Japanese, which specifically lists naturalization (帰化, kika) as a separate category. This misinterpretation is entirely my fault, and I apologize for misleading folks.
I have updated this article to add this clarification, and to correct my mistakes.
We also considered completely retracting this article, but I think it’s better to correct it and leave it on the site as an example of how, despite the best intentions of authors and editors, data can still be misinterpreted. I hope this article will introduce more people to publicly available Japanese data sources!
If you pay attention to news site headlines and videos from various influencers, then you’ve probably heard some of these claims involving international residents in Japan:
- Nobody stays more than a few years
- Permanent residency is impossible to get
- Citizenship is easy to get
- Japan doesn’t let people naturalize
- Foreigners are taking over Japan!
- Foreigners aren’t being allowed in Japan!
Are any of these true, though? Are they all true?
At TokyoDev, it’s important to us that we provide fact-based information rooted in valid contexts, so we’ve also published data-backed articles about salaries, permanent residency application rates, and our own surveys of international developers living in Japan.
Where can you find official data?
Instead of getting your information from sources with their own agendas, it’s possible to go look at the official statistics and judge for yourself. Various branches of the Japanese government are quite open with their data, whether it’s about visa renewal and processing times, the types of highly-skilled professional visas granted and where the grantees are from, or the number and home countries of international residents in the various municipalities of Tokyo.
Since e-Stat provides data sets in Excel and CSV format, you can build your own data visualization tools; for example, in the past people used data sets from e-State to track and visualize Covid-19 infection rates.
Especially relevant to this article are these three sets of statistics published and maintained by the Ministry of Justice:
- Trends in the numbers of applicants for naturalization
- Statistics on foreign residents (divided by residence type)
- Statistics on status of residence applications (filterable by year)
What does the data tell us about naturalization in Japan?
It’s critical to understand what you’re looking at and whether you’re comparing like to like. Let’s start with the trends in the numbers of applicants for naturalization.
Trends in the number of people applying for naturalization
The chart presents, for each year:
- Number of applications received
- Number of applications approved
- Number of approvals from China, Korea, or another country
- Number of applications denied
The biggest anomaly present is that the columns don’t seem to add up. Some additional context helps make sense of this chart:
- applications can take more than a calendar year to process
- approvals and denials will often arrive in a different calendar year than the application
This means it’s difficult to figure out an accurate “approval rate,” as we don’t know which approvals and denials are linked to which years. However, we can aggregate multiple years together to get a broad estimate of the acceptance rate. Let’s use the Reiwa era (2019–2024) as a cutoff point for our rough analysis.
What does the data tell us about permanent residents in Japan?
e-Stat has a table of international residents and their statuses of residence as of June 2025. There are two columns for permanent residents: permanent residents (永住者, eijuusha) and special permanent residents (特別永住者, tokubetsu eijuusha).
Special permanent residents are those who were displaced after World War II, as well as their descendants. They are typically people who have been born and raised in Japan and may culturally identify as Japanese, but in the eyes of the law are not Japanese citizens.
They are legally distinct from those who immigrated to Japan and later became permanent residents, so we will not include them in our analyses.
How many permanent residents are there in Japan?
To start with, Japan’s population is over 122 million people. Permanent residents number only 932,090 people, which makes them about 0.76% of the population of Japan.
The chart also tells us that there are 3,956,619 international residents total, so we can also conclude:
- Permanent residents represent roughly a quarter of the international population
- International residents represent around 3.24% of the population of Japan
What other statistics exist for permanent residency?
We can look at the statistics for status of residence applications for 2024, which includes data on permanent residence (永住, eijuu) applications specifically at the very right end of the chart. There are three rows of interest for us in the permanent residency section:
- applications from the previous cycle (
受理_旧受, juri, kyuuju) - applications from the current cycle (
受理_新受, juri, shinju) - applications successfully accepted (
既済_許可, kisai, kyoka)
Using this data, we can compare apples to apples: there were 116,919 ongoing applications for permanent residence during 2024, of which 48,362 were carried over from the previous cycle, and 68,557 were new. Permanent residence was granted to 36,766 people during this period, and denied for 17,282 people.
As we already know the application rates for citizenship, we can safely say that permanent residency appears to be an order of magnitude more popular than citizenship among international residents.
Why is permanent residency more popular?
The preference for permanent residency is probably attributable to a few objective factors:
- The multiple paths to permanent residency, which include continuous residence, the highly skilled professional points-based system, and the spouse visa
- Lower Japanese language requirements, since the permanent resident application process does not include an interview, test, or specific language ability requirement
- Less onerous bureaucracy, because there’s no requirement to give up other citizenships
- Flexibility, as permanent residents may relocate to other countries at any time
There are also subjective factors, such as emotional attachments to previous nationalities, or worries about the finality of “being Japanese” and never returning to live with family or friends.
However, citizenship also grants a few privileges over permanent residence:
- Citizens may vote in elections
- Citizens do not lose their citizenship if they commit a crime
- International residents are required to carry their residence card; there is no corresponding requirement for citizens
- Citizens receive and can be recorded on family registers (戸籍, koseki)
- Citizens have fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution, while permanent residents can have theirs curtailed; for example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, permanent residents faced travel restrictions that citizens did not
The numbers seem to indicate that these privileges are not well-known or compelling enough to persuade international residents to naturalize, even if it is an option for them.
What else can we learn from this data?
The table shows that many international residents in Japan are from East Asia. Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese immigrants alone make up about 35.5% of the international residents recorded in 2025. This likely can be attributed to geographic proximity, but also to cultural and economic similarities.
People from the US (68,022) or Europe (104,426)—not to mention those from Australia (11,845), New Zealand (3,770), Canada (12,441), and England (20,532)—account for less than 0.2% of the population and only about 5% of the international residents of Japan, making them a minority within minorities.
One possible explanation is that salaries in Japan can represent a practical barrier for people moving from higher-salary or more expensive countries. Even if they intend to live and retire in Japan, financial or personal obligations in other countries can be prohibitively expensive on a Japanese salary.
There are viable paths to permanent residency and naturalization
The data makes it clear that international residents who choose to do so are able to find more permanent means of living in Japan. Though there are some systemic barriers to naturalizing, in this case they do not arise from the Japanese government rejecting applications or discouraging immigrants from applying.
If you want to learn more, we have articles on permanent residency statistics and a developer’s personal experience with the process, as well as on the career arcs of developers who have settled long-term in Japan.
