Japan lifted its business manager threshold from ¥5m to ¥30m

Japan rewrote the entry test for the residence status its foreign business owners use on 16 October 2025, and the change is larger than the figure suggests. The monetary limb of that test rose from ¥5,000,000 to ¥30,000,000, and it is no longer one option among three. The test stopped being a choice and became a list: an employee, a Japanese speaker, a degree or a track record, and an outside verifier are now all required, each in addition to the money. Some 46,781 people held the status at the end of 2025.

What the ordinance says

The conditions for the Business Manager status sit in the Ministerial Ordinance to Provide for Criteria pursuant to Article 7(1)(ii) of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, Ministry of Justice Ordinance No. 16 of 1990. Ordinance No. 50 of 2025, promulgated on 10 October and in force from the 16th, replaced the Business Manager row of its table.

Until that date the applicant met the business-scale test by satisfying any one of three limbs: two or more full-time employees resident in Japan, stated capital or total contributions of ¥5,000,000 or more, or a scale recognised as equivalent to either. The third limb was the flexible one, and it is the one that has gone.

The text now in force requires both of two limbs. The business must be operated with at least one full-time employee resident in Japan other than the person managing it, and the total value of the property applied to the business, capital and contributions included, must be ¥30,000,000 or more.

The employee cannot be just anyone. For this limb the Immigration Services Agency accepts only a Japanese national, a special permanent resident, or the holder of a status in Appended Table II of the Act — permanent resident, spouse or child of a Japanese national, spouse or child of a permanent resident, or long-term resident. A colleague on an ordinary work visa does not count, however senior.

Two conditions that did not exist before sit beneath the scale test. One of the people managing the business, or working in it other than part-time, must understand and use Japanese with a high degree of autonomy and must be living in Japan while the applicant manages. The Agency reads that level as B2 on the national reference framework, evidenced by JLPT N2, 400 on the BJT business test, twenty years in Japan as a mid-to-long-term resident, a Japanese higher-education degree, or Japanese compulsory schooling followed by a Japanese high school. For this limb — and only this limb — a colleague on an ordinary work visa does count. And the applicant must hold a doctoral, master’s or professional degree in management or in the field the business needs, or three years of management experience.

A fifth requirement sits in the Enforcement Regulation rather than the ordinance: the business plan filed when the status is granted must now be checked by a certified SME management consultant, a certified public accountant or a tax accountant. The verifier may not be an officer or employee of the applicant’s own company, and a foreign equivalent of the three Japanese qualifications is not accepted.

The money is not always capital

The ¥30m means different things to a company and to a person, and the Agency has had to say so twice. For a company it is paid-in capital, or total contributions in a partnership-type company. Capital reserves, capital surplus and retained earnings are excluded, and salaries and office costs cannot be added to reach the figure. Where a person manages several companies, one of them must itself be at ¥30m: the capital cannot be pooled.

For a sole proprietor the figure is not capital at all but the total sum invested to run the business — premises, a year of staff salaries, capital equipment. Asked directly whether a sole proprietor must raise ¥30m of capital, the Agency’s answer is one line: that is not true.

Premises have their own rule. Using a home as the business office is, as a rule, not accepted, and the Agency ties that to securing an office fit for the scale the amended criteria assume.

Who has to meet it, and by when

For a new arrival, now. Two doorways into the old criteria survived the effective date, and both are shut to anyone who did not already have a foot in them: an application for a certificate of eligibility or a landing permit filed before 16 October 2025 is still decided on the old test, and a certificate of eligibility issued before that date carried the old test into a landing application for three months afterwards. Nothing filed today can reach either.

For people who already held the status on 16 October 2025, the date is 16 October 2028. An extension application made on or before that day will not be refused for failing the new criteria alone; the examiner weighs the state of the business and the prospect of compliance. For applications made after it, the criteria must be met — with a carve-out the Agency states plainly: where the business is sound, tax obligations have been discharged and the criteria are expected to be met by the following renewal, the whole residence record is weighed. Asked whether someone who cannot raise ¥30m by that date must leave Japan, the Agency answers that this is not true.

Two consequences travel further than the renewal queue. Permanent residence will not be granted from Business Manager, or from the Highly Skilled Professional statuses that rest on Business Manager activity, where the amended criteria are not met. And the Agency now checks labour-insurance and social-insurance enrolment and payment, and the national and local taxes the business owes, at every extension. A sound business and a clean corporate tax record do not, by themselves, secure a renewal.

The start-up visa buys time, not a discount

The route that softens the landing is the Foreign Entrepreneurship Promotion Programme, run under a notice of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. A local authority or private body certified by the minister checks a start-up preparation plan and issues a confirmation certificate; on that certificate the immigration bureau may grant Designated Activities status for start-up preparation, up to a cumulative ceiling of two years. The separate special-zone version was folded into it and the scheme went nationwide on 1 January 2025.

One date on that certificate decides everything that follows it. Where the confirmation certificate was issued before the amending METI notice took effect, the later conversion to Business Manager is judged on the old criteria; issued on or after it, on the new ones. For a certificate issued on or after that day the route does not lower the ¥30m. It postpones it, and it feeds the clock: time spent on the preparation status counts towards the three years of management experience that is one of the two ways into the new criteria. The route also has a gate of its own — one year of business experience, or the same degree the main route accepts.

The remote-work status asks for income, not investment

One route here requires no Japanese company, no capital and no hire. The Designated Activities status created for international remote work permits work by information and communications technology for a foreign employer, or supplying services and goods for reward to people abroad, for not more than six months. It substitutes an income test for an investment test: personal annual income of at least ¥10,000,000 at the time of application, and private insurance covering death, injury and illness for the whole stay with treatment cover of at least ¥10,000,000.

It is also the shortest. The status cannot be extended, a further stay needs six months outside Japan first, no residence card is issued, and work under a contract with a Japanese employer or client is not permitted.

Eligibility then runs off a list of 51 countries and regions. Eight of them sit in East or South-East Asia: Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Vietnam, the Philippines and mainland China are not among them, and neither is India.

The investor visa is a proposal that missed its own deadline

No investor or angel-investor category appears in the Immigration Services Agency’s index of Designated Activities, which does carry the start-up and remote-work entries added in recent years. The National Strategic Special Zones Act, as in force from 31 July 2026, contains neither the word “angel” nor the word “investor”, though it carries and names the special-zone immigration schemes that do exist.

The commitment behind it is three years old. The Action Plan for Attracting Human Resources and Capital from Overseas of 26 April 2023 asked the Ministry of Justice and METI to make such a grant easier. The Grand Design and Action Plan for a New Form of Capitalism, in its Cabinet decision of 16 June 2023, said the government would study an investor visa built on assets held and a record of start-up investment, using the special-zone framework and the United Kingdom as a model. The Regulatory Reform Implementation Plan of 21 June 2024 attached a date: the necessary measures by around the end of the 2024 fiscal year, 31 March 2025.

What exists instead is a design. The Agency put it to the special-zone working group on 29 January 2025 and labelled it the present draft: Designated Activities status, five years in total, for investing in, advising and supporting newly founded companies, with spouse and children able to accompany and no work permitted outside the status. The conditions listed — the paper ends them with “and so on”, so they are not a closed set — run to age, nationality, conduct, an investment record, management experience, assets, payment through a Japanese bank account, shares in an unlisted Japanese company within ten years of incorporation and screened as an appropriate investee, and activity expected to contribute to the zone’s start-up ecosystem.

The draft is firm about two of those and vague about the rest. The applicant must be 18 or over, and the company invested in must be within ten years of incorporation. Everything that would price the route — the size of the investment record, the length of the management experience, the level of assets, the value of the shareholding — is written as “a set amount” or “a set period”. The paper also notes that creating the status would take an amendment to the special-zone Act.

Fifteen months after the deadline, the Cabinet Office’s progress paper of July 2026 records the proposing authorities surveying investors during the 2025 fiscal year, the conditions and the screening and monitoring arrangements still under consideration, and ministries continuing to coordinate. It sets no new date.

What to watch

Two dates are fixed and one is missing. The last protected renewal for the people who held Business Manager on 16 October 2025 falls on 16 October 2028; after that their applications meet the new criteria like everyone else’s, and how generously the stated carve-out is read is the thing no text will settle in advance. The next revision of the criteria ordinance is already promulgated and takes effect on 1 April 2027; its Business Manager row is word for word the one in force today, so any further movement on the threshold needs a further amendment. The investor route has no date: its conditions were being worked out in July 2026, while the statute that would have to carry them, as in force at the end of that month, still says nothing about investors at all.