Japan's New Visa Rules Are Tearing Apart Immigrant Businesses — and Families With Them

The Restaurant That Smells Like Home — and May Soon Be Someone Else's

In the Okubo district of Tokyo, one stop north of Shinjuku on the Yamanote line, the neighbourhood tells a particular story. Vietnamese cafes sit beside Indian curry houses. Korean barbecue joints share walls with Bangladeshi trading offices. Kebab shops occupy the ground floors of apartment buildings where entire families have carved out lives that exist between two countries and belong fully to neither. This is the Japan that globalisation built — vibrant, useful, economically active, and now under formal government pressure to be significantly smaller.

In a corner of Okubo, 38-year-old Nepalese national Budhathoki Samjhana runs the Chitwan Rhino Restaurant and Bar, filling the space with the smell of freshly cooked momos and the steady rhythm of a business she assembled from nothing across years of sacrifice that most people would not have sustained. She came to Japan as a student in 2016. She saved. She opened her first restaurant in 2023. By January 2026 she had opened her third eatery — and for the first time in a decade, she had brought her 14-year-old daughter from Nepal to join her. The daughter is now enrolled in a Japanese school. The family is, finally, in the same country.

Now Budhathoki is not sure any of it will survive Japan's new business manager visa rules, introduced by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in late 2025. "I always wanted to become a bridge between Japan and Nepal," she told AFP. "But my dream is broken."

What Changed: The New Rules and What They Actually Require

The business manager visa category was designed to attract genuine foreign entrepreneurs to Japan — to give people with viable business plans a legal pathway to build companies, employ workers, contribute to the economy, and establish lives in a country that has one of the world's most severe demographic crises. The visa grew in popularity dramatically: by mid-2025 there were approximately 46,000 holders, up 70 per cent from 2020.

But the same growth that demonstrated the visa's appeal also attracted a different kind of interest. Administrative affairs advisor Kazuki Yuda described to AFP what immigration officials and advisors had been observing: the business manager visa had become an easy route for would-be immigrants without real business plans. More troubling, unscrupulous real estate agents had been telling people that they could secure a visa simply by purchasing property in Japan. Immigration attorney Daisuke Komori said he had personally declined clients, many of whom were Chinese nationals, seeking visas primarily to move their children into Japanese schools or to leave China for personal reasons rather than to build functioning businesses. About half of all business manager visa holders were Chinese nationals, according to government data.

The government's response to this documented abuse — and to the broader political pressure from an electorate increasingly agitated about immigration, overtourism, and foreign-driven real estate price inflation — was a package of new requirements that went into effect in late 2025. Business manager visa holders were given a three-year grace period to comply. The specific changes are where the real impact begins.

The most financially brutal change is the capital requirement. Under the old rules, a business manager visa holder needed to demonstrate 5 million yen — approximately $30,000 — in company capital. Under the new rules, that figure has been raised to 30 million yen — approximately $185,000. A sixfold increase. For a Nepalese woman who spent years working and saving to open a restaurant in one of Tokyo's most competitive food-and-beverage neighbourhoods, accumulating 30 million yen in registered company capital is not an administrative adjustment. It is, as Budhathoki said with the receipts fanned out in front of her, simply impossible.

The second major new requirement is that business manager visa holders must employ at least one Japanese national or long-term foreign resident. The logic is understandable as a policy objective — ensuring that foreign-owned businesses contribute to the domestic labour market rather than importing an entirely foreign workforce. The practical problem, as a 30-year-old Bangladeshi man who runs a trading business in Tokyo described to AFP, is that there are not enough Japanese workers. Japan's working-age population is shrinking. Labour shortages are real and documented across multiple sectors. The requirement that small foreign-owned businesses compete for Japanese workers in a tight labour market, while simultaneously demonstrating dramatically higher capital requirements, creates a compliance burden that is structurally difficult for exactly the businesses the visa was originally designed to help.

Third, immigration officials have become more rigorous in their documentation demands. Visa experts consulted by AFP explained that the renewal process now requires substantially more documentation than previously — tax receipts, social insurance premium records, detailed business accounts. Standards that may have been applied leniently in previous years are now enforced strictly. This tightening of administrative practice is described as applying regardless of whether a specific visa holder was among the abusers the policy was designed to address.

Two Lives That Illustrate the Stakes

Budhathoki Samjhana's situation is the story of a woman who did everything right within the rules that existed when she started and who is now being asked to meet requirements that could not have informed her decisions when she made them. She studied. She worked. She saved. She opened a restaurant, then another, then a third. She brought her daughter to Japan. She is a taxpaying, law-abiding entrepreneur who has demonstrably built something of economic and cultural value in the neighbourhood she occupies.

"Now I'm very worried not about myself but about my daughter," she told AFP. "What did I do to her? My heart pounds when I think about the next visa renewal."

That question — what did I do to her? — is the one that policy designers rarely grapple with directly when they draft immigration rules. The daughter is 14 years old. She is enrolled in a Japanese school. She has no country at the moment other than Japan. If her mother is forced to leave because she cannot meet a capital requirement that was introduced after a decade of building a life in Tokyo, the daughter goes back to Nepal — or stays, alone, in a country whose immigration system has no category for her.

Manish Kumar's situation has already reached its conclusion, and it is grimmer. An Indian national who has lived in Japan for thirty years, who ran a restaurant in Saitama for eighteen of those years, who watched his children grow up speaking Japanese as their first language — he has been told his business manager visa will not be renewed. He does not know precisely why, but immigration experts say officials are now demanding documentation he does not have or cannot produce in the format now required. At a gathering about the visa situation last month, he wept. "My children only speak Japanese," he said. "And we're told to go back to India."

His children. Who speak Japanese. Who have no other home. Being told to go to a country they have never lived in because their father's visa documentation does not satisfy a standard that did not exist when he built a life, a family, and an eighteen-year business in the country where they were raised.

More than 67,800 people have signed a petition calling for the suspension of the new rules. Petition organiser Taro Tsurugashima, speaking of Manish Kumar's case specifically, said what was happening was shocking. Kumar, he noted, "is one of my friends, and he is a trusted member of a business community."

The Political Climate: "Silent Invasion" and the Rise of Sanseito

The specific rules that are now threatening Budhathoki and Kumar did not emerge from a neutral bureaucratic process. They emerged from a specific political moment in Japan's recent history — one shaped by rising nativist sentiment, a demographic crisis that the dominant political culture does not know how to address honestly, and an election that changed the direction of government policy.

Japan has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population is aging faster than virtually any other developed nation. Labour shortages are documented and acute across sectors including healthcare, agriculture, construction, and the service industry. Increasing immigration is the economic response that demographers and most economists recommend. But foreigners were a major issue in last year's upper house election, which saw the sharp rise of the Sanseito party — a party that describes immigration as a "silent invasion."

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office in October 2025, has pledged stricter screening of foreign nationals. Her government announced last month a sharp increase in visa fees for tourists for the first time in nearly fifty years — hiking the cost for single and multiple-entry permits fivefold. And in May 2025, before she took office, the justice ministry announced a "zero illegal foreign residents" plan that has shaped the enforcement culture within which the new business manager visa rules are being applied.

The political pressure is real and it is pushing Japanese immigration policy in a specific direction: toward the appearance of control, regardless of the economic cost. The appearance of control in immigration serves a political function even when its economic consequences are adverse. A Japan that visibly tightens its rules, expels people who do not meet new standards, and announces zero-tolerance frameworks is a Japan that Sanseito voters can support. Whether that Japan can also maintain the restaurants, the trading companies, the small businesses that employ workers and pay taxes and fill the gaps in a labour market that the native population can no longer fill on its own is a separate and harder question.

The visa experts who spoke to AFP — Yuda and Komori, both of whom understand the system's abuses and supported the need for tighter oversight — made the same observation independently. The tougher measures are impacting small restaurant owners and young entrepreneurs alongside the system's abusers. The policy that was designed to target property investors using visas as financial instruments and families using businesses as a pretext for immigration is catching, in its net, exactly the people it was supposed to protect: genuine entrepreneurs who built real businesses and now cannot meet a capital requirement that arrived after the building was done.

The Japanese Worker Requirement: An Impossible Catch

The requirement to employ a Japanese national or long-term resident deserves particular attention because it illustrates the internal incoherence of the new rules when placed against Japan's actual labour market conditions. Japan's labour shortage is structural and severe. Unemployment is at generational lows. Working-age population decline is accelerating. Companies across every sector struggle to fill positions even at competitive wages. The government itself has created multiple new visa categories specifically to attract foreign workers to fill domestic labour gaps.

Into this environment, Japan has introduced a rule that foreign-owned small businesses must employ Japanese workers — in a country where there are, as the Bangladeshi trading company operator put it, simply not enough Japanese workers to go around. The practical consequence of the requirement is not that foreign-owned businesses will hire Japanese employees. It is that small foreign-owned businesses, already struggling to meet the sixfold capital increase, will face an additional compliance hurdle that they cannot practically satisfy because the workers the rule requires do not exist in sufficient supply at the wage levels small businesses can offer. And who would apply, the Bangladeshi operator asked, for a job at a company whose manager's visa has to be renewed every year and whose legal status is therefore permanently uncertain?

The structural circularity of the situation is almost elegant in its perversity: the visa's instability makes it harder to hire Japanese workers, which makes it harder to meet the requirement to employ Japanese workers, which makes the visa renewal harder, which makes the visa more unstable.

What Justice Minister Hiraguchi Said — and Did Not Say

At an April 2026 parliamentary session, Justice Minister Hiroshi Hiraguchi was asked directly whether the government planned to review the new rules. He said he had no such plan. His ministry, he added, intends to respond based on individual circumstances — a formulation that offers the theoretical possibility of case-by-case flexibility while providing no structural relief to the thousands of visa holders caught between the old rules they planned their lives around and the new ones they cannot meet.

The 67,800 signatories of the petition to suspend the rules represent a community of foreign residents, their Japanese partners and neighbours, and Japanese citizens who understand what these businesses contribute to their neighbourhoods and their country. Whether that pressure translates into any reconsideration of the policy is a question of political will in a government that has read its electoral landscape and concluded that appearing tough on immigration serves more voters than it costs.

The Contradiction at the Heart of Japan's Crisis

The story of Japan's new business manager visa rules is, ultimately, the story of a society in profound contradiction with itself. Japan has a demographic emergency that immigration could help address. Japan has labour shortages that foreign workers actively mitigate. Japan has neighbourhoods like Okubo where the cultural vitality, economic activity, and communal life created by immigrant entrepreneurs is visible and genuine. And Japan has a political culture that is moving, in this moment, toward restrictions that will make all of those things worse.

Budhathoki Samjhana spent a decade building a bridge — literally the word she used — between Nepal and Japan. She separated herself from her daughter for ten years to create something worth bringing her daughter into. She succeeded, by any reasonable standard. Three restaurants. A daughter in school in Tokyo. A business that fills a neighbourhood with the smell of home cooking and the sound of two cultures meeting across a counter.

Japan's new rules tell her it is not enough.

"My dream is broken," she said. She is 38 years old. She has a daughter in a Japanese school who has no other home. The capital requirement is six times what it was when she started. The three-year grace period is running.

And in the justice ministry in Tokyo, there is no current plan to review the rules.

Sources

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