Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan

A large number of Airbnb hosts were using this Business Manager Visa as a way to stay in Japan.

People in China realized they could just buy/lease a guesthouse in Osaka / any tourist hotspot, and rent it out on Airbnb. Then they become a "business manager" and get a Japanese resident visa within 3 months. All you needed is to invest 5million yen, which is like 31k USD, which isn't much. People wrote entire online guides on how to do this. They even had brokers/agents helping people with the process [0].

Approximately half of all business manager visas went to Chinese nationals. In Osaka, 41% of all short-term rentals were operated by Chinese individuals [1]. The visa practically turned into an Airbnb host visa.

It's not surprising at all that Japan made the rules stricter.

[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/06/05/japan/immigrati...

[1] https://chinatravelnews.com/article/186285/

A guesthouse in Osaka is 31k USD?

Many countries are tightening the immigration screws. For example, Thailand just reduced visa exempt stays for most countries from 60 to 30 days and have been going hard after illegal foreign businesses set up under Thai nominees.

While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.

This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.

Fundamentally the issue is that visa requirements are restrictive creating concentrated demand for labor. There are countries with higher paying jobs that can done online, but every position doesn't just shift overseas. We put the onus on the individual to stop illegal activity, but it’s the business owners that hire and sustain this kind of employment. A high minimum wage would negate the need and desire for irregular migration. It would also provide good paying jobs for migrants who could afford to live in the country.

> In one case, investigators in Kanagawa Prefecture found that a Sri Lankan national had set up roughly 600 shell companies. He also allegedly submitted business manager visa applications for at least six Sri Lankan nationals by listing them as company presidents on paper, even though they actually worked manual labor jobs.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government has a problem with this practice. The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable. When the issue was raised, the income requirements were changed as an immediate reaction, but the ISA has broad authority to grant or deny based on many circumstances.

Put differently, acts like this were already illegal, but difficult for the ISA to catch. So they changed the base requirements which are theoretically much easier to catch than the actual illegal behavior.