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Comment by sogen | Hacker News Reader

Visa cost: ¥5M Y

Isn't "5M JPY investment" (45k USD) the requirement for the visa, not the cost?

Yes, I don't think this is an official number though. It is almost sufficient (according to specialized lawyers) on its own but not absolutely necessary depending on the person degree, skills and plenty of other things.

edit: After checking a relevant Japan ministry of justice webpage [1], 5m yen is given as an indicator, which is why I suppose it is the value given by most lawyers.

[1]: http://www.moj.go.jp/nyuukokukanri/kouhou/nyukan_nyukan20.ht...

There is a minimum capitilisation requirement of 5M JPY to sponsor a visa. For people starting a company and coming in on a business visa (forget the actual name), you will need at least 5M JPY in your company. This is to ensure that your company has enough money to support you for a year. This amount is very much dependent upon a variety of factors, so it may be more than 5M JPY, as far as I know.

The money is still held by your company and you can own the stock, so it's not like you are "spending" it.

What? Why would anyone migrate to Japan then? You'd think that they'd have started relaxing the requirements, given the low birthrates and shrinking labor pool.

They kinda don't give a shit about that birthrate and declining population thing. Instead they aim for post-labour era with robots and not much manual labour.

In addition to that, they already have lots of young people who can't find solid jobs. For the last 20-ish years they economy doesn't grow. Big companies usually keep their old employees for a really long time, but don't grow. Thus youth don't have positions to fill. Importing population wouldn't help much, most of their companies are export based.

As someone with close friends in Japanese government (Ministries), I can tell you they do care VERY much about about their declining birthrate and stagnant economy.

...they're just unwilling to actually do anything about it. Allow immigration? Make it possible for women to have careers after childbirth? Stop funding increasingly ridiculous infrastructure boondoggles and give tax cuts to consumers instead of zaibatsu? Hire and promote based on talent, not seniority and what school you graduated from? Nope nope, it's all too muzukashii.

I've been visiting Japan regularly for 20 years now. To a first approximation, nothing about the fundamentals above has changed.

What do you mean by "allow immigration"? If you have a degree and a job you can come work and live in Japan. Japanese immigration is not that restrictive. My native country, the UK, has far more hoops to jump through to get permission to work.

The social changes are a much bigger challenge. If your family sees you as a bad mother for working while raising children then financial incentives and back to work schemes will only get you so far.

I guess he mean poor immigrants vs rich expats. The only relatively poor immigration they welcome is ESL teachers. Aside from that.. If you can make it in Japan, you can live well anywhere else.

There's very little of euro/us style poor 3rd world kind of immigration. Even if one would get a visa, they'd have a really really hard time finding a job. Strip club bouncers is very limited market.

Germany, Italy, Spain have similar low birthrates than Japan you know. They probably have less labor pool issues though.

For Germany, it is easily solved by getting a lot of good labour from Spain and Italy. That equation works out less favourably for Italy and Spain, though...

Business Visa applicants are a minority in any country. For a typical work visa, it's actually unusually simply to immigrate to Japan (all you need is a degree and a job offer). See how easy it is to immigrate to your country with just a degree and a job offer.

Japan just doesn't have a road for unskilled immigration (compared to the US with the green card lottery and all the illegal immigration, EU with all the refugee immigration). They had a program for nurse internship but apparently botched/sabotaged it.

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