There are roughly 22,000 Britons estimated to be living in Japan, which has the world’s oldest population with around 30 per cent of its citizens aged 65 or older – compared to 19.5 per cent in the UK. Although facing a chronic labour shortage and growing demand for foreign workers, it has also recently rolled out stricter and more expensive overhauls to its immigration framework. Fees for foreigners seeking permanent residency in the country have been increased by 20 times to Y200,000 (£955), and those seeking permanent residency must now also meet new income, pension and Japanese language requirements. Visa fees have also been raised by up to 400 per cent for the first time in nearly 50 years.
Lizzie Lawrence left the UK in 2015 and has now been living in Japan for 11 years with her Japanese husband Yoshiyuki and twin children, Euan and Iona, aged two years and four months. She has already seen how the changes have affected the country.
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Growing up, I first became aware of Japan through my mum’s childhood Japanese friend, and loved anime, manga, and all the pop culture. After studying Japanese and Asia Pacific studies at Lancashire University, I knew I wanted to live there in the future. I ended up studying abroad there in 2013 and 2014, staying in the Akita prefecture, near the city of Yokote which has a 450-year-old festival every year where they build igloos lined with candles. It was beautiful.
After leaving university, I applied for grad jobs, and I ended up back in Japan, working as an English teacher in Saitama, a quiet area just east of Tokyo. There are expats in Tokyo who have lived here for 30 years and still barely know a word of Japanese, but I wanted to integrate so I attended a Japanese language school on my days off. Now I work as an English translator and in my current job I earn around £22,000 a year, which for the UK isn’t much, but for Japan it’s a middling salary and I can live comfortably with my four-person family.
I met my Japanese partner, Yoshiyuki, online in 2018 and we married in 2021. We both love the quiet and calm, and still live just outside of Saitama city in the countryside. After renting for a year together, we were lucky when our house came on the market. In Japan, you pay the land price and the building price, but we just paid the land price of around £200,000. Our three-bedroom is larger than the average Japanese house and we’re surrounded by fields. We’re both into gardening and we’ve planted cucumbers, tomatoes, and we’ve even had watermelons before.
You pay for healthcare here via mandatory public health insurance, around ¥17,000 a month (£80) deducted from your salary – similar to the UK, where you pay national insurance. I had my twins, Euan and Iona, in 2023 through fertility treatment, which is becoming more common in Japan and is also covered under the health insurance now. In Japan, you usually have to pay for childbirth as they deem it a “voluntary illness”, but they pretty much only allow C-sections for twins, which is deemed medically necessary, so insurance paid for 70 per cent of it. The government also provides a childbirth and childcare lump-sum grant of ¥500,000 yen (approximately £2,371) per child which helps families cover delivery costs.
Euan and Iona went into nursery from 10-months-old, so I could go back to work. After the age of three, childcare is completely free, so you have to cover it up to then, but it’s all income-based and much cheaper than the UK. Back there, my sister pays about £950 a month (including the free 30 hours) for my niece, who is the same age as the twins. The twins’ cost about ¥66,000 a month (£315).
It’s happening world-over, but there’s anti-foreigner legislation that’s starting to creep its way through the government at the moment. The residency and visa changes have definitely made it trickier for foreigners since they’ve been introduced. I understand it to a degree, as the fees had been the same price for a long time since 1978, but the new fees feel like a huge increase.
I’ve just reapplied for my working visa. You either get a one, three, or a five-year visa but, unfortunately, you don’t know which one you’re going to get. They don’t lay out criteria of what you need to get each one. It’s really not transparent at all. People call it the “dartboart”’ where you’re just slinging in the dark. For me, if I get a five-year visa, that means I’m paying ¥75,000 yen (£356) every five years. If you get a one-year visa, you’re paying quite a lot every year (£156) to renew it.
As for permanent residency, there are a couple of routes you can take. You can take the 10-year route, the highly-skilled professional route, or the spousal route, which is when you’ve been married to a Japanese person or someone with permanent residency for three years. I went with the spousal.
Unfortunately, I was recently rejected after waiting two years since I first applied. They give you a list of paperwork, and there’s “optional” extras that you can submit. I learned the hard way that they aren’t really optional. The office took two years to say we were missing one thing, so we now had to apply again before the fees went up. It will take another two years because it goes through Tokyo, which is inundated. I think it was around 100 sheets of paper in total.
There are still lots of Japanese people that think foreigners don’t pay taxes. Of course we do. We are living here, paying taxes and contributing to the economy. They first changed the requirements for the business management visa because a lot of people were coming in, getting a visa, and then sending all of their profits back to their own country without it going through the Japanese system. I get there was a reason for it, but it’s caused a lot of people – including people with families and kids who have never been to their parents’ home country – to have to go back to where they came from because they just can’t afford to run their business anymore.
Suddenly you had to have a certain amount of assets and profit, which was just not possible for a lot of small businesses. Notably, a lot of Indian curry restaurants are starting to disappear because the owners couldn’t come up with the required assets in time.
Now, with the recent changes, it feels like they’re trying to solve one issue with a broad brush stroke. It’s going to cause a lot of people a lot of heartache because the income requirements have to be above the average Japanese household, which is not possible in some places, unless you’re living in Tokyo and you have a really good job. Thankfully, we’re fine because we can count assets in the application, so we added our house deed to the paperwork. My husband, who works in accounting, has also just changed jobs, so that should bring us above the threshold.
As for whether the stricter visa stipulations and rise in fees are intensifying the labour shortage in Japan, I think we’re already seeing the effects. Convenience stores, care homes, and the nursing practices usually relied on a foreign workforce, particularly from Southeast Asia. But many workers are now not able to afford the visa fees. A lot of restaurants haven’t been able to maintain staff because Japanese people don’t want to work for the salaries that they offer. It’s only going to get worse as the population grows older and Japan realises it won’t have people to take care of them in old-age.
A few of my coworkers have gone home. One went back to the UK with her family; the other went back to America; another, from South Africa, left a couple of years ago. She was constantly getting one-year visas, which makes it very unstable and hard to plan for the future. She got fed up with it and moved to Germany instead.
It would be very difficult to move back home and the visa fees and requirements in the UK would be higher than in Japan for Yoshiyuki. I also moved here right out of university, so I don’t have a lot of work experience as an adult there to fall back on. Yoshiyuki has epilepsy and a couple of health issues and we wouldn’t be able to get onto the NHS for six months, so that would also be an issue.
Even with this all going on, I love Japan and the plan is to stay here. We’re planning for the kids’ future here and putting money away for their education. We’re making sure they can speak both languages, though.
We like the quiet life. The twins love walking and spotting insects at the rice fields. There’s lots of dragonflies at the moment. I would find it really devastating to take them away from all this and the life we’ve built here.