Foreign Residents in Japan 2026

Living in Tokyo, meeting foreigners at cafés, restaurants, and on the street has become part of daily life. One third of the customers sitting in this cafe I am writing this from are foreign.(There might be ones like me who are hard to tell by looks so might be 40%)

We see a lot of inbound tourism hitting news headlines — and yes, Japan crossed 42 million visitor arrivals in 2025 for the first time. But tourists go home. What about people who stay like myself?

📊 Japan now has over 4 million foreign residents
According to the Immigration Services Agency, as of end-2025, Japan hosts 4,125,395 foreign residents — a 9.5% increase in a single year, and the fourth consecutive record high.

That’s 3.36% of Japan’s total population. Up from 2.3% in 2020.

Top nationalities: (K 1,000)
🇨🇳 China — 900K
🇻🇳 Vietnam — 660K
🇰🇷 South Korea — 410K (top3, no wonder I bump into a lot of fellow Koreans )
🇵🇭 Philippines, 🇳🇵 Nepal, 🇧🇷 Brazil following close behind
Myanmar and Indonesia are the fastest growing

📈 The trend: 10 years of near-unbroken growth
2015 -2.23 million (Dec data)
2020 -2.89 million (Dec data)
2025 -3.96 million (June data, Dec not released yet on gstat)

💼 Why is this happening? Job market place a big role.
Japan’s job-to-applicant ratio stands at 1.25 — meaning 125 job openings for every 100 applicants. In nursing it’s 3.7. In construction, 4.6.

When I was managing operations at a warehouse, we had quite the hard time securing the headcount for night shift. Significant portion(more than 70% headcount) of the workforce became Vietnamese.

Lets shift gears and go back to the 3.36% ratio(Foreign resident to JP total population)

🌍 Is 3.36% high? Compared to whom?
The number is considered low if you compare to European countries, but if you look at Korea or Taiwan where I believe the culture is more similar and language barrier is similarly high for foreigners the difference is not too big.

Country / Foreign Resident, born share
Germany 17%
UK 14%
USA 14%
South Korea 5%
Taiwan 4.1%
Japan 3.36%

As someone who enjoys a diverse environment with mixed nationalities Japan is becoming more interesting every year.

Also as a Korean (where the job to applicant ratio is 0.32 - and, yes that is not a typo.. Japan 1.25 Korea 0.32) I think it is a win-win for both Countries if more Koreans migrate to Japan for work.

If you are interested in seeing the full data in depth released by Japanese government refer to
https://lnkd.in/g4Yn73tk

Foreign Resident/ Born share is from 2024 UN data
https://lnkd.in/g3gqXrCz