Staying on
54.4% of you want to work here afterwards. What you ask for is not a job — it is a faster visa change.
Students who want to stay in Japan were asked what would help them most while job hunting. More career fairs came sixth. Better information came second. The answer at the top was the immigration paperwork — and unlike every other item on the list, it has grown at each of the last three surveys.
Most people arriving in Japan to study are not planning to leave. JASSO asks all 7,867 respondents what they intend to do after graduating, and lets them name up to three options.
Up to three answers each, so the column does not sum to 100. Shares of all 7,867 respondents.
Two of those lines are worth watching over time rather than reading once.
Plan to work in their home country
Was 19.4% in 2019 and 15.0% in 2021. Down by nearly half in four years.
Plan to study further in Japan
Was 41.4%, then 42.8%. Rising steadily while going home falls.
Whatever else is happening, the intention to leave is shrinking. The survey does not ask why and we are not going to supply a reason.
The work they want is not the work they are doing
Among the 4,278 students who want a job in Japan, the fields they name are almost the mirror image of the part-time jobs they currently hold. Two thirds of working students are in food service or retail. Here is what they are aiming at:
Up to three answers each. Shares of the 4,278 students who want to work in Japan.
Research and management are effectively tied at the top, each named by about one student in three. (They cannot be added together — this question allows three answers, so the same student appears in several rows.)
What is worth noticing is the bottom half of that chart against the top half of a different one. While studying, 39.2% of working students are in food service and 28.4% are in retail. Those are the two largest part-time occupations by a wide margin. In the list of careers they want, service work sits at 16.3% and sales at 14.1%. The survey uses different job categories for the two questions, so this is not a like-for-like subtraction — but the direction is unmistakable.
And here is what they say would help
This is the question that makes the whole chapter worth reading. The same 4,278 students were asked what they want more of when job hunting. Up to three answers.
Shares of the 4,278 students who want to work in Japan. At Japanese language schools the top figure rises to 60.2%.
The first and third items are both about immigration procedure. Put them next to each other and the picture is not ambiguous: the thing students most want changed about job hunting in Japan is not the job hunting.
The direction of travel is the real finding
A single survey tells you what people want. Three surveys tell you what is getting worse. JASSO has asked this question the same way since 2019:
| What would help | 2019 | 2021 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simpler, faster visa change | 53.8% | 54.8% | 57.2% |
| More flexible rules on status | 33.4% | 33.4% | 36.1% |
| Better job information | 53.0% | 51.2% | 51.2% |
| More internships | 24.9% | 29.1% | 28.3% |
| More career events at school | 32.4% | 31.3% | 26.6% |
| Better careers advice desk | 26.2% | 24.9% | 21.0% |
Every item that asks something of a school has fallen. Both items that ask something of the immigration process have risen. The careers desk lost five points; the visa procedure gained three and a half.
We are not going to tell you what that means about Japanese immigration policy — that is a bigger claim than one survey question supports, and the survey does not ask students to explain their answers. What we will say is narrower and firmer: students are increasingly identifying the paperwork, rather than the labour market or their school, as the obstacle between them and a job here.
Why this matters before you arrive, not after
Studying and working are two different residence statuses in Japan. Finishing your course does not convert one into the other — a separate application does, and it happens in the last months of your studies, at the same time as your job hunt and your thesis.
We are deliberately not describing the requirements here. Immigration rules change, and a wrong sentence about them costs a reader far more than a wrong sentence about rent. What the data supports us saying is this: this step is the one that the students already doing it rate as their biggest problem, and it is worth understanding its timing before you choose a course, not after.
It is not a language problem
The obvious counter-explanation is that students struggle to get hired because their Japanese is not good enough. The survey measures this directly, and among the students who want to work here:
Hold JLPT N1 or N2
33.9% at N1, the highest level, and 30.9% at N2.
Hold no Japanese qualification
Of those still at a language school, that figure is 15.9% — and 71.1% of them already hold N1, N2 or N3.
Two thirds of the students who want to stay have already cleared the two highest levels of the standard Japanese exam. Whatever is making this hard, it is not that they cannot speak the language.
Which does not stop them worrying about it. Asked what makes them anxious about working here, the top answer is still language:
| What worries them about working in Japan | Share | 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| Whether their Japanese will be understood | 48.1% | 52.6% |
| Whether they can build good relationships at work | 47.6% | 51.0% |
| Whether they can get the job they want | 41.5% | 35.3% |
| Whether they can adapt to Japanese business customs | 17.3% | 17.5% |
| Whether they will fail at business etiquette | 16.0% | 16.3% |
| Whether they can handle customers properly | 12.6% | 11.2% |
Language anxiety and relationship anxiety have both fallen since 2019. Only one line moved the other way, and it moved sharply: "whether I can get the job I want" went from 35.3% to 41.5%. That is the anxiety of someone who expects to be able to work and is not sure they will be allowed to do the work they trained for.
What to take from this
- Assume you will want to stay. 54.4% do, and the share planning to go home has fallen from 19.4% to 11.8% in four years.
- The step people find hardest is the status change, not the interview. 57.2% named it, more than any other item, and the number is climbing.
- Language is not the binding constraint for most of this group. Two in three already hold N1 or N2.
- Your field matters more than you think. Research and management are each named by about a third of the group — and what you study is bound up with what you will later be permitted to do.
- 10.1% intend to start a business here, which is a different route again, with its own rules.
Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Table 12-1 (plans after graduating; 7,867 respondents, up to three answers, with 2019 and 2021 comparisons), Table 12-4 (fields wanted; 4,278 students who want to work in Japan), Table 12-5 (Japanese-language qualifications held by the same group), Table 12-12 (what would help when job hunting, with 2019 and 2021 comparisons), Table 12-13 (anxieties about working, same comparisons), Table 8-4 (current part-time jobs). Survey PDF (Japanese). On reading the percentages: every table on this page allows up to three answers per student, so the columns exceed 100%. The first chart is a share of all respondents; every other figure is a share of the 4,278 who said they want to work in Japan. "2019" and "2021" are the Reiwa 1 and Reiwa 3 rounds of the same survey, printed in the same tables. The 71.1% figure for language school students holding N1, N2 or N3 is our addition of three published rows (16.7 + 26.2 + 28.2). What we have not done is describe the residence status rules themselves. Those come from the Immigration Services Agency, they change, and this article is about what students reported — not about what the procedure requires.