Where you live
Almost half of you will be asked for a guarantor. Most of you do not have one.
Seven in ten international students in Japan rent an ordinary private apartment. Nearly half of them were asked to produce someone who would pay their rent if they could not — a person they had, in most cases, no obvious way of finding.
There is a step in renting a Japanese apartment that has no equivalent in most countries, and it catches people at the worst possible moment — after they have been accepted, after they have booked the flight, while they are trying to secure somewhere to sleep from several thousand kilometres away.
The landlord asks for a guarantor. Not a deposit, which you can pay. A person.
First, where students actually live
5,380 / 1,480 / 739 students, from the 7,599 who gave valid income and expenditure answers. The survey's housing section reports the private-apartment figure as 70.1% against a slightly larger base (5,512 of 7,867) — the two are the same finding counted on different denominators.
Seven in ten are in the ordinary rental market, dealing with ordinary landlords and ordinary agencies — which means dealing with the guarantor question.
What a guarantor actually is
A guarantor (hoshōnin) is a person who signs a contract agreeing that if you stop paying rent, they will pay it. Not a reference. Not a character witness. A legally binding financial commitment from a third party, usually expected to be a working adult resident in Japan with stable income.
Japanese students typically use a parent. If you have just arrived from Nepal or Vietnam, you do not have a parent in Japan with a Japanese income and a Japanese address.
3,829 of 7,867 students. In the previous survey the figure was 51.0%, so this is easing — slowly.
The number that surprised us
There are guarantee companies in Japan — businesses that stand in for a personal guarantor in exchange for a fee. Some schools also run their own schemes for international students. Given that most arrivals have nobody to ask, you would expect these to carry the bulk of the load.
They do not.
Used a guarantee scheme
738 students, of the 3,829 who were asked for a guarantor.
Found some other way
Roughly four in five. The survey does not record who they found.
Four out of five people who were asked for a guarantor did not use a scheme. The survey stops there — it does not ask who they used instead. So we are not going to tell you. What we can say is that the great majority solved it through a person or an arrangement that the questionnaire had no box for: a school that arranged something, an employer, a relative already in Japan, a friend, a landlord who waived it.
The thing that is getting easier
Two figures in the survey have moved in the right direction across three rounds.
| Difficulty after arriving | 2023 | 2021 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finding somewhere to live | 16.8% | 18.9% | 20.3% |
| Following the rules where you live | 15.7% | 13.5% | 12.3% |
Finding a place has become steadily less painful. Living in it has become slightly more so. Rubbish separation, noise, the rules about what goes where on which morning — these are getting harder to comply with, not easier, and that is worth knowing before you sign anything.
The dormitory question, in money
Institutional housing removes the guarantor problem almost entirely, and it is cheaper. How much cheaper depends enormously on where you are enrolled:
| Where you study | Renting privately | In a dormitory | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior college | ¥179,000 | ¥99,000 | ¥80,000 |
| National university | ¥162,000 | ¥128,000 | ¥34,000 |
| Vocational school | ¥170,000 | ¥137,000 | ¥33,000 |
| Japanese language school | ¥176,000 | ¥150,000 | ¥26,000 |
| Private university | ¥200,000 | ¥178,000 | ¥22,000 |
These are total monthly spending figures, not rent alone — dormitory residents spend less across the board, partly because the accommodation is cheaper and partly because of where and how they end up living.
The spread is the interesting part. At a private university, moving into halls saves you ¥22,000 a month. At a junior college it saves ¥80,000 — nearly four times as much. "Is there a dormitory?" is a question worth asking with very different urgency depending on where you are applying.
What to ask, and when
Ask the school two things before you accept a place, not after: does the institution have housing for international students, and if not, does it act as guarantor or have an arrangement with a guarantee company?
Both answers change your costs and your options. Both are usually answerable in one email. And 16.8% of students still report that finding somewhere to live was one of their hardest struggles — a number you can lower for yourself by asking early.
Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Section 10 (housing; 7,867 respondents), Table 4-11 (difficulties after arriving), Table 7-7 (monthly spending by housing type and institution; 7,599 respondents who gave valid income and expenditure answers). Survey PDF (Japanese). On reading the percentages: all figures here are shares of students. The 19.3% guarantee-scheme figure is a share of the 3,829 students who were asked for a guarantor, not of all students. Table 7-7 gives total monthly spending, not rent in isolation.