Before and after
49.5% of you will struggle to find information. What you will find instead is one person's story.
Half of all international students say gathering information was one of the hardest parts of getting to Japan — second only to learning the language. The three sources they end up using most are a returned student, a relative, and a teacher back home. Every official channel sits at the bottom of the list.
Before you get to Japan, you have to get through the process of arranging it. JASSO asks what was hardest about that, and the answers are not what a prospectus would predict.
Shares of all 7,867 respondents, up to three answers each.
Finding out what is true ranks above the visa, above the exams, above the money. Half the student population found it hard.
So where did they go?
Shares of all 7,867 respondents, up to three answers each.
The top three are people. The bottom three are institutions. The organisation that runs this very survey — the one holding the most complete picture of student life in Japan that exists — is consulted by 3.7%.
One in five students used a private agency, which is worth noting separately: an agency is a source with a commercial interest in the answer. That does not make it wrong, but it makes it a different kind of thing from a friend.
The problem with the story you will be told
A returned student's account is genuinely valuable. It is also, structurally, a sample of one — and the numbers on this site show how much variation a single sample can hide.
Consider two students, both truthfully describing "studying in Japan":
A doctoral student in Tohoku
Regional average monthly spending. 65.3% chance of a scholarship, averaging ¥118,000. 19.7% of those who work do 20+ hours a week.
A language school student in Tokyo
Regional average monthly spending. 13.2% chance of a scholarship, averaging ¥35,000. 72.1% of those who work do 20+ hours a week.
Same country, same visa category, same year. A gap of ¥66,000 a month in living costs, a five-fold difference in the chance of funding, and an almost inverted working week. Neither student is exaggerating. Neither one's story transfers to the other.
Add nationality and the divergence widens again: 55.0% of students from Myanmar are at a Japanese language school, against 7.4% from South Korea. The "typical experience" those two groups would describe is not the same experience.
Five questions to ask anyone who tells you about Japan
Personal accounts are worth seeking out. They just need labelling. When someone tells you what it was like, these five facts determine how much of their story applies to you:
- Which city? Tokyo runs ¥66,000 a month above Tohoku. It is the largest single variable in the budget.
- What type of school? Language school, vocational school and university are three different working weeks and three different scholarship regimes.
- Which year? Japan had 279,274 international students in 2023 and 408,069 in 2025. An account from five years ago describes a smaller, differently-composed country.
- Did they have a scholarship? 34.4% do. It changes the study hours, though — perhaps surprisingly — barely the working hours.
- Private apartment or dormitory? It decides roughly ¥15,000–20,000 a month and, at 54.9% against 29.6%, whether they were asked for a guarantor.
A note about one number we cannot interpret
"Searching school or JASSO websites" was used by 14.2% of students. In the 2021 survey the same item scored 31.2%, and in 2019 it was 35.7% — an apparent collapse.
We do not think you should read it that way, and here is why. The top item on the current list — hearing from someone who studied here, at 46.7% — has no figure at all for 2021 or 2019. It is printed as a dash. That means the option was added to the questionnaire for this round.
When a large new option appears in a multiple-answer question with a three-answer cap, existing options lose share mechanically. So the fall in website searching may be real, may be an artefact of the changed question, or may be some of each. The survey does not say, and neither will we.
Which is, in fairness, why this site exists
We are not a neutral party on this question. Everything published here is an attempt to put the survey data in front of people who are currently getting their information from a cousin.
So we will be concrete about what that is worth and what it is not. What the data does well is tell you the shape of the distribution — what most students pay, how many get funded, how the answer changes by city and school. What it cannot do is tell you about your school, your professor, your landlord, or whether you will be happy. For that, you still need the person who went. You just need to know which version of Japan they went to.
Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Table 2-4 (hardest parts of arranging study), Table 2-5 (where information came from, with 2019 and 2021 comparisons and the dash indicating a newly added option), Table 7-3 (spending by region), Tables 6-2 and 6-3 (scholarships), Table 8-5 (working hours), Tables 10-1 and 10-7 (housing and guarantors). Survey PDF (Japanese). Student counts for 2023 and 2025, and the language-school shares by nationality: JASSO's Survey of International Students in Japan for 2025 and 2023. On reading the percentages: both charts allow up to three answers per student and are shares of all 7,867 respondents, so they exceed 100%. The two composite student portraits combine figures from separate tables — regional spending is not broken down by school type in the survey, so those pairings illustrate the range rather than describing measured individuals.