Approval Statistics, Processing Times, and Rejection Patterns

Statistics cited in discussion, based on experience and open JETRO data: Tokyo has issued roughly 400 startup visas since 2015; Osaka 36 since 2019; Kyoto around 23 across its entire program history. Unofficial approval-rate estimates vary, clustering around 10%, in the low tens of percent. The startup visa is estimated to be issued 50-100 times less often than the BM visa, which numbered in the thousands per year at its peak (participant estimate). Processing is officially promised within 2 months, but in practice can take 3-4 months, with real cases ranging from a few weeks up to 9-10 months. Importantly, the startup visa application does not extend an applicant's existing visa while under review — the applicant must already hold a long-term visa or apply from abroad. Applying to several city programs in parallel is not formally prohibited, but the administrators of some programs (Kyoto, for example) react negatively on learning of parallel applications — the recommendation is not to mention other cities in correspondence with a given program. Rejections can arrive with no explanation at all (one case: Shibuya, after 3 months of review, a bare "after careful consideration" with no detail) or with a stated reason, as in some municipalities such as Kyoto. A similar experience with InvestTokyo involved over 2 months of revisions and a review panel, ending in rejection on grounds of insufficient business scale ("we'd want a scale like Microsoft's" — quote from the discussion). See: Startup Visa Programs (City and Prefecture): How They Work; METI vs NSSZ Programs, City Options, and Interview Languages.