Doing Business in Japan

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Knowledge base on doing business in Japan. Topics: visas and immigration (including the Business Manager visa 経営・管理 and the October 2025 reform), company registration (株式会社/合同会社/個人事業主), taxes, legal issues and cases, documents and procedures (banking, offices, accounting, hiring), useful links and contacts, and other business-relevant topics (culture and mentality, networking, marketing, real estate, lending, insurance).

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Visa, Immigration, and Business-Manager Status Risks — Overview

Overview of visa and immigration risks for business owners in Japan: nominal-business risk, the 2025 BM-visa reform, and officer practice.

アンアン株式会社
Jul 21, 2026
japan-businessvisa-business-managervisa-other

This section merges several related areas: the risk that a mismatch between a business's real activity and its declared visa status creates — a nominal company opened "for the box," self-subcontracting by a director, someone on the wrong visa type performing director functions, changing directors after a BM-visa refusal, and holding a business through offshore structures under CFC rules; the legal nature of the Business Manager visa and the October 2025 reform, including the public-comment process via e-Gov, the consultation results, the arguments submitted against tightening the rules, holder statistics by nationality, the non-retroactivity rule with its transition period, and the reluctance to approve BM status for three or more foreign directors; actual immigration-officer practice around requesting information, the lack of a single communication protocol, the formal nature of business-plan interviews, the ability to appeal a decision in court, and public activity as a possible audit trigger; and additional migration topics — Employer-of-Record schemes for work visas, remote seishain work from abroad, nominal directors, working through a foreign company's branch representative office, visas for Ukrainian refugees, foreign-company ownership overlap, and business-survival statistics. See: Nominal Business Risk and the Legal Nature of the BM Visa; BM-Visa Reform Arguments, Statistics, and Officer Practice; EoR Schemes, Nominal Directors, Refugee Visas, and Detention.