BM-Visa Reform Arguments, Statistics, and Officer Practice

Chat activists drafted and submitted an official public comment opposing tightening the BM-visa rules, arguing: raising the capital threshold does not solve the problem of "fake" companies; there is a risk of financial schemes such as a temporary pool of money shared among people to show a bank statement, a practice reportedly used in the EU; a risk of corruption around mandatory paid business-plan review; a disproportionate impact on women founders, since the gender gap in venture funding makes bootstrapping harder for them; and the absence of any precedent of such policies succeeding in the UK, Korea, the US, or Switzerland, unlike France and Sweden, which have low or zero capital requirements. Proposed alternatives included longer visas, spot checks instead of hard thresholds, more flexible hiring (part-time or contract instead of full-time), and a formal mechanism for handling the mandatory-employee requirement before a renewal if that employee must be let go. On statistics (chat-sourced, accuracy unconfirmed): of 41,615 holders of the keiei kanri status, 21,740 — more than half — are Chinese nationals. One lawyer/consultant estimated that under the new 30-million-yen capital requirement, only about 4% of current BM-visa holders would qualify (citing "recent data" from the Immigration Services Agency, accuracy unconfirmed). The new BM rules formally do not apply retroactively to already-issued visas — they affect only new applications and renewals after the current visa expires; Article 39 of Japan's Constitution generally bars retroactive laws, but it applies primarily to criminal law. Opinions differ on whether Japan thereby broke an implicit understanding with existing BM-visa holders. The legal view is that the BM visa is not an "investment contract" guaranteeing unchanged terms; the law or regulation can be changed unilaterally, has no formal retroactive effect, but a three-year transition period applies. Separately, as a matter of practice rather than law, immigration is reluctant to approve BM visas for companies with three or more foreign directors (torishimariyaku) — lawyers and consultants will not guarantee success for three, and there are almost no known successful cases of all three getting approved. In one real case, a company with three founders/investors obtained startup visas for all three (a rare outcome that took more than two months to arrange), but immigration signaled that at most two of the three could apply for a BM visa, with the third needing to switch to employee status — the company had three investors, two as torishimariyaku and one as daihyo torishimariyaku. On immigration-officer practice generally: the immigration office has the right to request expanded information from a company at visa renewal — client lists, invoices, contacts — though the legal status of such a request is debatable, since there is no formal duty to disclose trade secrets, yet a refusal can in practice affect the visa decision. The claim that a KK (a public company form) is more exposed to such requests than a GK is unconfirmed — participants found no direct statutory basis for it. There is no single formal "protocol" for dealing with immigration — how long to keep someone waiting, how many times to request extra documents, whether to call someone in for an interview — is left to the discretion of the individual officer, illustrated by the Yokohama salary-based visa refusal case. A business-visa application typically goes through an oral interview with an immigration officer who formally checks compliance with the business plan ("did you do what you wrote"), without regard to the business's real success — in one participant's experience, sticking to an outdated business plan can be counterproductive, yet that is exactly what the officer expects. Immigration decisions can be challenged in court (see the 2021 Tokyo High Court precedent); visa cases are often kept confidential even when litigated, and even a foreigner who has already left Japan can theoretically hire a lawyer remotely and sue immigration. When immigration requests extra documents and proof is unavailable, one can request a certified copy of previously filed tax returns from the tax office via the shinkokusho-tou no kaiji seikyu procedure. The Yokohama immigration office is seen by several participants as stricter and slower on naturalization (kika) and similar procedures than other offices (unverified opinion). Public political activity or complaints from Japanese neighbors to immigration are a potentially risky trigger for a review of a foreigner's visa or status — cases were mentioned of visas being revoked over affairs with married Japanese women following a husband's complaint, though this is an unverified, undetailed chat claim. The Japanese government consistently talks about foreigners "following local rules" rather than strictly "following the law" — deliberately vague wording that can be interpreted broadly.