Employment status, wages, and social insurance requirements

There's a view circulating in the chat that employees have a right to demand salary in cash, though it comes without a citation to a specific law and is unconfirmed. Registering a new employee for social insurance/pension purposes requires an employer notification, which can be filed personally (going in yourself, or as the employee's representative with their documents) or handled remotely through a 社労士 (labor law specialist); freee has partial HR-and-Labor integration, but with account-type limits. Social insurance/pension for employees runs through the company the same way it does for a director-employee. Part of income tax is withheld by the employer and remitted to the tax office; social insurance is split between the employee's share (withheld from pay) and the company's share (paid on top by the company), with both usually settled in a single payment from the company. There's an annual report (e.g., in July) of employee salary ranges to the pension fund used to recalculate next year's insurance rates. For new employees or a director, the pension fund sends the employer a "contribution amount notice," which the employer must pass on to employees and has 3 months to dispute if it disagrees. If an employee didn't pay into the pension for two years (e.g., while a student on a language visa), that period can be retroactively restored as an exemption via a personal application to the pension fund. The pension fund's online portal is updated/unavailable overnight — the database only comes back online from 9:00 am. By law, salary must be paid on time regardless of the reason (barring force majeure); if a bank transfer is technically impossible, paying in cash is the recommended fallback. A company director can simultaneously be listed as an employee with a fixed "director's" salary (remuneration) — this is strictly fixed and, unlike regular employees' pay, cannot be made "flexible" (regular employees can receive bonuses on top). Hiring a Japanese employee under a "services contract" (roughly the equivalent of a gig contract) was discussed as a way to get around the full-time staff requirement for the BM visa, but the status (seishain vs. contract) for visa purposes isn't clearly defined; participants generally believe the BM visa needs a full-time staff employee (30+ hours/week per unofficial data), not a contractor. Hiring for a BM visa can't be structured as baito (hourly part-time work); the status must be "seishain" (permanent, fully employed) with organized payroll, pension, insurance, and the annual income-tax adjustment (年末調整); a seishain can work at several places simultaneously. One auditor's rule of thumb for what counts as "full-time" for an arbeit worker: income above 1 million yen/year is close to full-time, below that it isn't (the same 1-million-yen threshold is cited for foreigners on arbeit status — above that, it's no longer considered "side work" for accounting/tax purposes). A part-time employee working more than 20 hours/week must be enrolled in social insurance, unless already insured elsewhere (e.g., students through their university). Tokyo's minimum wage at the time of the chat (August 2025) was about 2.1 million yen/year, roughly 180,000 yen/month (another mention put it at around 200,000 yen/month). Suggested starting salaries: 200,000-264,000 yen/month per person in a startup's first year as a baseline, with the recommendation to set pay by market rate for the role rather than a flat figure for everyone. It's important to watch social-insurance thresholds when setting salaries (example: 250,000 yen sits right at a band boundary for social-insurance calculations, and a difference of even 1 yen can save roughly 50,000 yen/year); the director doesn't pay into the asbestos-victim compensation fund (0.002% of salary), but other employees (e.g., a CTO) do — a token but mandatory line item.