Reports at the end of July set out what the government intends to require of permanent residence applicants. Three numbers do most of the work.
Income above the national average
Applicants would need household income above Japan's average — the reference figure being around ¥5.75 million a year.
Read that carefully. It is not a subsistence threshold or a public-charge test. It is a requirement to earn more than the typical household in Japan, which by construction excludes roughly half the country's income distribution.
English teaching, care work, agriculture, hospitality and much of the service sector sit below it. So do a good number of people on the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities status in their early career.
Thirty years of pension
The second requirement is projected pension entitlement equivalent to 30 years of enrolment in the employees' pension scheme at the applicant's income level.
For someone who arrived in Japan at 25 and applies at 35, that is arithmetically impossible from contributions alone. The proposal allows the shortfall to be covered with financial assets, which shifts the test from contribution history to wealth — and bears hardest on younger applicants, who have had less time to accumulate either.
Language
The third is Japanese-language ability at independent-user level, the requirement that has been building since January's panel report. The specifics were left open.
Retroactive application
The part that drew most reaction is timing. The criteria would be applied to applications filed from April 2025 onward — which is to say, to people already in the queue, who filed under one set of published criteria and would be judged under another.
Applications take months to decide. Anyone who filed in 2025 has been waiting under rules that have since been rewritten around them.
What to do about it
If you have an application pending, this is worth a conversation with whoever filed it. If you are preparing one, the income and pension figures are worth checking against your own record before you commit the fee — which itself rises sharply on 1 October.
A formal public comment process followed in August, and the criteria were not final at this point. Our permanent residence page and the financial and income requirements page carry the current position.
Sources: The Japan Times, Japan Today