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Survey shows foreigners’ desire to work in Japan long-term dropping, but that’s not the whole story

Casey Baseel Jul 11, 2026
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Annual study finds sharp decline in interest among foreign residents to stick around for the long haul, but it’s probably leaving out some differing voices.

These days, Japan is more popular than ever with international tourists, and that trend doesn’t show signs of slowing down anytime soon. However, the recently released results of an annual survey shows that a big shift may be occurring in terms of how attractive a country Japan is for foreign nationals to live in.

Every year, Tokyo-based job-hunting service Mynavi Global conducts its Study of Employment Attitudes of Foreign Nationals in Japan. The results for the 2026 iteration were released on July 7, and show a large drop in the number of foreign residents who want to work in Japan long-term. When asked how long they wanted to work in the country, only 63.3 percent of the respondents said they want to be here for five years or more, down 18.4 percent from last year’s survey.

How long do you want to work in Japan?
● More than 5 years: 61.6 percent (down 14.7 percent compared to last year)
● 2-5 years: 34.2 percent (up 12.7 percent)
● I want to go home within 1 year: 12.7 percent (up 4.2 percent)

As the data above shows, the surveyed foreigners aren’t looking to get out of Japan ASAP, but a significantly increased proportion of them don’t see them sticking around all that long either. A major reason for this dip in long-term interest is also a big factor in Japan’s inbound international tourism boom: the value of the yen has plummeted. While the weak yen is making Japan a travel bargain for tourists from overseas converting their home country’s currency, for people working in Japan for yen-based salaries, the weak yen means that all sorts of goods, including various daily life necessities, are now much more expensive than they used to be, and Japanese salaries are not rising at the same pace as consumer prices are.

In addition, the weak yen also means that whatever marginal savings foreigners working in Japan are able to put away are going to be considerably smaller if/when they want to transfer those funds back to their home country. While this might not be such a major concern for expats who’re planning to stay in Japan permanently, for those who haven’t mentally closed the door on the option of one day returning home, or of living anywhere other than Japan, every in-yen paycheck they’re receiving comes with a potential opportunity cost of accumulating savings in a stronger currency by working somewhere else.

This doesn’t mean that the bloom is entirely off the rose/sakura for working in Japan, though, so let’s take a closer look at the survey’s data. Mynavi Global collected 1,732 responses, sourcing participants through Mynavi Global users, affiliated Japanese language schools, and online communities of job-searching foreign residents in Japan. As such, many of the respondents are likely yet to start their careers or still early in their professional lives, or are currently in jobs that they’re less than fully satisfied with. Foreign residents in rewarding mid or high-level professional positions, who’d be more optimistic about the economics of remaining in Japan long-term, probably weren’t approached in significant numbers for the survey, and so the data wouldn’t reflect their outlooks on working in Japan.

For example, roughly 41.1 percent of the respondents, are currently students, with another 41.1 percent working under Japan’s Specified Skill Worker programs, which allow foreign nationals to work in fields such as nursing, cleaning, manufacturing, construction, food service, and agriculture. All of those are honest jobs, but they’re not exactly the sort of lucrative roles that would quickly convince someone that they want to live in Japan for as long as possible, especially since they generally don’t command salaries high enough to let someone shrug off inflation and currency conversion concerns. Again, a survey incorporating responses from foreigners working in higher white-collar positions in the finance, management, or technology sectors would probably turn up more people who’d be happy to stay in Japan for more than five years.

It’s also worth noting that the majority of the survey respondents hail from southeast Asian nations, with the five largest demographics being 36.1 percent from Vietnam, 22.2 percent from Myanmar, 13.5 percent from Nepal, 11.5 percent from Indonesia, and 7.3 percent from China. Among those five, while respondents from Vietnam and Indonesia were much less likely to want to work in Japan for five years or more (down 18.4 and 10.9 percent, respectively, compared to last year), there were actually slight upticks in the percentage of respondents from Myanmar, Nepal, and China who’d like to work in Japan for the next half-decade plus (up 6.4, 4/7 and 1.2 percent).

Adding one more wrinkle to the analysis is that while Mynavi Global has only just released the results this month, the survey itself was conducted in late-January/early-February of this year. Since then, the weak yen and consumer price inflation haven’t gotten any better, and there have been multiple new government proposals that are likely to make living as a foreigner in Japan more expensive and less pleasant.

Again, though, this doesn’t mean that Japan is about to experience a mass exodus of working-age foreign residents, or that moving to the country for work is a uniformly bad idea, especially for those on expat contracts where there salary is set in some currency other than the yen. The results do suggest, though, that there’s growing pessimism about the economic climate surrounding starting your career in Japan on a Japanese pay scale if you have other options in other parts of the world.

Source: Mynavi Global, PR Times, Nihon Keizai Shimbun via Jin
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