TOKYO — Japan raised the minimum capital requirement for its "business management" visa from ¥5 million to ¥30 million in October, a move officials designed to stop wealthy foreigners—many of them Chinese, according to government officials—from using shell companies to obtain residency. The collateral damage has fallen on a different group entirely: Nepalese immigrants who built the country's Indian restaurant industry from scratch.
Applications for the business management visa have dropped 96 percent since the new rules took effect. The internal-affairs ministry's own data show that fewer than nine percent of Japanese companies hold ¥30 million or more in capital, meaning the threshold now sits beyond the reach of most small food businesses. In dollar terms, the old floor was roughly $31,500. The new one is $188,000.
Japan has between 4,000 and 5,000 Indian restaurants, a number that exceeds the country's total McDonald's outlets, despite having only 59,000 Indian residents. The apparent contradiction has a straightforward explanation: the restaurants are owned and staffed overwhelmingly by Nepalese immigrants, whose population in Japan stands at roughly 300,000. The business management visa is the legal mechanism on which most of those owners depend.
Sanjay Sahani opened Himalayan Caravan, a Nepalese-Indian restaurant in east Tokyo, after arriving in Japan as a chef in 2006. His ¥850 lunch set—curry and naan for about $5—has made the restaurant a fixture in the neighborhood for two decades. He describes his regulars and neighbors as family. Under the new rules, owners like him face a capital requirement they cannot realistically meet.
The government added a second condition alongside the capital increase: applicants must employ at least one full-time Japanese worker or permanent resident. The requirement has drawn sharp criticism from restaurant owners who say the broader Japanese labor market already fails to supply enough domestic workers. "Even Japanese firms cannot find Japanese workers. How are we supposed to?" said Anju Khatri, 32, a Nepalese restaurant owner. Her observation tracks with visible reality in Tokyo, where Southeast Asian workers have become common in retail and service jobs across the city.
Existing visa holders have a three-year grace period to comply with the new standards, but the capital threshold makes compliance structurally difficult for small operators. A curry house running on thin margins from an ¥850 lunch set cannot credibly capitalize itself at ¥30 million. The requirement was sized to filter out shell companies, not neighborhood restaurants—but the rule makes no such distinction.
Foreigners represent just three percent of Japan's population, compared with 15 percent across OECD member countries. The government under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has moved to tighten immigration rules as domestic political pressure against foreign residents has grown. The business management visa crackdown fits that broader policy direction, even though the stated target was specifically the abuse of the visa system by wealthy foreign nationals.
The restaurant sector illustrates a tension running through Japan's immigration debate. The country's working-age population is shrinking, and service industries have grown dependent on foreign labor to function. The same government tightening the business management visa has watched Southeast Asian workers fill cashier, hospitality and logistics roles that Japanese workers are not taking. Khatri's point—that Japanese employers face the same staffing problem—captures this contradiction directly.
The policy's cultural effect runs alongside the economic one. Tokyo's culinary range depends in part on immigrant-run kitchens. Indian, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants operating on small margins have given office workers and pensioners dining options that Japanese-owned establishments have not replicated at the same price points. The ¥850 curry lunch that Sahani has served for two decades is not a product that materializes without the supply chain of Nepalese immigrant labor and ownership that the visa rules now make harder to sustain.
The government has not announced any adjustment to the thresholds or the staffing requirement. Existing holders working through the grace period have three years to find a path to compliance or close.
