Japan to unveil six-month residency visa for IT engineers, other workers

The Japanese government will introduce a new visa status that will make it easy for IT engineers and other workers for overseas companies to reside in the country. According to a report by Nikkei Asia on Friday (Feb 2), Japan’s immigration services agency said that the visa status would allow highly skilled workers to work in the country on a teleworking basis for up to six months while enjoying sightseeing trips.

The agency hopes to launch the programme by next month. It will create the system to accept “digital nomads” who can work from anywhere they happen to be, the report said.

As per the report, to be eligible for a digital nomad visa, applicants must have an annual income equivalent to $68,000 (10 million yen) or more. The applicants must be citizens of one of the 50 countries and regions that have visa waiver agreements with Japan and have private health insurance.

Self-employed people can be eligible for the visa only if they do business for overseas revenue, the report further said, adding they will be allowed to bring family members who are covered by private health insurance.

Last week, the labour ministry said that the number of foreign nationals working in Japan topped 2 million for the first time. The ministry said that the figure for Oct 2023 was up 12.4% on the year to nearly 2.05 million, a growth rate 6.9 percentage points higher than in the same month in 2022.

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People from Vietnam made up 25.3 per cent of the workers, at 518,364. This was followed by people from China whose number was 397,918 and 226,846 people from the Philippines, Nikkei Asia reported.

Overall workers from Indonesia grew by 56%, the fastest pace among all nationalities, the report added.

(With inputs from agencies)