Every week, I go to the same small Thai restaurant near my home. The food is inexpensive, generous, and consistently good. On days when work leaves me exhausted, a bowl of sour, spicy tom yum soup brings me back to life. The lunch set still costs 900 yen—almost a small miracle in today’s Tokyo. For me, and for many people in the neighborhood, this restaurant is not simply a place to eat. It is a local treasure. Yet many places like it have become more difficult to sustain under Japan’s new Business Manager visa rules.
In October 2025, Japan tightened the requirements for the Business Manager visa, a status used by many foreign nationals who open and operate small businesses. The capital requirement, meaning the amount of money applicants must show has been invested in or made available to the company, was raised from 5 million yen to 30 million yen, alongside other conditions such as employment, Japanese-language ability, and more detailed business planning. The government’s stated concern is understandable: to prevent abuse of the system, including paper companies and fraudulent applications. But for small, migrant-run restaurants operating on thin margins, 30 million yen can be an impossible hurdle.
On social media, Japanese users have begun sharing the hashtag #推しエスニックといつまでも—roughly, “may my favorite ethnic restaurant stay with us forever”—alongside a petition urging the government to reconsider this one-size-fits-all measure. The phrase is affectionate, even playful. But beneath it lies a serious anxiety: that the small restaurants many people rely on, love, and take for granted may become harder to sustain under a system designed with a very different image of “business” in mind.
Japan celebrates diversity when it appears as cuisine, culture, or international branding, but becomes far more cautious when diversity demands legal security, institutional recognition, or a credible future.
Japan has increasingly turned to foreign workers as its population ages and labor shortages deepen. In 2024, the government moved to replace the controversial trainee program with a new system intended to encourage foreign workers to stay longer in labor-strapped sectors. But when migrants try to do more than fill a labor gap—when they open businesses, build livelihoods, feed neighborhoods, and become part of local life—they face a narrow and uncertain pathway to stability.
Some may respond: if they want to stay in Japan for a long time, why not apply for permanent residency or naturalization? This sounds simple only from a distance.
Permanent residency in Japan is not an easy or automatic step. It generally requires many years of continuous residence, stable income, and careful compliance with tax, pension, health insurance, and other public obligations. Naturalization is also not a light alternative. Japan does not recognize dual nationality for adults who acquire Japanese citizenship. For some migrants, this may mean giving up a formal tie to a country where their parents, relatives, memories, property, or political identity remain.
Japan’s demanding standard for long-term belonging has also been visible in recent naturalization cases. In one widely reported case, a man who had been recognized as a refugee in Japan, completed a PhD at a Japanese university, and sought Japanese nationality had his naturalization application rejected, a decision later upheld by the court. The point is not that migrant restaurant owners are in the same legal position as refugees. Rather, the case shows a deeper problem: naturalization can depend on standards that are not clearly codified, leaving the government wide discretion to decide what counts as “integration into society.” For migrants who have spent years building their lives in Japan, this uncertainty makes naturalization a far less straightforward route to stability than it may appear from the outside.
Fraudulent applications, paper companies, and exploitative arrangements should be addressed. But a blanket 30-million-yen capital requirement is a blunt instrument.
There is a clear tension with Japan’s own policy goals. The government has set a target of accepting 400,000 international students by 2033 and has promoted the Specified Skilled Worker system to bring workers from abroad into sectors facing labor shortages. Japan’s policy goals suggest that it wants people from abroad to study, work, and contribute. But when those people seek long-term stability—not only as temporary students or workers, but as residents, business owners, neighbors, and future citizens—they encounter a system that often seems reluctant to let them stay on equal terms.
The contradiction is stark. Japan wants global talent, but is uneasy about permanent belonging. It wants foreign labor, but hesitates when foreign workers become local actors. It celebrates diversity when it appears as cuisine, culture, or international branding, but becomes far more cautious when diversity demands legal security, institutional recognition, or a credible future.
Small ethnic restaurants make this contradiction visible in everyday life. They are loved by customers, praised for “authenticity,” and woven into the routines of their neighborhoods. Yet the people who run them may remain vulnerable to visa rules, financial thresholds, language requirements, and shifting public suspicion toward foreigners.
Japan should not treat these spaces as disposable. Fraudulent applications, paper companies, and exploitative arrangements should be addressed. But a blanket 30-million-yen capital requirement is a blunt instrument. It risks treating a neighborhood restaurant that has operated for years, paid taxes, employed workers, and served local communities, in the same way as a paper company created only to obtain a visa. Immigration rules should instead place greater weight on what businesses actually do: whether they operate continuously, pay taxes, employ workers, contribute to local economies, and maintain ties with their communities.
More importantly, migrant-owned restaurants are not merely private enterprises. They are among the most familiar places where many people encounter migrants not as abstract workers in a policy debate, but as neighbors, business owners, employers, taxpayers, and familiar faces. Food cannot replace legal rights or secure status, but it is not “just food” either.
The question is not only whether my favorite Thai restaurant will survive. It is whether Japan can recognize that such restaurants are not decorative signs of diversity, but part of the infrastructure of a multicultural society.
Rina Komiya is a social anthropologist and Program-Specific Assistant Professor at Kyoto University. Her research focuses on migration, refugee resettlement, and local inclusion in Japan and beyond. Her work examines migrants’ and refugees’ everyday practices, as well as how receiving societies and institutions are reshaped through these encounters. She holds an MSt in International Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford and a PhD. from Tokyo Metropolitan University.
