Hi everyone! After a couple months thinking I’ve almost decided to leave my home country for good. And with that, comes lots of questions that I hope I can get answered here.
Quick summmary: I’m a 19 year old male, living in Sweden. In 2024 I plan to travel to Japan for 2 weeks, to see if it actually fits me. And if I decide then to study in Japan, I’ll begin in 2025, with language school and after that, University –> Work.
So, all the questions I have:
1. I’m aware that the Student Visa requires an amount of money in my bank account. Like 2 million yen for a year. For those who know what CSN is, will that cover it, if I take a student loan from CSN?
1.5 Can I pay off the CSN whenever I want, like when I have a job, or is it after an amount of time?
2. Does the Student Visa have a limit of time? Or can I use it for both Language school and University as long as I renew it?
3. If I have around 2 million yen in my bank account + the CSN (around 200k yen a month?), Will I be able to live on that?
4. How difficult is it to get a place to live, preferrably a private apartment? Can GoGoNihon help me with this?
5. The one thing I would have to get shipped is my PC, is it possible to ship that over to Japan?
6. Is it possible to take 2 separate CSN loans? One for Language school and one for University. So the loans get combined or something.
7. Is the process difficult to get from Sweden to study in a language school? Getting the Student Visa, COE, apartment, a school to study in. Or is it pretty easy? – Will GoGoNihon assist me if I have more questions/need help from them?
That’s all questions I have for now, I hope you’re willing to answer some or all of them. Thank you.
2 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**Study in Japan – lots of questions.**
Hi everyone! After a couple months thinking I’ve almost decided to leave my home country for good. And with that, comes lots of questions that I hope I can get answered here.
Quick summmary: I’m a 19 year old male, living in Sweden. In 2024 I plan to travel to Japan for 2 weeks, to see if it actually fits me. And if I decide then to study in Japan, I’ll begin in 2025, with language school and after that, University –> Work.
So, all the questions I have:
1. I’m aware that the Student Visa requires an amount of money in my bank account. Like 2 million yen for a year. For those who know what CSN is, will that cover it, if I take a student loan from CSN?
1.5 Can I pay off the CSN whenever I want, like when I have a job, or is it after an amount of time?
2. Does the Student Visa have a limit of time? Or can I use it for both Language school and University as long as I renew it?
3. If I have around 2 million yen in my bank account + the CSN (around 200k yen a month?), Will I be able to live on that?
4. How difficult is it to get a place to live, preferrably a private apartment? Can GoGoNihon help me with this?
5. The one thing I would have to get shipped is my PC, is it possible to ship that over to Japan?
6. Is it possible to take 2 separate CSN loans? One for Language school and one for University. So the loans get combined or something.
7. Is the process difficult to get from Sweden to study in a language school? Getting the Student Visa, COE, apartment, a school to study in. Or is it pretty easy? – Will GoGoNihon assist me if I have more questions/need help from them?
That’s all questions I have for now, I hope you’re willing to answer some or all of them. Thank you.
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1.) You can’t use CSN for language school. The requirement for CSN is the institution must provide examinations for the courses or confer a degree upon graduation. Language school provides neither. You can try to see if they’ll provide a loan and apply anyways – maybe they’re more lenient.
1.5) They’ll give you a repayment plan and you follow along with that plan.
2.) The student visa for language school is max of 2 years. But I’m assuming you’ll be going directly from language school to uni which will you’ll then be granted a student visa from the uni that you’ll be attending.
3.) See point 1 for CSN, but 2 million for a year to a year and half is enough. You won’t have a lot of emergency money if there’s no supplementary income as tuition will take away half of that 2 million
4.) What’s your definition of private apartment? Does it need to have a kitchen? Do the toilet and shower need to be separate? Is a 1R technically a private apartment? Yes… but you’ll eat, sleep, cook, study, and play in the same room.
5.) Take apart your PC. Bring your graphics card, SSD (and/or HDD), motherboard, and power bank. Wrap it in bubble wrap. Stick it in your suitcase and when you get to Japan, shop around for a PC case, fans, strips, etc. Unless you have a $10k PC setup it’s not worth shipping the PC whole.
6.) You can take multiple loans from CSN (I.e. Undergrad > grad) but you’ll have to contact the student finance office to hash out details of the second loan if you can’t pay back the first one in full beforehand.
7.) Honestly if you have the money, GogoNihon is a great service. They’ll set you up with the school and act as middle man for correspondence so you don’t have to worry about reading and replying in Japanese. However they make commission off of students that attend certain schools so they’ll both mark up the tuition as well as bias your options to 4-5 schools. If you have time and internet smarts you can apply to the school directly. You also have the option of living in the apartment the language school provides. Actually… if you don’t have a stable source of income (ie parents making monthly deposits or a full time job) it’ll be pretty impossible to find an apartment outside of school…