How much have the number of foreigners gone up in the last 10 years?

5 comments

1. Just clocked 17 years here this week and if anything I’d say there are noticeably less where I am. That said, I don’t go out nearly as much as I did 10 years ago.

2. According to news reports the number of foreigners in Japan has increased to about two-thirds of the pre-covid level. There have never been many foreigners here in my corner of Kyushu and I haven’t seen any increase here. I expect there will be more foreign workers in the future, though, due to the labor shortage caused by the population decline.

3. General population of foreigners is increasing annually, but those are mostly Chinese, not Europeans or Americans.

4. The government actually uploads a lot of raw data about this kind of thing.

   Number of foreign residents at the end of 2022:
   https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/publications/press/13_00033.html?hl=en
   pdf: https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/001393064.pdf

   Excel showing the change in number of foreign residents by country between 2009 and 2019:
   https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/930005064.xlsx

   There is even more data if you Google search in Japanese or browse through the immigration bureau’s homepage.

   Here’s a site with a graph from 1991 to 2021:
   https://honkawa2.sakura.ne.jp/1180.html

   More raw data here (if you look at 「国籍・地域別 在留資格（在留目的）別 在留外国人 」, you can see detailed numbers for individual countries instead of low-number countries all being grouped into 「その他」):
   https://www.e-stat.go.jp/stat-search/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=00250012&tstat=000001018034&cycle=1&tclass1=000001060399&cycle_facet=tclass1&tclass2val=0
   excel for end-of-2022: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/stat-search/file-download?statInfId=000040068461&fileKind=4

5. Not as many in Osaka now compared to pre pandemic.