A Decision
Yuki Nakamura, who has owned an English school in Tokyo for more than two decades, had already made up his mind before he finished reading the CV. The candidate was strong on paper — a university degree, teaching experience in two countries, glowing references, the kind of application that would have got an automatic yes 10 years ago. Nakamura read it twice anyway, he said, the way a person reads something they already expect to decline, as if the second pass might change the answer. It didn't. He chose someone else instead — a weaker candidate, by most of the usual measures, but one who already lived in Yokohama. Already had a bank account, a lease, a tax history, a visa that didn't need to be conjured out of an overseas job offer.
“There may be more applicants than ever before in my career,” Nakamura said. “And yet I feel less confident in my decisions than I did 10 years ago.” A small, tired smile. “Perhaps this is what they call progress.”
He is not describing a labour shortage. Applications, he said, have never been more plentiful.
The Old Arrangement
For most of the last three decades, Japan's English education industry ran on an assumption nobody examined too closely: that the number of foreigners who wanted to come to Japan and the number of foreigners who could reliably be employed as teachers there were, for practical purposes, the same number. They were never the same number. It simply didn't matter, for a long time, that they weren't. Wanting to live somewhere and wanting to do a specific job there are, after all, different questions — but the industry that grew up around English teaching in Japan spent decades treating them as one and the same.
A school needed a foreign face in front of a classroom. An applicant wanted a plane ticket and a residence card. The paperwork existed mostly as a formality connecting one desire to the other — sponsorship was a transaction, not a decision. Immigration categories like Instructor or the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services visa were treated less as legal instruments than as administrative plumbing: necessary, mostly invisible, rarely inspected closely.
That plumbing is still there. What has changed is that someone is finally checking it.
The Recruiter
Kenji Sato has spent eight years placing foreign teachers in Japanese schools, long enough to field the same kind of phone call more times than he can count. The most recent version, he said, involved a school director in Saitama whose overseas hire — flights booked, flat half-arranged, students already told a new teacher was coming — had hit a snag in visa screening. Nothing dramatic: a job description that didn't quite match the sponsoring category, a salary structure the case officer wanted clarified.
“You can't wing this part any more,” Sato told him.
What Sato has watched happen is schools slowly discovering that an abundance of interest is not the same thing as an abundance of options. “Schools think they have the upper hand because they have lots of applicants,” he said. “They don't have the upper hand with good candidates.”
Formalisation, Not Crackdown
Hiroshi Tanaka, an immigration specialist nearing the end of a decades-long career helping employers and foreign workers navigate residency procedures, did not like the word crackdown. He preferred a different word: formalisation. Documentation must be accurate, he said. Contracts must reflect actual duties. Insurance obligations must be met. He described these not as new demands but as things that were always technically true, and simply weren't always checked.
The change shows up less as a single new rule than as a lower tolerance for old gaps. Contracts get checked against actual job duties instead of being taken at face value. Salary structures get a second look. Tax and insurance records that case officers once let slide now get requested and reviewed.
“For an organisation with a strong system already, the change is small,” he said. “For an organisation that depended on flexibility, the change is very large.”
The Ones Who Leave
David Carter arrived in Japan in 2008 and stayed nearly 20 years — long enough to build a version of a life there that, by his own account, no longer quite exists for people arriving today. Housing was cheap back then, he said; schools invested in teachers, and there was a sense that showing up and doing the work would eventually add up to something permanent.
Eventually, he said, teachers start asking the questions that end careers. Can I buy a place here? Can I raise children here? Can I retire without disaster? “For a lot of us, the answer's just no.”
The Vehicle
The clearest description of the mechanism itself came from Sarah Williams, who arrived in Japan less than three years ago, drawn by a plan she'd first made as a teenager. Asked whether she came to Japan because she wanted to teach, or taught because she wanted to come to Japan, she laughed, and then stopped laughing. “Honestly? I taught because I wanted to come to Japan.”
For years, English schools built hiring pipelines on the premise that wanting to live in Japan and wanting to teach English were functionally the same motivation. Williams described the room from the inside: they are not the same door.
The Odds
None of what the five sources for this piece said amounted to a country turning against foreign workers, or a policy engineered to push English teachers out. What came through instead was something closer to an audit arriving 20 years late — an industry that had always technically required competence, stability and compliance, only now beginning to check for them.
Nakamura estimates roughly one in three of his foreign hires leaves earlier than planned; maybe 30 to 40 per cent stay past three years. “Not very good odds,” he said, “for a business.”
That is what has actually disappeared: not the applicants, not the demand, but the industry's ability to treat popularity and reliability as the same currency. Japan does not have a shortage of foreigners who want to come here. What it has is a shortage of foreign teachers who are simultaneously qualified, compliant, financially durable and willing to stay long enough to justify the cost of sponsoring them.
Nakamura never found out what became of the stronger candidate he turned down. Some other Tokyo school is very likely still making the old bet — still confusing a good CV for a safe one, still one renewal cycle away from finding out the difference.