In 2022, the number of foreign nationals living in Japan was a record 2.99 million, a 10.7% increase from the previous year.
When this data was announced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, news media also concurrently reported that the number of Japanese people has decreased at the fastest pace ever.
The government aims to address the problem of securing a stable labor force by various means, including employing more women and modifying visa requirements in some industries to make it easier to attract foreign workers.
The GaijinPot marketing team took a look at our own data to answer this question:
- How well does the GaijinPot resume database represent the resident foreigner population of Japan?
Where do foreigners live in Japan?
First, let’s take a look at where foreigners live in Japan, by prefecture based on the most recent government data available, from October 2022.
The top five prefectures are:
- Tokyo
- Aichi
- Osaka
- Kanagawa
- Saitama
Aichi prefecture notably takes second place, as the headquarters of Toyota and other companies in the automotive, aircraft and machine tool industries, many of which employ foreign workers.
Where do GaijinPot registered job seekers live in Japan?
About 10% of the foreigners living in Japan are verified in the GaijinPot Jobs database.
Where in Japan do they live?
The top five prefectures are:
- Tokyo
- Kanagawa
- Osaka
- Saitama
- Chiba
Aichi comes in sixth, accounting for about 5% of the job seekers registered in the GaijinPot database, so foreigners in Aichi are under-represented in our database compared to the population as a whole. This is not a surprising data point, since job seekers in manufacturing jobs represent a relatively small percentage of the GaijinPot database.
Comparison
Here is how the data looks side by side for all 47 prefectures:
| Prefecture | Share of Total Foreigner Population | Share of GaijinPot Database |
| Hokkaido | 1.5% | 1.4% |
| Aomori | 0.2% | 0.2% |
| Iwate | 0.3% | 0.1% |
| Miyagi | 0.8% | 0.8% |
| Akita | 0.1% | 0.1% |
| Yamagata | 0.3% | 0.3% |
| Fukushima | 0.5% | 0.3% |
| Ibaraki | 2.7% | 1.8% |
| Tochigi | 1.6% | 0.9% |
| Gunma | 2.5% | 0.9% |
| Saitama | 5.1% | 6.2% |
| Chiba | 3.8% | 5.4% |
| Tokyo | 27.4% | 38.7% |
| Kanagawa | 5.8% | 11.0% |
| Niigata | 0.6% | 0.5% |
| Toyama | 0.7% | 0.2% |
| Ishikawa | 0.6% | 0.3% |
| Fukui | 0.6% | 0.1% |
| Yamanashi | 0.6% | 0.4% |
| Nagano | 1.2% | 0.7% |
| Gifu | 2.0% | 0.9% |
| Shizuoka | 3.7% | 1.4% |
| Aichi | 10.4% | 5.1% |
| Mie | 1.7% | 0.6% |
| Shiga | 1.3% | 0.6% |
| Kyoto | 1.3% | 3.0% |
| Osaka | 6.8% | 7.8% |
| Hyogo | 2.8% | 2.7% |
| Nara | 0.4% | 0.4% |
| Wakayama | 0.2% | 0.2% |
| Tottori | 0.2% | 0.1% |
| Shimane | 0.3% | 0.1% |
| Okayama | 1.2% | 0.5% |
| Hiroshima | 2.1% | 0.9% |
| Yamaguchi | 0.5% | 0.3% |
| Tokushima | 0.3% | 0.1% |
| Kagawa | 0.6% | 0.2% |
| Ehime | 0.6% | 0.2% |
| Kochi | 0.2% | 0.1% |
| Fukuoka | 3.1% | 1.9% |
| Saga | 0.3% | 0.1% |
| Nagasaki | 0.4% | 0.3% |
| Kumamoto | 0.8% | 0.3% |
| Oita | 0.5% | 0.7% |
| Miyazaki | 0.3% | 0.2% |
| Kagoshima | 0.5% | 0.2% |
| Okinawa | 0.6% | 0.7% |
Resident foreigners in the GaijinPot database are over represented in Japan’s main urban centers, especially Tokyo:
- Tokyo (+11.3 points)
- Kanagawa (+5.2 points)
- Kyoto (+1.7 points)
- Chiba (+1.6 points)
- Saitama (+1.1 points)
- Osaka (+1.0 points)
- Oita (+0.2 points)
This is because users registered in the GaijinPot Jobs database are concentrated in white collar fields such as education and training, tourism and hospitality, translation and localization, sales and marketing and IT and engineering; and many companies hiring foreigners in these fields are based in the capital region.
However, employers from a range of companies use GaijinPot Jobs’s services, not just those looking for office workers. In the past year, we have seen a noticeable increase in inquiries from restaurant groups and transportation companies.
Top line data
As this is a birds eye view of the population distribution, we don’t want to err by reading too much into the top line data.
For example, registered GaijinPot users in Fukuoka represent about 1.9% of our database, but comprise about 3.1% of resident foreigners in Japan.
Does this mean that employers looking for candidates in Fukuoka might find a dearth of candidates in the prefecture? Not necessarily.
The resident foreign population of Fukuoka prefecture is comprised mostly of people from Asian countries, notably Viet Nam, China and Nepal who are international students or technical trainees (Source: Fukuoka City NPO/Volunteer Exchange CenterAsumin)
The top five nationalities of GaijinPot Jobs users living in Fukuoka, however, are actual job seekers from: the United States, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, India and Australia.
Are you trying to hire multinational employees?
If your company is looking to hire multinational talent, please contact the GaijinPot Jobs team to see how we can help.
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