People in China realized they could just buy a guesthouse in Osaka / any tourist hotspot, and rent it out on Airbnb. Then they become a "business manager" and get a Japanese resident visa within 3 months. All you needed is to invest 5million yen, which is like 31k USD, which isn't much. People wrote entire online guides on how to do this. They even had brokers/agents helping people with the process [0].

Approximately half of all business manager visas went to Chinese nationals. In Osaka, 41% of all short-term rentals were operated by Chinese individuals [1]. The visa practically turned into an Airbnb host visa.

It's not surprising at all that Japan made the rules stricter.

[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/06/05/japan/immigrati...

[1] https://chinatravelnews.com/article/186285/

While there are usually political and economic factors that contribute to these decisions, I've been living overseas for almost two decades and have noticed that rampant abuse is now almost everywhere you look in any country that is interesting to foreigners. A few years ago, I was sitting at busy bar near the beach in Bali and a couple of guys were loudly discussing a scheme they used to get KITAS investor visas without actually putting up the required capital.

This is just the beginning of this type of thing methinks.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the government has a problem with this practice. The problem is trying to create a system of requirements that is both feasible to put on paper and also testable. When the issue was raised, the income requirements were changed as an immediate reaction, but the ISA has broad authority to grant or deny based on many circumstances.

Put differently, acts like this were already illegal, but difficult for the ISA to catch. So they changed the base requirements which are theoretically much easier to catch than the actual illegal behavior.