Foreign-founded companies in Japan halved in six months. I read all 795 comments. 65.3% of the vote went to whether the company was real at all, and only two comments mentioned prosecution
I said the courts here are soft, that anyone who gets in walks away without charges. Two comments out of 795 mention prosecution at all, with eight agree presses between them. What took 65.3% of the vote was whether the company was real.
How the votes fell
Ranked by upvotes. Left of the slash is agree, right is disagree. This is where the resentment actually sits.
- 1st 9086 ∕ 191 Calling someone a foreign entrepreneur does not mean they are actually running a business. If companies with little real substance were being set up to obtain Business Manager status or a future permanent residency, that should be tightened. This one figure does not tell us how many were shell companies, but I want the possibility that the system was being used as a loophole to be investigated. People who genuinely trade here, employ people and pay tax should be welcomed
- 2nd 7553 ∕ 54 The problem is that we built a system where setting up a shell company got you a visa. No check afterwards on whether income tax was ever paid, and money sitting in a bank account for a moment was enough to earn the right to work here. In Europe or America, where immigration is far higher, that would be unthinkable. Japanese people cannot get a work visa abroad that easily, and we should understand a visa is not something a country hands out lightly
- 3rd 4423 ∕ 72 Foreign entrepreneur sounds impressive, but most were after the Business Manager visa as the shortest route to permanent residency. Three million yen of capital was a cheap way to get there; the reform raised it to thirty million, which lifts the bar for the sole traders - scrap and demolition yards, Chinese restaurants, Indian curry houses, YouTubers. And small operations like these have weak finances, so there are warnings about welfare claims later
- 4th 4001 ∕ 62 Most of it was middle-class Chinese buyers setting up paper companies to buy flats. They buy a flat here and run short-term lets or unlicensed taxis, which does Japan no good, and they pay through Chinese apps so no consumption tax lands here either. The waterfront towers falling in price is a good thing
- 5th 2092 ∕ 189 Some of this is necessary for Japan to develop, but when I think about Japanese people's own standard of living, too many rights have been handed out. Japanese people have declined so far that the birth rate has collapsed. Unless economic policy is built around Japanese people, we will end up classified as an endangered species
I read all 795 top-level comments, about twenty-two hours after publication, at 5.19am on 27 September 2026. The article shows 1,021 comments in total, and 172 replies are displayed under the top-level ones. The buttons: 40,838 agree, 1,660 that-explains-it, 1,944 hmm - 96 to 4. Of the 56 threads I have counted, this is one of the more settled. The vote sits near the top: the first-placed comment alone holds 9,086 agree presses, 22.2% of the total, with 66.5% in the top five, 77.7% in the top ten, 85.3% in the top twenty and 88.4% in the top thirty. Lower down it is quiet - 73 comments, 9.2%, drew no agree press at all, 36 comments, 4.5%, drew no button of any kind, and 51 comments, 6.4%, took more hmm presses than agree presses. The average comment runs 90.2 characters and 86 run past 200. Now to what I had said. I read the 52% fall as proof that more than half of these founders had never intended to trade honestly, and I said Japan's courts are so soft that once someone is in, they walk away without being charged - which is why this country is easy on foreigners. So I counted. Prosecution first. Two comments out of 795, 0.3%, use the word at all, with eight agree presses between them - 0.0% of the vote. Widen it to sentencing, punishment, courts, prosecutors, trials, police or enforcement and you reach 35 comments, 4.4%, with 634 agree presses for 1.6% of the vote. Deportation, removal or revoking a status appears in 11 comments, 1.4%, with 110 agree presses for 0.3%. Next, proportions. Comments saying most of them or nearly all of them in words number 28, 3.5%, with 8,767 agree presses for 21.5% of the vote. In words, this thread says what I said. But comments that put an actual figure on it - a percentage, a fraction, a half - number 21, 2.6%, with 140 agree presses for 0.3% of the vote. One comment states my reading almost word for word: the half that disappeared were there for fraud. It sits 171st with seven agree presses. So where did the vote go? Comments about shell companies - no real business, registered in name only, used as cover - number 142, 17.9%, with 26,675 agree presses for 65.3% of the vote. The phrase paper company alone accounts for 99 comments, 12.5%, with 25,561 agree presses for 62.6%. Comments touching residence status, visas or permanent residency number 120, 15.1%, with 25,135 agree presses for 61.5%. This thread was looking at the company, not the courtroom. The rest: property, flats, short-term lets, unlicensed taxis in 66 comments, 8.3%, holding 18.3% of the vote; welfare, medical costs, health insurance and social security in 36 comments, 4.5%, holding 13.1%; comparisons with other countries in 39 comments, 4.9%, holding 21.2%; calls to re-examine companies already on the register in 20 comments, 2.5%, holding 1.9%; calls to go further still in 91 comments, 11.4%, holding 4.4%. On countries, China appears in 108 comments, 13.6%, with 9,417 agree presses for 23.1% of the vote, which makes it by far the most-named place; then India in 17, Nepal in 11, Korea in 6, the Kurdish community in 5 and Vietnam in 3. I counted the other direction too. Comments worrying that the tightening also shuts out people who genuinely want to trade here number 26, 3.3%, with 1,037 agree presses for 2.5% of the vote and 124 hmm presses for 6.4%. Comments saying nationality is beside the point, or that people should not be lumped together, number 37, 4.7%, with 443 agree presses for 1.1% and 75 hmm presses for 3.9%. And the single comment that drew the most hmm presses in this thread was written by a foreign worker three years into a job in Japan: 85 agree presses and 47 that-explains-it presses against 355 hmm presses. That is 18.3% of every hmm press in the thread, landing on one comment, which also drew 20 replies. On replies: there are 172, and 45 of them, 26.2%, sit under the first-placed comment, with 120, 69.8%, under the top five. Of 795 comments, 767 - 96.5% - have no reply at all. Things I have not checked. I do not know how many of those 4,731 companies had no real business behind them. The reading that more than half of these founders meant to do harm is mine, and I have not found anything to support it. The report itself says it is hard to tell whether it is the insubstantial start-ups that fell away. So this note says nothing about what the missing 5,120 companies were. I also have not checked whether people who do get in escape prosecution. This is not a crime story; charges are not mentioned anywhere in it, and only two comments out of 795 use the word. One more note about the count: Yahoo! News displayed 846 top-level comments on this article, and I was able to read 795 of them. Every proportion here is out of the 795 I read. Comments counted but not quoted: 22 comments, 2.8%, contain abusive words, with 249 agree presses for 0.6% of the vote, and five comments, 0.6%, give ethnicity, bloodline or race as the reason, with 19 agree presses for 0.0%. This site counts comments that rest on origin itself but does not reproduce them. Finally, marking my own reading. More than half meant to do harm - in words, 21.5% of the vote says the same thing, but only 0.3% of it puts a number on it, and since I have not found the source of my own figure, this note does not state it as fact. Once in, they are never charged - two comments, 0.0% of the vote. The courts are soft - 35 comments, 1.6%. What took 65.3% instead was whether the company was real. The comment I shared before writing this sits 3rd in the thread, with 4,423 agree presses, 358 that-explains-it presses, 72 hmm presses and 15 replies.
At 7.02am on 26 September 2026, Teikoku Databank published a short report on Yahoo! News.
In the first half of 2026, January to June, 4,731 companies in Japan appear to have been founded by foreign nationals. A year earlier the same six months produced 9,851. That is a fall of about 52%, and the lowest level since 2022.
In October 2025 Japan tightened the requirements for the residence status called Business Manager. The capital threshold went up and the authorities began checking whether a business actually operates. The report suggests the fall reflects that change.
The report also says something else. The tightening may have narrowed the door for people who genuinely want to build something here, and it is hard to tell whether what fell away was the insubstantial sort.
795 people wrote in the Yahoo! News comment section under it.
Context for readers outside Japan
Yahoo! News is where a very large share of Japan reads the news, and its comment sections are the closest thing this country has to a national argument held in public. Readers press one of three buttons on each comment - agree, that explains it, hmm - and those presses are what this site counts. In Japan, registering a company is not difficult, and the Business Manager status is granted to people who run one. That means a company can function as the paperwork that lets someone stay. The October 2025 reform raised what that paperwork has to prove.
What I expected to find
Looking at a 52% fall, this is what I thought.
So they were not all here to build something. Reading this result, more than half of them must have come intending to do harm.
Japan's courts are extremely soft. So we narrowed the entrance, and now only half of them get in.
But the half already inside - the ones who really are here to do harm - are never charged. They are caught and nothing follows. Which is why Japan's justice system is easy on foreigners after all.
That was my reading.
So I turned it into something countable. Is this thread talking about punishment at all - or is it looking at something else?
96 to 4 - 795 comments, about twenty-two hours in
I read all 795 top-level comments. The article shows 1,021 comments in total, and 172 replies are displayed.
The buttons: 40,838 agree, 1,660 that explains it, 1,944 hmm. That is 96 to 4.
Of the 56 threads I have counted, this is one of the more settled ones.
The vote sits near the top. The first-placed comment alone holds 9,086 agree presses - 22.2% of the total. The top five hold 66.5%, the top ten 77.7%, the top twenty 85.3%, the top thirty 88.4%.
Lower down it is quiet. Of 795 comments, 73 - 9.2% - drew no agree press at all. Another 36, 4.5%, drew no button of any kind, and 51, 6.4%, took more hmm presses than agree presses.
The average comment runs 90.2 characters; 86 run past 200.
The most-pressed comment in the thread says it does not know
Here is what this thread read hardest.
Calling someone a foreign entrepreneur does not mean they are actually running a business. If there were cases of companies with little real substance being set up to obtain Business Manager status, or a future permanent residency, then yes, that should be tightened. This one figure does not tell us how many were shell companies, but I would like the possibility that the system was being used as a loophole to be properly investigated. People who genuinely trade here, employ people and pay tax should be welcomed. A system where a company that exists on paper alone earns a residence status is one I want kept strict from here on.
外国人起業家といっても、会社を作っただけで本当に事業をしているとは限りません。経営・管理の在留資格を取ることや、将来的な永住を目的に、実態の乏しい会社を作るケースがあったのなら、そこはきちんと締めるべきです。今回の数字だけでペーパーカンパニーがどれだけあったかは分かりませんが、制度の抜け道にされていた可能性は検証してほしいです。
本当に日本で商売をして雇用や納税に貢献する人は歓迎すればいい。形だけの会社で在留資格を取るような制度は、今後も厳しくしてほしいです。9,086 agree presses, 22.2% of everything this thread pressed, and 45 replies.
Look at what it does. It refuses to put a number on it.
It says this one figure cannot tell you how many of the missing 5,120 were shells - and then asks for the question to be investigated.
I said more than half. The comment this thread pressed hardest said we do not know how many.
65.3% of the vote went to whether the company was real
I counted every comment touching shell companies: no real business, registered in name only, a front, a cover.
142 comments, 17.9%, with 26,675 agree presses - 65.3% of the vote.
The phrase "paper company" by itself accounts for 99 comments, 12.5%, with 25,561 agree presses - 62.6%.
Comments touching residence status, visas or permanent residency: 120, 15.1%, with 25,135 agree presses for 61.5%.
Second place, with 7,553 agree presses, puts it plainly: the problem is that we built a system where setting up a shell company got you a visa on top, with no check afterwards on whether any income tax was ever paid. Money sitting in a bank account for a moment was enough to earn the right to work here - unthinkable, it says, in Europe or America, where immigration is supposed to be so much higher. And given how hard it is for a Japanese person to get a work visa abroad, we ought to understand that a visa is not something another country hands over lightly.
Seventh place, 1,172 agree presses, argues that starting a business is hard for Japanese people too, so the real fault was a system that made it easy - and asks for companies already registered to face a strict review every five years.
Tenth place, 621 agree presses, is more precise still: beyond the capital requirement, renewals are now being refused where a company has run two consecutive years of negative equity, where social insurance has not been paid, or where the "manager" is only ever doing the physical work himself.
This thread is arguing about documents and substance, not about punishment.
Two comments out of 795 mention prosecution
This was the load-bearing part of what I had said.
I counted. Two comments, 0.3%, use the word prosecution, with eight agree presses between them - 0.0% of the vote.
I widened it to sentencing, punishment, courts, prosecutors, trials, police and enforcement. 35 comments, 4.4%, with 634 agree presses - 1.6% of the vote.
Deportation, removal, or revoking a status: 11 comments, 1.4%, with 110 agree presses - 0.3%.
This thread barely mentions punishment at all.
The reason is probably simple. This is not a crime story. Nobody is arrested in it and nobody is harmed. What appears instead is a count of companies, a capital threshold, and a list of conditions.
So the thread looked at the entrance paperwork rather than the courtroom.
It says "most of them" in words, and almost never in figures
The same thing happened in the last thread I counted.
Comments saying most, nearly all, almost entirely: 28, 3.5%, with 8,767 agree presses - 21.5% of the vote.
In words, about a fifth of this thread's vote is saying what I said. Third and fourth place both use exactly that phrasing.
But comments that put a figure on it - a percentage, a fraction, a half - number 21, 2.6%, with 140 agree presses: 0.3% of the vote.
This thread describes scale in words and almost never in numbers.
One comment says what I said. It sits 171st
I went looking, and it is there.
Which means the half that disappeared were here for fraud. Let it keep falling at this rate.
減った半分は不正が目的だったということ。
このペースで もっと減っていけばいい。Seven agree presses, 171st in the thread. My own reading, in two lines.
There are near neighbours. 94th, twelve agree presses, wants every foreign-founded company re-examined retroactively and guesses more than half would vanish. 396th, three agree presses, thinks it safer to assume about half of past registrations were really about the status.
People who read it the way I did are in this thread. The vote simply is not with them.
730th, with no agree presses at all, reads the same figure the other way round: the half that survived the tightening are the ones who meant it, so a fall is not in itself a bad sign.
China is named in 108 comments, holding 23.1% of the vote
China is by far the most-named country here: 108 comments, 13.6%, with 9,417 agree presses - 23.1% of the vote.
After that: India in 17, Nepal in 11, Korea in 6, the Kurdish community in 5, Vietnam in 3.
The report itself names no nationality at all. Teikoku Databank explains that it identified likely foreign founders from the spelling and sound of directors' names, not from nationality, and warns that naturalised citizens and hard-to-classify Japanese names may be caught in the total.
On a subject where the source gives no nationality, this thread supplied one.
Fourth place, 4,001 agree presses, says most of it was middle-class Chinese buyers setting up paper companies to buy flats, running short-term lets and unlicensed taxis, paying through Chinese apps so no consumption tax lands here.
Property, flats, short-term lets, unlicensed taxis: 66 comments, 8.3%, with 7,467 agree presses - 18.3% of the vote.
Welfare, medical costs, health insurance, social security: 36 comments, 4.5%, with 5,355 agree presses - 13.1%.
Comparisons with other countries' rules: 39 comments, 4.9%, with 8,659 agree presses - 21.2%. Eleventh place, 532 agree presses, points out that a thirty-million-yen capital requirement is comparable to the American entrepreneur visa, so Japan has merely become ordinary by international standards.
The most pushed-back comment was written by a foreign worker
This thread pressed hmm 1,944 times. 355 of those - 18.3% - landed on a single comment.
I have been working in Japan for three years now. At first I thought everyone was kind, and that if I worked hard I would be recognised for it. In practice it is not that simple. Miss a word of Japanese at work and someone says, if you came to Japan you could at least speak the language. Awkward jobs get handed to me because I am foreign. I have eaten food from home on my break and had people pull a face about the smell. If I make a mistake it is "well, he's foreign"; if I do it well it is "unusual, for a foreigner". Whatever I do, I am being looked at through my nationality, and honestly it wears you down. Even so, I decided to live and work here, and I do not want to give that up easily. One day I would like to be seen not as a foreigner but as an ordinary person who works.
日本に来て働いて3年になります。最初は日本人はみんな優しくて、仕事も頑張れば認めてもらえると思っていました。でも、実際に働いてみると、なかなか簡単ではありません。職場では日本語が少し聞き取れないだけで「日本に来たなら日本語くらい話せ」と言われたり、外国人だからという理由で面倒な仕事を任されることもあります。休憩中に母国の料理を食べていると、においについて嫌な顔をされたこともありました。ミスをすると「外国人だから仕方ない」と言われるのに、うまくできても「外国人なのに珍しい」と言われる。何をしても国籍で見られているようで、正直疲れることがあります。それでも、日本で働いて生活すると決めた以上、簡単には諦めたくありません。いつか外国人だからではなく、一人の働く人間として普通に見てもらえるようになりたいです。85 agree presses and 47 that-explains-it presses, against 355 hmm presses. It stands 32nd on the vote - and first in the thread for being pushed back on. It drew 20 replies.
Notice what it does not contain. No company counts, no capital threshold, no policy. Only what gets said to him at work.
A thread arguing about corporate substance turned sharp the moment a person spoke.
Comments worrying that the tightening shuts out people who genuinely want to trade here: 26, 3.3%, with 1,037 agree presses for 2.5% of the vote and 124 hmm presses for 6.4%. Comments saying nationality is beside the point, or that people should not be lumped together: 37, 4.7%, with 443 agree presses for 1.1% and 75 hmm presses for 3.9%.
Both take a larger share of the hmm presses than of the thread.
96.5% of these comments drew no reply at all
There are 172 replies in this thread. 45 of them - 26.2% - sit under the first-placed comment, and 120 - 69.8% - under the top five.
Of 795 comments, 767 - 96.5% - have no reply at all.
Compared with the thread I counted the day before, which carried 790 replies, this one is quiet. People wrote, people pressed, and that was the end of it.
Things I have not checked
I do not know how many of those 4,731 companies had no real business behind them. The reading that more than half of these founders meant to do harm is mine, and I have not found anything to support it.
The report itself says it is hard to tell whether what fell away was the insubstantial sort. So this note says nothing about what the missing 5,120 companies were.
I also have not checked whether people who do get in escape prosecution. This is not a crime story, charges are not mentioned in it anywhere, and only two of 795 comments use the word.
One more note about the count. Yahoo! News displayed 846 top-level comments on this article; I was able to read 795 of them. Every proportion in this note is out of the 795 I read.
Counted but not quoted
22 comments, 2.8%, contain abusive words, with 249 agree presses - 0.6% of the vote.
Five comments, 0.6%, give ethnicity, bloodline or race as the reason, with 19 agree presses - 0.0%.
This site counts comments that rest on origin itself, and does not reproduce them.
Marking my own reading
More than half meant to do harm - in words, 21.5% of the vote says the same thing. With a figure attached, 0.3%. I have not found the source of my own number, so this note does not state it as fact.
Once inside, they are never charged - two comments out of 795, 0.0% of the vote.
Japan's courts are soft - 35 comments, 1.6%. Deportation, 0.3%.
What took 65.3% instead was whether the company was real.
And the single most-pressed comment in the thread says this figure does not tell us how many.
The comment I shared before writing this sits 3rd in the thread, with 4,423 agree presses, 358 that-explains-it presses, 72 hmm presses and 15 replies.
What this thread was actually saying
I had described an entrance and an exit: the entrance narrowed, the exit - the courts - still soft.
This thread hardly discussed the exit.
It looked inside the entrance instead. Does the company exist. Does it trade. Does it pay tax. Is it enrolled in social insurance. Is any of that checked when the status comes up for renewal.
That is where 65.3% of the vote went.
What this thread wanted was not a heavier punishment. It was a proper check.
Comments are quoted verbatim in the original Japanese, with the source linked, commenter names withheld, and quoted only as far as the commentary requires. Translations are mine. Source articles may expire (retrieval dates noted). The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.