THE END OF THE EASY TEACHER

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 — one of Japan's largest work-visa categories, and the one that, alongside engineers, translators, and international-business hires, covers most hiring at eikaiwa, Japan's private, for-profit English conversation schools — were treated less as legal instruments than as administrative plumbing: necessary, mostly invisible, rarely inspected closely. The category contained more than 362,000 foreign residents at the end of 2023, according to Japan's Immigration Services Agency, and more than 418,000 by the end of 2024 — a fast-growing population moving through a visa status that most of these schools never had to think hard about.

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. The kind of mismatch that, years ago, might have gone through on the strength of a covering letter and a hopeful timeline.

"You can't wing this part any more," Sato told him. There wasn't much sympathy left in his voice by the end of the call, he said — he's had a version of it several times a year for most of a decade.

What Sato has watched happen, over eight years of placements, 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." Everybody wants to come to Japan, in his account — but qualified, stable, compliant, and actually likely to stay is a much smaller category. "They keep mixing up 'popular' with 'leverage.' Those aren't the same thing."

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 did not much care for restriction, either. 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. None of it is dramatic in isolation. Together, school owners say, it adds up to a process that no longer moves quickly for an employer that can't produce clean paperwork on request.

Asked whether employers now face more scrutiny, Tanaka corrected the premise. Not scrutiny. Expectation. "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." He paused. "This is outcome." "Not punishment."

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, he said; there was a sense that showing up and doing the work would eventually add up to something permanent. That sense didn't collapse all at once, in his telling — it eroded year over year, as pay stayed roughly flat, responsibilities grew, and the cost of living moved on without waiting for either.

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." He is, at the time of the interview, preparing to leave the country he spent two decades trying to build a life inside.

Asked whether a young teacher arriving in Tokyo today could realistically build the life he built, he took a while to answer. "Honestly? Nah." "I don't reckon so."

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 — a question, several sources said, that people in this industry ask privately and rarely ask out loud — she laughed, and then stopped laughing. "Honestly? I taught because I wanted to come to Japan." She quickly added that she cares about her students and takes the job seriously. But the order mattered to her answer. Japan came first. "The job was kind of just the vehicle."

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 — two doors into one room. Williams described the room from the inside: They are not the same door. And schools have rarely had a reliable way of telling which one an applicant walked through until well after hiring them.

The Odds

None of what the five sources for this piece said amounted to a country turning against foreign workers, or a crackdown, or a policy engineered to push English teachers out. What came through instead, independently and in strikingly similar language, 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. For a long time, it didn't need to check, because enough candidates cleared the bar anyway.

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." Sato describes the same arithmetic from the recruiting side — an applicant pool that keeps growing while the number of candidates he'd actually vouch for barely moves at all. Carter, further along the same curve, is the kind of exit that never shows up in either man's numbers until it's already happened: someone who stayed nearly 20 years, built a real life, and is leaving anyway.

That is what has actually disappeared: Not the applicants. Not the demand. Not the government's willingness to let foreigners teach English. 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. It may not even have a shortage of foreign teachers. 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 — a number that was probably always this small, in an industry that is only now required to look directly at it.

Nakamura never found out what became of the stronger candidate he turned down. He doesn't have to wonder very hard, though. 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.