Black Companies in Japan: How Indians Can Spot an Exploitative Employer Before Signing, From India

General information, not legal or immigration advice — see the note at the end.

Last September, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare published something it had never published before: the results of its labour inspections at workplaces employing Specified Skilled Workers. Inspectors visited 5,750 workplaces during 2024. They found labour-law violations at 4,395 of them — 76.4%.

That number is going to be quoted badly. So let's use it properly instead — because buried inside the same release is something far more useful to you than a scary percentage: a precise, itemised list of what actually goes wrong at the bad employers, ranked by how often it happens. That list is a checklist. And almost every item on it is something you can test before you sign, from a laptop in Pune or Kochi, using databases the Japanese government publishes for free.

This article gives you that checklist, the five official databases, and the six lines in a Japanese employment contract that decide whether the next three years of your life go well.

Key takeaway: you cannot judge a Japanese employer from its website, and you should not try to judge it from anecdotes on Facebook. You can check whether it legally exists, whether it actually enrolls its staff in social insurance, whether the recruiter introducing it is licensed, and whether it appears on a government list of prosecuted employers — all in one evening, for free, from India. Do those four checks before you send a rupee or a document to anyone.

First: what "black company" means, and what this article will not do

Burakku kigyō (ブラック企業) is Japanese slang, not a legal category. There is no official register of "black companies" and no test that certifies one. It's a shorthand people use for employers who run on illegal overtime, unpaid wages, unsafe equipment, and pressure that makes leaving feel impossible.

Because it isn't a legal term, we are not going to name a single company, agent, or employer anywhere in this article — and you should be sceptical of any blog that does. What we will do is show you the patterns that Japan's own inspectors document, in general terms, with the official sources attached, so you can run the checks yourself and reach your own conclusion.

Two more framing points, because they matter:

• Most Japanese employers are not like this. Japan has one of the most heavily documented labour-inspection systems in the world, which is precisely why we have data to show you. A country that publishes its own violation rates is a country you can audit.
• The risk is unevenly distributed. It clusters in specific sectors, specific company sizes, and specific visa routes. Knowing where it clusters is most of the protection.

What Japan's inspectors actually found in 2024

On 26 September 2025, MHLW released calendar-2024 results for two groups of workplaces: those employing technical intern trainees (TITP) and — for the first time ever — those employing Specified Skilled Workers.

Source: MHLW press release, 26 Sep 2025, with Annex 1 (TITP) and Annex 2 (SSW).

The honest reading of 76.4% (please don't skip this)

Here's where most coverage will go wrong, so let's be precise. MHLW's own wording is that inspectors visited workplaces where a violation was suspected (労働基準関係法令違反が疑われる5,750事業場). These were targeted inspections, not a random sample.

The same annex tells you the denominator that matters: at the end of 2024 there were 50,099 organisations registered as accepting SSW workers in Japan. So:

Computed by Komichi: 5,750 ÷ 50,099 = 11.5% of SSW-accepting organisations were inspected, roughly 1 in 9 — and those were the ones already flagged as suspicious. The 76.4% is a hit rate on suspects, not a prevalence rate across employers. Anyone who tells you "76% of Japanese employers hiring foreigners break the law" is misreading the release.

What the number does tell you, reliably: when Japanese inspectors think something is wrong at a workplace hiring foreign workers, they are right about three times out of four. Their instincts are good. This article is partly an attempt to give you the same instincts.

The ranked list of what goes wrong

This is the part worth printing. Every item below is a violation category found at SSW-employing workplaces in 2024, with the share of inspected workplaces where it was found.

Source: MHLW Annex 2, SSW workplaces, 2024.

Reframe 1: the biggest danger is a machine guard, not a payslip

Read the top of that table again. Safety standards, at 24.0%, is the single most common finding — about 1.4 times as common as unpaid overtime.

It gets sharper. Of the 7 SSW cases MHLW referred to prosecutors in 2024, the breakdown was 5 safety-standard cases, 1 offsetting of an advance against wages, and 1 failure by an ordering party. That is:

Computed by Komichi: 5 of 7 prosecutions — 71.4% — were about physical safety, not money.

The one prosecution case MHLW describes in detail involves a metal-products factory where the light-curtain safety device on a press machine had been switched off with a key. A Specified Skilled Worker's hand was caught in the press. He lost a finger. Another case in the same document: a food-processing plant where a worker adjusting film position on a packing machine hit the start switch by accident and lost two fingers, with one month off work.

Indians researching Japan spend a lot of energy on salary comparison and almost none on this. If you are heading into construction, food manufacturing or food service, or industrial production, the question "does this factory switch off its safety devices to hit quota?" matters more to your life than ¥10,000 a month.

Concrete things to ask, in writing, before you sign:

• Will I receive safety and health training at hire (雇入れ時の安全衛生教育)? In the food-processing case above, the inspector's finding was that this training had simply not been given.
• Are the safety manuals available in a language I read — or at minimum with furigana over the kanji? That was the corrective action the company took.
• Who is the designated operations chief (作業主任者) for the machine I will operate?

An employer that answers those three questions easily is telling you something. So is one that doesn't.

Reframe 2: where the risk clusters, by sector

MHLW breaks the SSW inspections down by the five sectors with the most SSW residents. The spread is real:

Source: MHLW Annex 2. Same caveat applies: these are targeted inspections, not a census.

Two things jump out. Construction sits 6.1 points above food manufacturing — and its top finding is unpaid overtime premium, which is a money problem you can detect on a payslip. In food manufacturing, 40.4% of inspected workplaces had a machinery-safety finding — a body problem you may only detect once. Different sectors fail in different ways, and your pre-signing questions should change accordingly.

If you're weighing caregiving, note that social welfare facilities' top finding is overtime premium at 29.3% — the highest of any sector for that item. Care work in Japan is real, needed and often well run; it is also shift work where unpaid handover time is the classic problem. Ask specifically how handover, record-writing and on-call night hours are counted.

Reframe 3: almost nobody complains

Now the most quietly important number in the entire release.

In 2024, Specified Skilled Workers filed 107 formal complaints (申告) with labour standards inspection offices across all of Japan. Of those, 90 concerned unpaid wages or unpaid overtime, 15 concerned improper dismissal procedure, and 6 concerned pay below minimum wage. (Those sub-totals come to more than 107 because MHLW counts each subject separately where a single complaint raises two or more — the ministry says so in its own footnote.)

Computed by Komichi: 107 complaints against 4,395 workplaces where violations were actually found = one worker complaint for roughly every 41 violating workplaces (2.4 per 100). And 84.1% of the complaints that were filed were about money — even though money was not the most common violation.

Read that as a behavioural finding, not a statistical one. Foreign workers in Japan overwhelmingly do not report problems, and when they do report, they report the one thing they can see on a payslip. The safety violations, the missing health-check follow-ups, the untracked hours: those got found by inspectors walking in, not by workers speaking up.

Which is exactly why the pre-signing check matters more than the post-arrival remedy. You will probably not complain. Almost nobody does. Plan on that being true of you too, and choose accordingly.

The three failures that hit Indians hardest — from the ministry's own case files

MHLW publishes anonymised case studies with the inspection data. Three are worth walking through in full, because they map almost exactly onto what goes wrong for Indian workers.

Case A: "If you leave early, repay the visa costs" — ₹1.38 lakh clawed back

A Specified Skilled Worker at a social welfare facility told the employer he wanted to resign mid-contract. The employer deducted the cost of obtaining his work visa from his wages. He reported it.

The inspector's finding: the Japanese-language employment contract contained a clause requiring repayment of visa acquisition costs if he left mid-term. That is a penalty-for-breach clause, prohibited under Labour Standards Act Article 16. The company was issued a correction order and repaid approximately ¥230,000 ≈ ₹1.38 lakh (at ¥1 ≈ ₹0.60) that it had deducted.

Now the part nobody tells Indian applicants. Look at what the company was made to do next:

It stopped using the Japanese-only employment contract and instead set working conditions using the bilingual employment contract submitted at the immigration application, and removed the penalty clause.

There can be two contracts. The one the employer puts in front of you, and the one filed with the Immigration Services Agency — which in this case was described by the ministry as carrying the worker's own language alongside Japanese. If the two documents say different things, that is not a translation issue. That is the finding.

Your move: ask for the immigration-filed employment contract and the accompanying conditions-of-employment sheet, in both languages, before you sign anything. Then read both. If the employer or agent resists, or says "the Japanese one is the real one," you have learned what you needed to learn. (More on testing an offer end-to-end in our guide to verifying a Japan job offer from India.)

Case B: rent, electricity and tools deducted from wages — ₹72,000 returned

A Specified Skilled Worker in construction had rent, utilities and the cost of tools deducted from his wages with no labour-management agreement in place. Under LSA Article 24, wages must be paid in full and directly; deductions beyond statutory ones (tax, social insurance) require a written labour-management agreement.

Two corrections followed. The company signed a proper agreement for rent and utilities — and made the tool costs the company's own expense. Separately, a special allowance paid only to the SSW workers had been left out of the base used to calculate overtime premium; the company paid about ¥120,000 ≈ ₹72,000 in shortfall.

That second point is the one to memorise, because it is invisible on a job ad. Your overtime rate is calculated on a base that includes most regular allowances. An employer that shifts pay into "allowances" and then excludes them from the overtime base is quietly cutting your overtime rate. Ask which allowances are included in the 割増賃金 base. Then run the numbers yourself in our Japan salary calculator and cross-check the deductions with the tax calculator.

Case C: the safety device that was switched off

Covered above, but it belongs in this list. A press machine's light-curtain safety device had been disabled via a key switch, and the operations chief was not keeping custody of that key. A worker lost a finger. The company and a director were referred to prosecutors.

There is no clever pre-signing check for this one. There is only asking about safety training, safety manuals in your language, and who holds responsibility for the machine — and taking the answer seriously.

The Komichi pre-signing check: five official databases, one evening, from India

Here is the actual method. All five are free, all five are Japanese-government sources, and none of them require you to be in Japan or to read fluent Japanese (browser translation handles these pages adequately, though you should treat machine translation as a guide, not gospel).

1. Does the company legally exist? — National Tax Agency Corporate Number site

Every registered corporation in Japan has a 13-digit corporate number (法人番号), and the National Tax Agency publishes all of them, searchable by name or address, with change history for name and location.

What you're looking for: the company exists, its registered name matches the name on your offer letter exactly, its registered address matches, and there isn't a suspicious trail of recent name or address changes. A "company" that cannot be found here, or whose registered name differs from what's on your paperwork, is a stop-and-ask moment.

2. Does it actually enroll staff in social insurance? — Japan Pension Service establishment search

This is the check almost no one outside Japan knows about, and it is the single most informative one.

The Japan Pension Service runs a public Employees' Pension and Health Insurance Covered Establishment Search (search page here). Search by prefecture, name, address or corporate number, and it will tell you whether an establishment is currently covered, whether coverage was terminated (it retains terminations for two years), which pension office handles it — and the number of insured persons.

Why this matters so much:

• Enrolment in health insurance and employees' pension is not optional for a covered establishment. An employer that isn't listed is either genuinely exempt, or isn't doing something it should be. Either way you want to know before you arrive and discover you have no health cover — see health insurance in Japan and what it costs.
• Your pension contributions are your money. Indians who leave Japan can claim a lump-sum withdrawal on contributions actually paid — an employer that never enrolled you creates no such entitlement. Read how the pension refund works for Indians and model it in the pension calculator.
• The insured-person count is a sanity check on the story you're being told. An employer describing a large operation while showing a handful of insured staff is worth a follow-up question — politely asked, since group companies and multiple establishments are normal.

One rule: the Japan Pension Service states that republishing or making secondary use of the search results is not permitted. Look it up yourself for your own decision; don't screenshot it into a WhatsApp forward.

3. Is the recruiter licensed, and what is its actual placement record? — MHLW Jinzai Service site

If a Japanese recruitment agency is involved, it needs a fee-charging employment placement licence (有料職業紹介事業許可), and licensed operators are listed on MHLW's Jinzai Service Comprehensive Site. The licence number's first two digits are the prefecture that issued it (13 = Tokyo), and the katakana character indicates fee-charging (ユ) or free (ム).

Better still: licensed operators are required to publish their performance data on the same site — including numbers placed and separations, broken out by how quickly placements ended. A recruiter whose placements keep ending within a few months is telling you something about the employers it works with.

This is the Japan-side counterpart to the India-side checks (eMigrate registered-recruiting-agent register, NSDC sending-organisation list) covered in our job-offer verification guide and our roundup of official India→Japan government hiring channels.

4. Has it been prosecuted? — MHLW's published violation cases

MHLW and each prefectural labour bureau publish a rolling list of cases of labour-law violation (労働基準関係法令違反に係る公表事案) — company name, location, the provisions violated, and a case summary. Tokyo's is here; every prefecture maintains its own.

Two things to understand about this list, both of which cut against over-reliance on it:

• Entries stay up for about one year from publication, and can be removed sooner once corrective action is confirmed. Absence from the list proves nothing about the past.
• MHLW's stated purpose is to prompt voluntary improvement by other employers, not primarily to warn job-seekers. It is a genuinely small list relative to the scale of the problem — remember, only 7 SSW cases were referred to prosecutors in all of 2024.

So: presence on it is a strong signal. Absence from it is not a clean chit.

5. Ask for the numbers you are legally allowed to ask for — Youth Employment Promotion Act

This one surprises people. Under Japan's Youth Employment Promotion Act (若者雇用促進法, Arts. 13–14, in force since 1 March 2016), employers must, on request from an applicant, provide workplace information across three categories, giving at least one item from each:

1. Recruitment and hiring — new-graduate hires and separations over the past three years, hires by gender, average length of service
2. Working conditions — average monthly overtime hours, average paid-leave days taken, childcare-leave figures
3. Employment management and training — training provided, mentoring, career-consultation systems

The honest caveat: this framework is designed around Japanese youth recruitment, and there is no guarantee an employer will treat an overseas applicant's email as a formal request under it. But asking costs nothing, and the answer is information either way. An employer that emails you back "average overtime last year was 14 hours a month, average tenure 8.6 years" has just handed you the two most predictive numbers in this entire article. An employer that refuses has also told you something.

Related, and free: MHLW's Youth Employment Promotion portal lets you browse company employment-management information, and lists Yūsu Eeru (ユースエール) certified companies — small and medium employers (300 staff or fewer) certified by the Minister for good youth-employment management. Certification is a genuine green flag. Its limits are worth stating plainly: it only covers SMEs, and most employers simply never apply.

Read the contract like an inspector: six lines that decide everything

You now know that written disclosure of working conditions (LSA Art. 15) was a finding at 10.3% of inspected SSW workplaces — roughly 1 in 10. So don't assume the paperwork is right. Check these six things.

1. Is there a written statement of conditions at all — and in which languages?

Article 15 requires the employer to state working conditions clearly at the time the contract is concluded. For SSW, the immigration-filed contract is a bilingual prescribed form. Get both language versions. Keep both.

And here is the provision worth carrying in your head. Under Article 15, if the stated conditions turn out to differ from the facts, the worker may terminate the contract immediately — and where the worker moved home for the job and returns within 14 days of terminating, the employer must bear the necessary travel costs home. That rule exists precisely because someone who has moved for work and been lied to is otherwise trapped by the price of the ticket. It applies to you.

2. What is base pay, and what is an allowance?

Base pay drives overtime, bonuses and often your severance position. Allowances may or may not. As Case B showed, allowances excluded from the overtime base quietly cut your overtime rate. Ask, in writing, which allowances are included in the overtime premium calculation.

Then translate the offer into what you'll actually hold. Gross-to-net in Japan is typically well under what the headline suggests once income tax, resident tax, health insurance, pension and employment insurance come out — the full walk-through is in salaries, tax and savings in Japan, and the ₹-side illusion is unpacked in the ₹35 lakh illusion.

3. Does the wage clear minimum wage — arithmetic you can do today

Japan sets minimum wage by prefecture, revised each autumn. For FY2026 the Central Minimum Wages Council's recommended increase was A-rank ¥54, B-rank ¥56, C-rank ¥56, which if applied as recommended would give a national weighted average of ¥1,176 per hour, up ¥55 (4.9%) from ¥1,121. Prefectural councils set the actual figures and the new rates take effect from October onwards, prefecture by prefecture — so check your prefecture's rate, not the average.

Computed by Komichi, as an illustration only: at ¥1,176/hour and a standard 40-hour week (173.33 hours a month), the monthly floor is ≈¥203,840 ≈ ₹1.22 lakh at ¥1 ≈ ₹0.60. If a monthly offer divided by contracted monthly hours lands below your prefecture's rate, that is a Minimum Wage Act problem on its face — and it was the subject of 6 of the 107 complaints filed by SSW workers in 2024.

Our Japan minimum wage guide for Indians has the prefectural picture, and cost of living in Japan versus India tells you what the number buys.

4. What do the hours actually say — and what does the 36 Agreement allow?

Statutory hours are 8 per day and 40 per week. Overtime beyond that requires a 36 Agreement (サブロク協定) filed with the labour standards office. Since 2019 (2020 for SMEs) there are hard legal caps:

Now the reframe that should change how you read an offer:

Those ceiling figures are not neutral. Japan's own occupational-injury recognition standard for brain and heart disease treats a strong work-relatedness as established at roughly 100 hours of overtime in the month before onset, or roughly 80 hours a month averaged over 2–6 months. The legal maximum an employer may work you under a special clause is, numerically, the same line the state uses to recognise death and illness from overwork.

So "we're within the legal limit" is not reassurance. Ask instead for the actual average monthly overtime last year — the Youth Employment Promotion Act item above — and treat anything approaching 45 hours a month as a lifestyle decision, not a detail. Our guide to Japanese work culture for Indians covers what the hours feel like from the inside.

5. What can legally be deducted?

Statutory deductions (income tax, resident tax, social insurance, employment insurance) come out automatically. Anything else — company housing rent, utilities, uniforms, tools — requires a written labour-management agreement, per Case B. And note what the inspector did there: tools became the company's cost.

Company housing is common and often a genuine benefit, particularly given Japan's upfront rental costs. But get the rent figure in writing before you sign, not after you land — it is part of your real wage. Budget the whole move properly with how much money you need to move to Japan.

6. Is there any penalty, deposit, or clawback clause?

There should not be, and for SSW there cannot be.

• LSA Art. 16 prohibits contracts fixing penalties or damages for breach — that's the ₹1.38 lakh visa-cost clawback in Case A.
• LSA Art. 17 prohibits offsetting advances against wages — one of the seven SSW prosecutions in 2024 was exactly this.
• The Specified Skilled Worker operational guidelines and the ISA's SSW Q&A require that neither the employer nor anyone in the chain collects a guarantee deposit or imposes a breach penalty, and require that you be told the amount of any fees paid to intermediaries.

If a contract, an agent, or a "training bond" asks you to put money at risk against leaving, it is not a grey area. Our SSW visa cost breakdown from India sets out what should and shouldn't cost you money.

Your exit is your leverage — and it depends entirely on your visa

Here is the framework that ties this together. Everything above is about detecting a bad employer. This is about what happens if you're already inside one. And that is decided by your residence status, not by your courage.

The Ikusei Shuro system launches on 1 April 2027, replacing TITP, and its headline reform is that it permits transfer at the worker's own volition (本人意向による転籍) — the thing TITP notoriously did not. But read the conditions in the ISA's own July 2026 programme overview:

• A restriction period set field by field, generally one to two years (the ISA table shows, for example, two years for care work and one year for accommodation), and
• passing both a skills test and a Japanese-language test — the overview's summary box cites A2.1-equivalent or above (JFT-Basic), with the actual required level set field by field within a range running from A1-equivalent up to the level needed to move on to SSW. The overview states plainly that passing these tests is the condition for a self-initiated transfer.

The exit door has a language key. Under Ikusei Shuro, your ability to leave a bad employer is gated on a Japanese test. That reframes language study from "nice to have" into the most concrete insurance policy available to you. Start with how much Japanese each Japan visa needs, then JFT-Basic from India or the JLPT in India, and learning Japanese specifically for work.

An India-specific finding worth knowing right now

Ikusei Shuro is built on bilateral Memoranda of Cooperation, and the ISA overview states that acceptance will in principle be only from countries that have concluded an MOC.

As of 21 August 2026, the ISA's Ikusei Shuro MOC page lists exactly three countries: Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. India is not among them.

India does have a Specified Skilled Worker MOC — signed in New Delhi on 18 January 2021 (Embassy of Japan in India), and listed on the ISA's SSW MOC page. So on our reading of these two pages as they stand today, the live India→Japan door for skilled work is SSW, and the Ikusei Shuro door has no India-specific framework yet. That could change at any time — these pages are updated as MOCs are signed, and we will update this article when it does. Verify before relying on it.

Two practical consequences. First, if you're planning a blue-collar move from India, plan it as an SSW move and follow the SSW application process. Second, be careful with anyone selling "Ikusei Shuro placements from India starting 2027" — as of today there is no bilateral framework behind that pitch.

If you're already in Japan and something is wrong

Three numbers, and one thing almost nobody tells Indians.

Use the free hotline, not the paid one. MHLW runs two multilingual services, and their own comparison page (information as of April 2026) makes the choice obvious:

The free line runs in the evenings and at weekends — which is to say, when you are actually off shift. If you take one phone number from this article, take 0120-531-401.

And the India-specific finding: the Foreign Workers service covers 13 languages — English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Myanmar, Nepali, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Khmer and Mongolian — and the free Labour Standards Advice Hotline covers those thirteen plus Japanese. There is no Hindi line, and no line in any other Indian language. Nepali speakers get four days a week on the Foreign Workers dial; Indians are routed to English.

That isn't an outrage, it's a resourcing decision that reflects who currently works in Japan — Indians are a small share of the foreign workforce, as our Indians in Japan statistics piece sets out. But it does mean something practical: your access to labour-rights help in Japan runs through English. Being able to describe a wage problem clearly in English, on the phone, is a real and underrated skill. Prepare the sentences before you need them.

Also worth knowing:

• FRESC (Foreign Residents Support Center), Yotsuya, Tokyo — 0570-011000 — is the one-stop government support centre for foreign residents (details).
• Your local Labour Standards Inspection Office is the body with actual enforcement power, and several prefectural bureaus have foreign-worker advisers with named language days — the table on that same MHLW page lists them prefecture by prefecture.
• Labour offices and immigration share information. In 2024, labour inspection offices reported 339 cases to immigration authorities, immigration reported 73 cases back, and the two ran joint inspections at 10 workplaces. That channel exists to catch exploitative employers — but it does mean a labour complaint can surface immigration questions, and vice versa. If your situation is complicated, get advice from a licensed professional or a support organisation before filing.

Green flags: what a good Japanese employer looks like on paper

Balance matters here, because the vast majority of Indians who move to Japan for work do not end up in this article's scenarios. Positive signals, in rough order of how much they tell you:

• A published average monthly overtime figure in the teens or low twenties, offered without being chased.
• Average length of service above five years. It's an imperfect proxy — tenure varies a lot by sector and company age — but whether people stay is one of the few signals you can actually get hold of from India.
• Listed as covered on the Japan Pension Service establishment search, with an insured-person count consistent with the size they describe.
• The bilingual immigration-filed contract handed over unprompted, matching the Japanese version line for line.
• A named support contact and, for SSW, a registered support organisation you can look up.
• Clear, boring answers about deductions: rent stated, utilities stated, tools company-paid.
• Certification marks — Yūsu Eeru, Kurumin (childcare-friendly), or the Safety and Health Excellent Enterprise "White Mark". Rare, but meaningful when present.
• Willingness to let you speak to a current foreign employee before you sign.

And a cultural note that isn't a red flag, though it often gets read as one: Japanese workplaces run on quiet, low-friction consideration for the people around you — the meiwaku social contract. Formality, indirectness and detailed process are normal here and are not evidence of a bad employer. Learning to tell the difference between demanding and exploitative is most of what your first year teaches you. If you're weighing employer types more broadly, Japanese company vs foreign company in Japan is the companion piece.

Your next step this week

Don't try to do all of this at once. Do the two checks that take fifteen minutes and eliminate most of the risk:

1. Search the company on the National Tax Agency corporate number site — confirm the registered name and address match your offer exactly.
2. Search it on the Japan Pension Service establishment search — confirm it is currently covered for health insurance and employees' pension.

Then, if both come back clean, ask one email's worth of questions: which allowances count toward the overtime base, what last year's average monthly overtime was, and whether you can have the bilingual immigration-filed contract.

And run the offer through the salary calculator so you're negotiating on take-home, not on a headline. Japan needs people — it's short millions of workers, and demand runs across many sectors. That shortage is your leverage. Use it before you sign, when it's worth the most.

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This article is general information, not legal, immigration, tax, financial, or medical advice. Rules, fees, and figures change and vary by individual circumstances — verify the latest details with official sources (e.g. the Immigration Services Agency of Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and the relevant embassy or test body) and consult a qualified professional before making decisions. Nothing here is a statement about any specific named company, agent, or employer.