Japan Removed 18,442 People Last Year — and 73% of Them Had Been Working Illegally

Most articles about deportation from Japan start with overstaying. Japan's own numbers say that is the wrong starting point.

In 2025, removal or departure-order procedures were taken against 18,442 foreign nationals. Of those, 13,435 — 72.9% — were found to have been working illegally (Immigration Services Agency, Illegal Employment Countermeasures Package). Not the paperwork. The work.

That single ratio is why Japan spent 2026 building a new enforcement package, and why the package is aimed less at people hiding from the state than at the ordinary machinery of getting paid — job listings, payroll filings, residence-card checks at the hiring desk.

If you are Indian and reading this from Bengaluru or from a share-house in Saitama, here is the honest headline: Indians barely appear in this data at all. But three specific situations can put an otherwise law-abiding Indian student or engineer on the wrong side of the line, and two of them are things an employer or an agent does to you. This article walks through what the numbers say, what the law actually punishes, where those three traps are, and — because someone reading this will need it — what Japan's own published route looks like for a person who has already fallen out of status.

🔑 Key takeaway

Japan's overstaying population is falling: 68,488 on 1 January 2026, down 8.5% in a year. India is not in the published top ten nationalities (the tenth, Cambodia, is 1,044), and the dominant entry route into that population — short-term visa-waiver travel — is one Indians cannot use, because India is a visa-required country. The real exposure for Indians is not overstaying: it is working outside what your status permits. Under the Immigration Control Act, working without permission costs up to 1 year or ¥2,000,000; if work becomes your predominant activity it rises to 3 years or ¥3,000,000 and becomes a removal ground. The employer or agent who arranges it faces 3 years or ¥3,000,000 — and, by statute, cannot escape liability by saying they did not know.

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Part 1: What Japan's overstay numbers actually show

Every year the Immigration Services Agency (ISA) publishes a count of people in Japan past their permitted stay. On 1 January 2026 it was 68,488 — down 6,375 (8.5%) from 74,863 a year earlier (ISA press release).

The population is shrinking, and has been for two years. That is worth saying out loud, because the enforcement drive described below is often reported as a response to a rising problem.

By nationality

Source: ISA statistical tables (PDF), Table 1. Every nationality in the top ten fell except Sri Lanka.

India does not appear. ISA publishes only the top ten by nationality, so the only honest statement is that India's figure sits below 1,044 — against 58,999 Indian residents in Japan at the end of 2025. We are deliberately not turning that into a percentage: it would be a meaningless number, for the reason the next table makes obvious.

By the status people held when they fell out of it

Source: ISA statistical tables (PDF), Table 3.

Six in ten arrived as short-stay visitors. And in ISA's own analysis of who newly became an overstayer during 2025, the largest single group — about 3,900 of roughly 13,000 — came in on short-term stay from visa-waiver countries, with only about 600 from visa-required countries (ISA, explanatory document, August 2026, PDF).

This is the structural reason India is absent, and it is Komichi's reading of ISA's own figures rather than something ISA says about India. Japan's overstay problem is overwhelmingly a short-stay problem, and short-stay arrivals are dominated by countries whose nationals can board a plane without a visa — Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia. India is a visa-required country. An Indian traveller is screened by a consular officer in India before departure, which is a filter most of that 41,607 never passed through.

Which is also why the crackdown's flagship measure barely touches Indians. More on that in a moment.

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Part 2: What Japan is actually doing about it

The policy has a clear chain of custody, and it is worth laying out because a lot of secondhand coverage collapses it into "Japan is cracking down."

• May 2025 — the Ministry of Justice publishes the Zero Illegal Residents Plan for the Safety and Security of the Nation, organised into three stages: entry control, residence management and refugee screening, and departure and removal.
• November 2025 — Prime Minister Takaichi instructs Justice Minister Hiraguchi to drive the plan harder.
• 23 January 2026 — the Cabinet-level ministerial conference adopts the Comprehensive Measures for Accepting Foreign Nationals and Realising an Orderly Inclusive Society, which carries the plan forward. (This is the same Cabinet package that produced the new language-school visa proof rules.)
• 22 May 2026 — four agencies (National Police Agency, Ministry of Justice, ISA, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) revise their joint illegal-employment strategy and publish an Illegal Employment Countermeasures Package (ISA).
• May 2026 — ISA publishes the Powerful Promotion Package, eight priority measures.
• August 2026 — the Deputy Minister of Justice issues a plain-language explanatory version, posted by ISA on 31 August 2026 (ISA).

The eight measures, and the one that is new

Seven of the eight restate or accelerate existing work: early introduction of JESTA (an electronic travel authorisation), diplomatic pressure on countries with many unreturned nationals, faster refugee screening, immigration digitalisation including AI, escorted state-funded removals, promotion of voluntary departure, and monitoring of provisionally released people.

The eighth is flagged 【new】: strengthening enforcement. It contains three concrete things — joint immigration-and-police raids, cyber patrols, and measures to encourage members of the public to report suspected cases.

The JESTA myth-bust

If you saw a headline about Japan introducing JESTA and wondered what it means for your application: for Indian nationals, almost nothing directly. ISA states plainly that JESTA is for people from visa-waiver countries travelling for short stays. The package's parallel line for visa-required countries — India among them — is stricter visa screening, with ISA and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sharing data.

There is, however, one line in the package that does touch honest Indian applicants, and it is the one to watch: for medium- and long-term residents, ISA says it is considering further tightening the screening of Certificate of Eligibility applications. If that happens, it lands on students, engineers and Specified Skilled Worker candidates applying from India, not on anyone doing anything wrong. We will cover it when there is a published rule rather than a stated intention.

What the illegal-employment package actually does

This is the part with teeth, because it changes what happens at the hiring desk:

• Residence-card reader app. ISA's free app already reads the IC chip; since November 2025 it also checks the card against invalidation records. Employers are being pushed to use it as standard. Practical effect: a forged or cancelled card now fails in seconds.
• Employment-status filings tightened. Labour bureaus and Hello Work are coordinating with police on employers who file late, file falsely, or do not file at all.
• Social-media monitoring. ISA says it is strengthening its capacity to collect and analyse information from social platforms and to use it in enforcement. In plain terms: the "earn more than 28 hours, no questions" posts circulating in student groups are a monitored surface.
• Facilitators pursued for removal. ISA states it will actively take removal procedures against people who facilitate illegal employment regardless of the criminal outcome. Note that a facilitator can be a foreign national — including an Indian "agent" living in Japan.
• A proposal, not yet law. The package proposes writing illegal-employment facilitation into industry-licensing laws as a disqualification ground, so a convicted employer loses its licence. The document itself notes this needs legislation.

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Part 3: What the law actually punishes

Here is the in-force text, from Japan's statute database. Read this table once; it is the whole risk map.

Source: in-force text of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, e-Gov. At ₹0.62 per ¥1 (mid-market, 15 September 2026), ¥3,000,000 is roughly ₹18.6 lakh.

Three things in that table deserve a sentence each.

One: the word "predominantly" is the line. Article 73 and Article 70(1)(iv) describe the same act with different weight. The heavier one — the one that is also a removal ground — applies where paid work is clearly the person's main activity. Komichi's reading: this is the legal reason a student who works some extra hours in a bad month sits in a different box from a student who has effectively stopped studying and is working full-time. Neither is lawful. They are not the same offence, and outcomes differ. Do not treat that as reassurance — treat it as the reason the school's attendance record matters as much as the payroll.

Two: "I didn't know" is expressly not a defence for the employer. Article 73-2(2) says a person who commits the offence cannot escape punishment on the ground that they did not know the worker lacked permission — unless they were genuinely not negligent. That one clause explains the entire residence-card-reader push. It also means a legitimate employer has a strong incentive to check your card properly, and an employer who doesn't ask is showing you something about itself. Our guide to spotting a black company from India covers the rest of that signal set.

Three: residence-card forgery carries a prison-only sentence. One to ten years, with no fine as an alternative — the heaviest penalty on this list. If anyone ever offers to "arrange" a card, a sticker, or a "designated activities" document for you, this is the provision they are inviting you into. See fake agents and the three scams Indians fall for.

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Part 4: The three ways an honest Indian ends up in this data

Trap 1 — the 28-hour cap, and the second job you forgot to count

A student with permission to engage in activity outside their status may work up to 28 hours a week during term, across all jobs combined. The combining is where people come unstuck: two restaurants at sixteen hours each is a breach, even though neither employer sees a problem.

What changed in 2026 is that nobody has to catch you in person any more. Employers file employment-status notifications; ISA cross-matches those filings to identify students appearing at multiple workplaces. Separately, since April 2026 language schools must ask every student, every three months, for their permission status, every employer's name, and their hours — and report cases that do not improve. The mechanics are in our language-school visa rules piece.

The same reporting duty has a side almost nobody frames properly: ISA explicitly names "my employer is making me work more than 28 hours" as something the school must pass upward. If you are being pushed over the limit, the quarterly check is a documented route out, not only a monitor. Use it.

And if the reason you are over the cap is money, do the arithmetic before you do the hours: Japan's minimum wage rises again from October 2026, and what a realistic baito actually pays is usually a better lever than extra shifts. The salary calculator and affordability tool will do it in two minutes.

Trap 2 — work that isn't what your visa says

This one catches engineers, not students, and it is not your decision.

A person on an Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services status is permitted to do the work described in that status. If a dispatch or SES firm places you on a client site doing shop-floor assembly, warehouse picking, or kitchen work, that is work outside your permitted activity — regardless of what your contract says, and regardless of the fact that you did not choose it. The employer is committing the Article 73-2 offence. You bear the immigration consequence at your next renewal.

This is the single most under-discussed risk for Indian IT workers in Japan, and it is why we wrote a whole piece on how Japan's 2026 dispatch and SES rules work. If your actual daily tasks have drifted from your status, that is a conversation to have with a qualified professional now, not at renewal time — and renewals themselves got more expensive on 1 October 2026.

Trap 3 — the agent who "arranges" everything

Article 73-2(iii) names brokering illegal work as a business as its own offence. The Zero Plan adds that ISA will pursue removal against facilitators whatever happens in the criminal courts.

Agents who guarantee jobs before a visa exists, who promise hours beyond the cap, who hold your passport, who ask for large upfront "placement" payments, or who supply documents you did not fill in yourself are describing this offence. Our scams guide and how to verify a Japanese job offer from India exist for exactly this. The safe alternative is dull and works: Japan's official government job channels for Indians.

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Part 5: The reporting system, stated plainly

This deserves to be reported rather than skipped, because it is on ISA's own public page and few Indian-market articles mention it.

Japan operates a reward system for information about people who may be subject to removal. Under Article 60 of the Act's Enforcement Regulations the reward is ¥1,000 to ¥50,000 per case (roughly ₹620 to ₹31,000 at ₹0.62 per ¥1, 15 September 2026). Anonymous tips do not qualify — ISA must be able to verify the informant's name and occupation — and payment is discretionary. The Powerful Promotion Package lists measures to promote information provision and reporting among its new enforcement steps (ISA Q&A, Q41–Q46).

ISA addresses the obvious objection itself, in Q46: it says the system exists to secure public cooperation in apprehending people who fall under removal grounds, and that it does not promote discrimination. Reasonable people disagree with that assessment, and immigration detention and removal in Japan are the subject of continuing domestic and international criticism. We are not going to settle that argument here. What we will say is the practical part: the system is real, it is being expanded, and it applies to conduct, not to nationality. If you are studying or working within your status, it is not about you. Our piece on racism and discrimination in Japan for Indians deals with the broader question of how it feels to live under that kind of scrutiny.

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Part 6: If someone has already fallen out of status

Some readers will have arrived here because this is not hypothetical — for them, or for a friend. So here is what Japan's own documents say, laid out neutrally. This is information, not advice. Anyone in this position should speak to a qualified immigration lawyer or a certified administrative scrivener before doing anything.

The counter-intuitive fact

Of roughly 17,000 people whose irregular status was resolved during 2025:

• about 11,000 came from people presenting themselves voluntarily at an immigration office,
• about 4,800 from handovers by police and other agencies,
• about 1,500 from raids.

Komichi's arithmetic from ISA's figures: voluntary surrender accounts for roughly 63% of the resolution flow, and raids for roughly 9%. Japan's system is not primarily a hunting operation. It is built to make coming forward the path of least resistance — and, as the package shows, the government wants that share to grow.

The departure-order route, and what the ban actually costs

Japan has a simplified route, the departure order system, introduced in 2004 and widened in June 2024 so that it now also covers someone who states an intention to leave promptly after an investigation has begun but before the inspector's finding. A person who qualifies leaves without being detained, under an order setting a departure deadline of no more than 15 days.

The difference it makes is measured in years:

Source: ISA Q&A, Q2.

To qualify (Art. 24-3) a person must: have come forward voluntarily before the violation investigation began, or stated an intention to leave promptly before the inspector's finding; have no removal ground other than irregular stay; not have been sentenced to imprisonment for certain offences; never have been removed or departure-ordered before; and be expected to leave promptly. ISA says the process typically takes about two weeks, and that you must attend one of the eight regional immigration bureaus (Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima, Takamatsu, Fukuoka) or three branch offices (Yokohama, Kobe, Naha) — an airport office will only issue an acknowledgement.

Two things ISA says that people get wrong

Coming forward does not legalise your stay. ISA's Q1 addresses this directly: many people believe that reporting to immigration resolves the violation. It does not. Unless the Minister of Justice grants special permission to stay, the person remains in breach and, as a rule, still may not work — and ISA notes people in exactly this situation are picked up at the workplace they kept going to.

A shortened ban does not work on a tourist visa. There is a separate mechanism — a decision to shorten the entry-ban period — for someone issued a removal order who has permission to depart at their own expense and has never been removed or departure-ordered before. It is discretionary, with no guarantee. And there is a catch ISA states outright in Q40: even with a shortening decision, if you try to enter on a short-term stay status, the ban remains five years. The shortened period is usable only by coming back properly, with a Certificate of Eligibility behind a real job or study place.

That is a genuinely important asymmetry, and it points the same way as everything else on this page: the route back into Japan runs through the formal system, every time.

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Part 7: What this means if you are simply applying from India

Almost certainly nothing. You are not in this data, your country is not in this data, and the population it describes is falling.

Two things are worth carrying anyway.

One: the file you build is the one that protects you. Keep your own copies of the contract, the employment-status notification, your residence card, your permission to work outside your status, and every payslip. If a dispute arises about what you were doing and for whom, a clean paper trail is the whole defence.

Two: the rules that constrain your employer are yours to use. The residence-card check, the quarterly school report, the employment filings, the industry codes of conduct — these exist to police the employer, not you. An employer irritated by them is telling you something. How to work in Japan from India and Japanese work culture for Indians cover the version of this that shows up day to day.

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The one thing to take away

Japan is not tightening the door on Indians. It is tightening the door on illegal work — and the data says that is where 73% of removals actually come from. The distinction matters because it tells you where to put your attention: not on some vague fear of immigration, but on two very specific documents, your permission to work and the description of what your status lets you do.

Your move this week: check what your residence card and your permission to engage in activity outside your status actually say, add up your hours across all employers, and compare that against what you are really doing every day. If the three don't match, that gap is the only thing on this page that concerns you — and it is fixable while it is small.

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This article is general information, not legal, immigration, or financial advice. Immigration law, enforcement practice, penalties and exchange rates change, and every case turns on its own facts — if your own status is in question, consult a qualified immigration lawyer or certified administrative scrivener, and verify current rules with the Immigration Services Agency of Japan and the Embassy or Consulate of Japan in India before acting. Currency conversions are approximate and were calculated at roughly ₹0.62 per ¥1 on 15 September 2026. Where this article draws a conclusion the sources do not state outright, it is labelled as Komichi's reading or Komichi's arithmetic.