JJapan Finance

Possibility to keep Corporate Bank Account Open When Leaving Japan

  • October 31, 2025

I have a personal bank account and corporate bank account (for my Japanese GK company) in the same bank. Unfortunately, with recent developments, I need to think of an exit strategy where I will need to leave Japan and lose my residency (startup visa).

I have seen the other Reddit threads where I would need to close down my personal bank account (the one that gets frozen whenever my zairyu card expires) but I have not experienced this same freezing with my corporate bank account.

When I extended my personal bank account last time I renewed my zairyu card, I asked my bank if I needed to do anything similar with my corporate bank account and they said nope, all was good there. I was hoping to keep my corp account active as I need to pay some stuff still in Japan and most of these only work with auto-debit with a Japanese bank.

Have any of you out there any experience with this situation?

I own my own place here so I will have a valid address (although I will not be residing there, just keeping my stuff for when I come over to visit). The management fee + reserve fund fee for the apartment are auto-debit in my personal account and if I could not keep my personal account, I was hoping to have the auto-debit done on the corporate account instead. I will replenish it from overseas.

Unfortunately, my corp / business will probably not be doing any business anymore here but I still plan to file the proper residence tax (for the corp) and file annual statements. I want to keep the business entity alive for a possibility in the future when I can regroup my finances and come back and operate the company business again.

Does this exit plan sound possible? Thanks for your replies.

by TokyoShibe

4 comments

  1. Legally speaking, this shouldn’t be a problem, as your company is resident in Japan even if you’re not.

    But I believe, in practice, a lot of banks want a resident representative director in Japan. But from what I’ve seen, these requirements apply during the initial account creation, so they might not care if you move abroad later.

    For example, Mizuho bank says :

    > If the representative resides overseas or does not hold a residence status in Japan, the person in charge must visit the branch in person when opening the account.

    This implies you can live overseas and hold an account with them as long as you visit their branch when opening the account.

    But if you don’t intend to apply for a business manager visa yet anyway, you could just have a foreign corporate bank account, like Wise Business, to hold your corporate funds in and pay the bills.

  2. I have the same question, I’m happy to see your post. I dont know this yet.

    I need the corporate account to receive monthly income and also pay vendors and professionals. Really hoping they don’t make me close it after I leave. I’m with SBI Neobank for the corporate account.

    It was a long journey to open it.

    We finally opened it after operating since 2019, building up income to support our family, over about 4 years, and then me and my family finally moved here last year in the beginning of 2025 on Business Manager Visa. We have just enough corporate income in Japan to support a business manager visa and a family of 6, but no employees. I’m a beginner in Japanese. We are from the U.S. I am self studying Japanese on top of work and raising 4 kids. Fluency is not going to happen quickly enough.

    I can see my family and business situation is not very welcome here by the BM visa changes.

    So this is one of the reasons we we are planning to move away from Japan next year.

    I’m so disappointed in Japan right now. I came here expecting stability, and we got unpredictability. Its fine they want to target certain businesses and they want to have Japanese employees and all that. That’s fine if its known ahead of time. Its a shame they change the rules though, and its definitely going to devastate my fam financially to move again…so frustrating. I don’t want to agonize once a year until the grace period runs out about the visa renewals. If I’m a single dude fine, but it takes a ton of money and effort to move a family of 6.

  4. If you can change your bill payment requirements (such as rent) to you manually doing a furikomi, you could instead use Wise to make the payments.

    Be sure that you do at least one such payment for each destination account BEFORE you leave Japan. You will need to manually enter both the bank account number and the recipient’s exact bank account name. The best way to get this info is by starting a furikomi from a regular domestic account (online or even from an ATM) and just copying/photographing the exact kana that will pop up on the confirmation screen. If you get the kana wrong, the recipient’s bank will reject the transfer, so you need to make sure you have the right info, and you need to make sure that each transfer works from Wise. (You can cancel the furikomi after you get the kana.)

    So for example if you are sending money to “不動会社”, you will need to know if you should send to カ）フドウガイシャ or フドウガイシャ（カ etc etc. Wise does not auto-populate the kana and asking people for their exact bank account kana seems to be a question they don’t really understand how to answer. So it’s best to get it sorted yourself before leaving.

    Edit: Once you’ve done a transfer once in Wise you can just use the “send again” feature to send to the same recipient without having to reenter the details every time.

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