On my earlier post on Income Protection Insurance (収入保障保険) multiple people mentioned getting disability insurance to cover for the case of being unable to work for extended time, so I started looking into this.
I found this older blog post that failed to find any good option in Japan.
I found that SBI seem to have a popular offering, although the fact that they will decide if you qualify or not regardless of what the doctors say is a bit worrying. I'd prefer a more transparent, objective criteria, but I guess this is inherent with disability insurance. It also seems that they will only pay if you are fully unable to work (e.g. staying in hospital, being on doctor ordered home-rest) and as soon as you can do some work (even some simple, part-time job, even if remotely) it stops paying.
Also full time employees should receive about 2/3 of their salary for up to 18 months as Injury & Sickness Allowance (傷病手当金) from health insurance, so there is already some default coverage.
Overall the available Disability Insurance offerings just don't seem like such good deals: if one has a healthy emergency fund and savings, then I can't see a compelling reason to get this. The combination of a high bar to getting the insurance, the default 18 months 2/3 salary coverage, and the affordable healthcare system (with payment caps) makes it seem like this insurance is not really useful/necessary. Am I missing something here? Or is it really that this is not a good deal and one should look abroad (in their home country) for this type of insurance (as recommended by klimaheizung and in this comment)?
Even this insurance company website says that they only recommend it to freelancers or people with no savings (although it seems they don't offer this type of insurance, so they might be simply talking against the competition a bit).
by szabo_jp