community:
long‑term foreign residents in Japan are getting older, and many are becoming seriously isolated.
A lot of people who came in the 90s or early 2000s — Brazilian Nikkeijin, Chinese residents, SE Asian workers, etc. — are now in their 60s and 70s. And the problems are pretty rough:
Many didn’t pay enough into the pension system
A lot worked unstable jobs for decades
Japanese paperwork is hard even for natives, impossible if you’re older and not fluent
No family in Japan to rely on
Local senior communities are very Japanese‑only and hard to enter
Some don’t even know how to apply for介護保険 or welfare
The article highlighted places like Toyota City and Gunma where multilingual care centers are popping up, but it’s still tiny compared to the scale of the issue.
One professor said something that hit hard:
Japan has treated foreigners as “workers,” not “residents,” so now the bill is coming due.
I’m curious what others in Japan have seen.
Are there older foreign residents in your area?
Are local governments preparing for this at all?
Or is this going to become another “we didn’t expect this” crisis?
https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/yomidr/article/20230606-OYTET50005/
by Ok-Conference-9984
35 comments
Japanese elderly residents are also being isolated.
OP could you post link to the article?
This is heartbreaking
[deleted]
>Japan has treated foreigners as “workers,” not “residents,” so now the bill is coming due.
Don’t worry. The plan is to continue to do this, but preferably ramp up making it more difficult to stay so they will leave and Japan can keep their pensions.
>Are local governments preparing for this at all?
They are planning at about the same level as most Japanese government dynamic action plans to address pressing problems. Serious teeth suck and back of the head patting.
This is why I had children
Well maybe Kamiya is right. They should all be shipped home after retirement. /s
I’m 57 and I’ll probably be in the same boat. It’s kind of disheartening to spend 38 years in a country and then have people start making noise about kicking you out of your *home*. But I’m one of the lucky ones. I speak the language, paid my bills, have Japanese family. But the anti-foreigner sentiment is starting to keep me awake at night. Being kicked out to go live in the US would basically be a death sentence. It turns out that I have ancestors who moved from Canada to the US in the late 19th century, which under a new Canadian policy, qualifies me for Canadian citizenship. It’s starting to look like an option if the SHTF.
After the 2011 tsunami & earthquake, there were reports of chronically ill foreigners being paid to leave Japan. It wasn’t widely reported at the time and I can’t find any links. I recall some US citizens being sent off to veterans hospitals in the USA – I expect they are all dead now. In the 2008/2009 slump, many unemployed immigrants from South America were also paid to return to South America provided they promised never to return to Japan.
Must be heartbreaking to call Japan “home” and to be encouraged to leave after living here for so long.
I am very worried about a lot of my English teaching friends who came here straight out of college and never learned any financial skills do to the easy money they got as 22 year olds.
Damn you should see what actual Japanese senior citizens are dealing with
My observation is that the foreigners in their 50s and 60s are becoming more isolated.
There is less meeting up for a beer or a curry lunch than there used to be…..but maybe it’s same everywhere.
To the statement saying that foreigners are treated as workers and not residents: if you grow old in a country and never learn the language and also don’t build any sort of social network and family, you clearly didn’t treat the country as your home either.
When you have been here your whole adult life, returning to a country you haven’t lived in, in over four decades, is going to be just as difficult if not more so, depending on the status of any family that would be there to help out.
I don’t even know where I would live if I was ever forced to go back to the U.S. I was born in Ohio which is where most of my remaining relative live. But , I moved to Arizona when I was seven and haven’t been close to anyone in Ohio since then. My parents now live in North Carolina, so I have no family left in Arizona- which probably would have been my first choice of place to live as I love it out in the wide open desert. They won’t be around much longer and I’ve never lived anywhere as an adult but Phoenix, a few years in Nevada -stationed there in the Navy, and Japan.
At least here I have my two daughters or my son,who seem to love me enough that they would do their best to look after me. But, they also have their own lives and financial hardships to deal with. Hopefully, I will not be much of a burden to them but, given my lack of financial planning and taking care of my health…
There is still my wife. She is older than me but will probably out live me. But, will be in the same boat as me as far as having money to not just live, but be able to enjoy what’s left of her life.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I will have to work until I die. Which sucks as I hate my career field and would retire now if I could. My hating my chosen job is a whole different topic, so I will not go into details, other than to say that there are only 4-5 jobs that I would actually enjoy, none of which are available to me.
I have too many things to keep me busy during my free time. Things I’d much rather be doing, than be stuck for 9+ hours a day, doing something they I find no joy in.
Why do people always have to make a distinction between foreigners and native in all their posts about Japan?
Yes, foreigners have a harder time because of their lack of language skills and family. This is true everywhere you go in this world. Do you think you are better off in the US if you lose your job and have no family around to help when you are over 60y without enough money to sustain yourself? This is the same everywhere.
Living abroad has always been riskier than staying home, unless your country is at war or under threat and you lost everything.
Yes this is one of the various social issues that Japan has coming at them at, well Shinkansen speed and of course no one is going to do anything about it as expected. This is going to be especially impactful for the foreign population that has made a life here but are not wealthy enough to simply grin and bare it. Like quoted, foreign workers even after 30+ years here are viewed as workers who will return “soon” rather than living as citizens.
So people keep to their own kind, avoid paying their bills and then end up old, isolated and with small pensions. And Japan is to blame for this.
Attitudes like yours are exactly what feeds into the anti-foreigner sentiments.
Especially shit like this:
>Japanese paperwork is hard even for natives
To sign up for pension you literally just need to show up at the counter. Those who don’t show up do so not out of confusion but because they don’t want to pay.
Everyone is isolated 😂
That’s the reality…
Post all the propaganda you want, she’s still getting record approval.
In the old Rome, Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Elder) proposed that when slaves get old and cannot work as much and their upkeep (health) gets too expensive, they should be sold off (freed/deported?) in order to save money.
Maybe we could tell that story to Sanae?
(I am in my 70ies, too, so I am allowed to make stupid jokes like this)
I know a woman that’s been here since the early 80s
She’s a stay a home wife. Husband works. The thing is she doesn’t have a community of people her age so she’s very isolated. Also after 50 years in Japan she cant speak Japanese so she’s isolated from those elderly communities.
Fuck man, anyone who isn’t insane is becoming isolated at this point.
I’m really counting on one of my chronic illness flare ups to take me out gracefully before I have to deal with all this 😅
They’re isolated by choice tho. I know many elderly resident foreigners that don’t have that issue because they made efforts to integrate, learn the language to at least a minimum level, made local friends.
Whether you want to be a citizen or a worker is in you, not the people around you.
We know this because some *Japanese* elderly are also isolated despite – by definition – having family here.
I’m seeing the same thing and I’m seeing a lot of foreigners return home to retire there instead. remember most foreigners are not westerners so when they return home their money usually stretches further, not less
I won’t have any empathy for people who don’t pay into the pension system. Currently have friend bragging for not doing so.
My mother in law does this, but I think getting to 80 something just destroys a person mentally and physically. Everyone says getting older is better. From what I see it looks like get to 60 and after that there isn’t much left.
Useless comment.
Elderly in every country become isolated. People decide against family, are raised to be selfish members of society that bother more about their monthly Netflix subscription rate than anything else. Of course it increases and will increase even further.
As soon as “not fluent” is pointed out all my sympathy goes out the window. I was fluent before I even moved to Japan permanently. There is literally no excuse if you’ve been here for decades not to be fluent. You made this bed yourself.
This is really sad to hear. From my understanding the Japanese pension system isn’t enough for anyone. It’s a long standing problem that I hope they can resolved for everyone in the future.
Also, I wonder if you have been living in Japan long enough to retire, why not get citizenship? From what I’ve heard (again, could be wrong about this), but getting citizenship is easier than residency. That way they could vote, yes?
>Japan has treated foreigners as “workers,” not “residents,” so now the bill is coming due.
Maybe allow people to pay extra to nenkin system to compensate for years they weren’t there. That might help in some cases. This is also a problem for Japanese returning from overseas.
Isolation though is common problem here even with Japanese who lived all their lives in Japan.
Just like any Japanese company who can’t easily fire workers, Japan will come up with an elaborate plan to make an “oidashibeya” for the long term residents to make the leave on their own by ctrating more and more difficult to suffer through environment
In Shinjuku there is an old-folks home for Japanese-Brazilians.
I’m surprised some enterprising company hasn’t created an old-folks home for foreigners who have been living here for decades and still have minimal Japanese skills. *Some* of them have the money to afford it
It’s the same in other countries.
I’m an older foreign resident at 74, retired for what will be nine years at the end of next month. First got here in the mid-80s. And tho for not as long or fully as a native, due to my employment I paid into two pension systems, kokumin and a version of kosei. Also paid–and continue paying for(!)–介護保険.
“Local senior communities are very Japanese‑only and hard to enter.” True to an extent, but while I’m still frustrated by some paperwork here, shouldn’t people who came in the 90s/early 2000s be reasonably good at japanese by now? Eg, I’ve been in hospital a few times (equivalent paperwork?), and other than a potential waiting list for admission (which can be a problem), I don’t think getting into an aged care facility would be (paperwork-wise) any more difficult than that.
“Japan has treated foreigners as “workers,” not “residents,” so now the bill is coming due.” To play the devil’s advocate, I would sort of flip this–these foreign workers need to have thought and acted like residents and not just foreign workers, so as not to find themselves in this predicament.
That flip side of the coin may be harsh, but some (or a lot more) of the ‘blame’ needs to be shared on the other side of this relationship than is expressed in the article.
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