The Japan Times65%
Japan to raise visa fees for foreign nationals in first revision in 48 years 21%
By JIJI0%
6/20/2026, 5:04:00 AM
Topics: Visa Fees, Immigration Policy
Keywords: Visas, Immigration, Foreign Workers, Immigration Services Agency, Expats, Tourism, Cabinet
BS Summary: This article contains 11 faulty reasoning types, including Recency Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Loss Aversion, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 21.3% saturation with 90 hits. Analysis detected 410 faulty-reasoning hits from 422 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.1% and a BS Rank of 21% (16,264 of 20,367 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 79.90% of the article peer group.
The government has decided to raise the fees for visas for foreign nationals by revising a related Cabinet order.
The decision, made at a Cabinet meeting Friday, marks the first revision of the visa fees in 48 years, since 1978.
The fee will be increased from the current ¥3,000 to ¥15,000 for a single-entry visa and from ¥6,000 to ¥30,000 for a multiple-entry visa.
The new fees will apply to applications submitted on or after July 1.
“The current visa fee was set in 1978, and we have recently revised it to reflect inflation and exchange rate fluctuations since then,“ Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi told a news conference Friday.
“We made this decision after carefully considering various factors, and we do not anticipate that it will have an immediate impact on inbound tourism,” he added.
Last month, the Upper House enacted a bill to raise visa-related fees for foreign nationals by up to 30 times the current levels.
The increase will enable the government to use the additional revenue to help cover the administrative costs of managing the country’s growing foreign population.
The bill cleared the Lower House in April.
Prior to the bill’s enactment, the statutory upper limit for fees to change residency statuses or extend a period of stay was ¥10,000 ($63), while the cap for permanent residency applications was also set at ¥10,000.
Under the revision, those ceilings will be raised to ¥100,000 and ¥300,000, respectively.
Under the revised framework, actual fees are set by Cabinet orders within the new statutory limits.
The government has proposed raising fees for residency status changes and stay extensions from the current range of ¥5,500 to ¥6,000 to between ¥10,000 and ¥70,000, while fees for permanent residency applications would increase from ¥10,000 to ¥200,000.
The government is aiming to implement the changes sometime before the end of the next fiscal year on March 31, 2027.
The government plans to use the additional revenue for processing Japan’s growing foreign resident population — which reached a record 4.13 million as of the end of 2025 — as well as expanding Japanese-language programs and strengthening measures against illegal overstayers.
It has justified the fee hikes by arguing that Japan must align visa- and residency-related charges more closely with those of Western countries in order to build a more robust immigration system.
Visa renewal fees, for example, are about $420 to $470 in the United States and €93 ($107) to €98 in Germany.
Speakers
1speaker14%attributed speech364writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageToshimitsu Motegi
58 attributed words100% of attributed speech52% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.