There's many ways to immigrate to Japan, and the point system is one of the hardest because it gives you direct access to Permanent Residency (incidentally I will apply next year to it) instead of the temporary Work Visa.

As far as you have a degree and a job offer from a Japanese company (both should be related) it's trivial to fill the paperwork to come here. Engineers in particular have it pretty easy, with many Engineering jobs not even requiring you to speak Japanese.

But that's the trick, it's "okay" to come to Japan with a work permit, which allows you to work and pay your taxes but you have to be actively working with those, unless you have switched to PR (which IS a lot harder), or get out of the country. This has been criticized a lot, Japan is very friendly for young professional workers, but will never treat you as one of their own and once there's a sign of trouble you are on your own.

In practice if you’re out of a job you can be put on a special visa to look for work and if done in good faith I’ve heard of people who were on such visas for like 6 months.

Another point about being “on your own”. Basically every service that exists to help people out of work is accessible to foreigners. My locality offers “loans” (partially aid, part loan) for people who experience massive drops in salaries, for example. Any resident. Ive almost never run into a service gated on citizenship (except for some job postings with the govt)

Oh it's even simpler, you just keep the same visa and officially you are good for 3 months, unofficially it's much longer (as long as you have left in your previous visa), so that's good and much better than in e.g. the USA, I'm just saying that the jump from normal work visa to Permanent Residency (equivalent to the greencard) is a bit harsh.

Say for example you've been working for 7 years in Japan and your father gets sick back in your home country. If you go back for few months to help out you are basically a goner (unless you can keep remote working). Or that after working e.g. 10 years abroad and 5 in Japan you just want to take 6 month break for a bad burnout. No cannot do.

It's very intentional. Japan is largely homogenous and there's a lot of support for keeping it that way.

Until they homogenous their way to a country that doesn’t breed and has 75% of the population above 60.

I’m pretty sure they’re more okay with that than letting immigrants in. The Japanese have no interest in bringing different looking people into the country.

I’m sure they are but will that sentiment persist when threatened with extinction/forced breeding programs.

>A while back I looked at how I would score on their "points based" immigration calculator thing. >It wasn't good at all.

So I take it you don't have a college degree or work in the software field like most people here.

It's true: if you have no skills and work as a barista or janitor, Japan isn't very interested in having you immigrate here. If you're a skilled tech professional, however, it's the easiest country in the world to immigrate to. Experienced software engineers can easily score 70-80 points. With 80, you can apply for permanent residence in 1 year.

I have a degree and 10+ years in tech.

I redid it today, and now have 85 points.

Amusingly, I just did some back of the envelope maths and worked out I could probably bump that to over 120 points in 2 years if I set my mind to it.

As for "easiest", no.

I've moved a lot, there's many countries that are far easier :)

I don't know of any highly developed nations where you can easily get permanent residence in less than 1 year.