Of the five requirements the October 2025 reform added to the Business Manager Visa, the Japanese language test is the one founders most often assume disqualifies them. It usually does not, and the reason is a detail buried in a footnote: you do not have to be the one who speaks Japanese.
It is also the requirement with the most routes to satisfying it that have nothing to do with sitting an exam.
What the requirement is
Either the applicant or a full-time employee must have Japanese ability at B2 or above on Japan’s Language Education Reference Framework (日本語教育の参照枠). The Immigration Services Agency names B2 explicitly; it is not an approximation someone made in translation.
Five ways to prove it — only two are tests
| Route | What it takes |
|---|---|
| JLPT | N2 or above |
| BJT Business Japanese Test | 400 points or above |
| Long residence | 20 or more years of continuous residence in Japan |
| Japanese higher education | Graduation from a Japanese university or other higher education institution |
| Japanese schooling | Completion of Japanese compulsory education plus high school graduation |
The education routes are the ones that go unmentioned in English coverage, and they matter more than the tests for a particular group. If you graduated from a Japanese university, you satisfy this requirement already. No exam, no study, no deadline. A founder who did an undergraduate or master’s degree here and then went home to work — a very common path into this visa — has already cleared it.
The same is true of anyone who went through the Japanese school system, and of long-term residents at twenty years.
The distinction that changes your hiring plan
This is the part worth reading slowly, because two requirements use the same phrase — 常勤職員, full-time employee — with two different definitions.
For the mandatory employee requirement, the employee must be a Japanese national, a special permanent resident, or hold a Table 2 status: permanent resident, spouse of a Japanese national or of a permanent resident, or long-term resident. Someone on an ordinary work visa is excluded, however qualified. We cover that requirement in hiring your first employee in Japan.
For the language requirement, the pool is wider. A full-time employee holding a Table 1 work status can be the person whose Japanese satisfies it — someone the hiring requirement would not accept.
The practical consequence: the person who carries your language requirement and the person who satisfies your employee requirement do not have to be the same person. If you already employ a bilingual engineer on a work visa, that may be your language route — while you separately recruit the status-based hire the other requirement demands.
Reading the two requirements as one is how founders conclude they need to find a single unicorn: a permanent resident with N2 willing to join a company that does not exist yet. Often they need two ordinary people instead.
What this does not do
It does not remove the employee requirement. The wider pool applies to proving language ability, not to the headcount the reform demands — a Table 1 employee counts alongside a qualifying employee, not instead of one.
It also does not mean the language question is free. If your only route is an employee, that person is now load-bearing for your application. If they leave before the filing, or before a renewal, the requirement leaves with them. A founder relying on a single bilingual employee has a single point of failure in their immigration status, which is a different kind of risk from a capital shortfall — it walks out of the building on its own.
That argues for taking a test yourself even when an employee covers you, if you are anywhere near N2. It converts a dependency into something you own.
If you are starting from no Japanese
N2 is not a beginner milestone. Planning to sit it before an application is a multi-year commitment for most people, and it is not a realistic path to a filing next quarter. The workable routes are the employee, or a qualification you already hold and had not thought to count.
Check the education routes before you conclude you are stuck. People who studied in Japan frequently do not realise a degree they earned a decade ago is the evidence they need.
Where this sits among the other requirements
Language is one of five things the reform added, and it interacts with the others. The employee who carries it has to be paid, which is cash flow. The capital figure has a consumption tax consequence of its own. And the whole set has to be satisfied before you file, in an order we set out in how long does it take to set up a company in Japan.
The full list is in what the October 2025 rules actually require. If you already hold the status, none of this binds you until October 2028.
Our directory records which firms handle visa applications and which of them publish their fees. This page summarises a published requirement; whether a particular qualification will be accepted in your case is a question for a licensed professional.