Search for the office requirement of Japan’s Business Manager Visa and you will be told, confidently and everywhere, that a virtual office is prohibited, that partitions must reach the ceiling, and that your lease should run at least two years.
Some of that is in the rules. Most of it is not. The distinction is worth twenty minutes of your attention, because the parts that are convention rather than regulation are exactly the parts that cost money to over-comply with.
What the Agency actually publishes
On the October 2025 revision, the Immigration Services Agency says two things about premises.
Premises must be “necessary and sufficient” for business activity at the revised scale. Asked for a fixed standard, the Agency’s own Q&A declines to give one: it states that answering uniformly is difficult, and that what is required is space necessary and sufficient for the scale of activity. Proportionality governs. There is no square-metre figure.
Using your home as your office is not permitted, in principle. This is the part the revision made explicit, and it is the one genuinely new constraint. A founder who planned to register at their apartment now has a problem the old rules tolerated more easily.
That is close to the whole of it. The published text does not name virtual offices. It does not name coworking. It sets no lease term.
What is convention, and why it still matters
The walls-and-a-door picture, the partition-height question, the preference for a lease of a year or more — these come from how applications have actually been decided over years of practice, not from a published standard. Immigration lawyers are not inventing them.
Convention of that kind deserves respect. An adviser telling you a partitioned desk has been refused before is giving you information the published rules cannot. The error is treating it as regulation, because regulation is fixed and convention is negotiable against your circumstances.
Consider the practical difference. If a two-year lease were the rule, you would sign one. Because it is convention grounded in “short terms read as impermanent”, you can ask a better question: what would make my arrangement read as permanent? A one-year lease with a demonstrable renewal history, in a building whose other tenants are companies, may answer that as well as a two-year term on a room you cannot afford.
Where “necessary and sufficient” bites
The proportionality language cuts both ways, and the second edge is the one people miss.
The reform requires JPY 30 million in capital and a full-time employee. That is the scale your premises now have to be necessary and sufficient for. A single small room may have suited a JPY 5 million company with no staff; the same room, for a company that has told immigration it employs someone, invites the question of where that person sits.
The requirements are read together, not separately. An office that looks thin against your own stated headcount is a weaker application than the square metres alone suggest.
The home-office exclusion has an “in principle” in it
The Agency’s wording is 原則として — in principle, or as a general rule. Japanese administrative language uses that phrase deliberately: it signals a default with room for exception, not an absolute bar.
Do not read that as a loophole. Read it as the reason to ask an adviser rather than assume, if your situation is genuinely unusual — a property where the residential and business portions are separately demarcated and separately contracted, for instance. The default is no. Whether your case is the exception is not a question a guide can answer, and it is not a question to answer yourself.
What this means for choosing a space
Rental office operators in Tokyo now market rooms specifically for this application, and several of them price publicly. That is genuinely useful, and it is also a market with an incentive to describe its product as visa-compliant.
Three questions worth asking any operator before signing:
- Is the room enclosed to the ceiling and separately lockable, or is it a partitioned area within a larger space?
- Will the contract be in the company’s name, for business use, and will you issue the documents an immigration application needs?
- What is the actual minimum term, as opposed to the campaign rate advertised on the page?
The last one catches people. A six-month promotional rate is a six-month commitment, and an adviser who wanted a longer term will tell you so after you have signed.
Our directory lists visa-compliant office space in Japan with what each operator publishes, and which firms publish their fees shows who states a price at all. We record what operators say about their own rooms; we do not certify that any particular room will satisfy an application, and neither can they.
The honest summary
You need premises that are not your home and that are plausibly sized for the business you have described to immigration. Beyond that, you are working with convention — well-founded, widely followed, and worth following, but convention.
Ask your adviser which parts of their advice are published requirements and which are practice. A good one will tell you without hesitating, and the answer will change what you sign.
The rest of the October 2025 requirements are in what the rules actually require, the order they have to happen in is in how long does it take, and if you already hold the status your deadline is October 2028.