Japan · East Asia
Moving to Nagoya
Nagoya quick facts
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World Bank · 2025Religion
% of populationCIA World Factbook / national censuses
Cost of living in Nagoya
Can you move to Japan?
Pick your passport to see whether you can enter Japan — and what it takes to stay.
Entry rules come from github.com/imorte/passport-index-data, updated 17 February 2026. They change without notice — confirm with the official immigration service before booking.
Getting set up in Japan
The residence card, sixteen wards, and the prefecture with Japan's deepest foreign roots
Japan issues the residence card at the airport, which is fast and slightly misleading, because the card alone unlocks nothing. What unlocks everything is the move-in notification filed at the correct one of Nagoya's sixteen ward offices within fourteen days. Aichi is unusual in Japanese terms: it holds the second largest foreign population of any prefecture, with a very large Brazilian-Japanese community, and the multilingual support around immigration and daily life is correspondingly better developed than almost anywhere else in the country.
Read the full step-by-step guideConverting a licence in the one Japanese city where you will actually need one
Converting a foreign licence — gaimen kirikae — needs a knowledge check and, unless your country is on the exemption list, a practical test on a closed course judged on Japanese procedural form, and the whole procedure was tightened nationally on 1 October 2025. The three-month presence rule blocks more applications than the test does. What makes this guide matter more in Nagoya than in Tokyo or Osaka is that here you will probably drive: household car ownership in Aichi is among the highest in Japan, plants and suppliers sit off the rail network, and the prefecture held the worst road death record in the country for sixteen straight years to 2018.
Read the full step-by-step guideOpening an account, the six-month problem, and a megabank that used to be local
Several major Japanese banks will not open a full account until you have six months of residence — internal policy rather than law, and unadvertised. Japan Post Bank and the online banks do not apply it, so they are almost every foreign resident's first account. Nagoya's quirk is that the megabank with the deepest local network here, MUFG, is the successor to Tōkai Bank, which was Nagoya's own bank until the 2000s mergers — so the branch density in Aichi is unlike anywhere else outside Tokyo.
Read the full step-by-step guideHealth insurance, the 30% rule, and a prefecture that will send an interpreter
Enrolment is a legal obligation. You pay 30% of most treatment at the counter and the scheme pays the rest, with a monthly ceiling that stops a serious illness becoming a financial catastrophe. Pension enrolment is equally compulsory and partly refundable if you leave. Two things are worth knowing here specifically: Aichi runs a prefecture-funded medical interpretation system that few other prefectures match, and Nagoya's summers are hot enough that heat illness is a genuine seasonal public health problem rather than a talking point.
Read the full step-by-step guideA Japanese SIM, cheap fibre, and the danchi that only has copper
Japanese mobile was expensive for years until government pressure produced low-cost sub-brands and a healthy MVNO market riding the same towers. You need a residence card and, for most postpaid plans, a Japanese bank account or a Japanese-issued credit card. Home fibre is fast and cheap by international standards — with the caveat that Aichi has an enormous stock of 1960s and 1970s estate housing where the line into the flat is copper regardless of what the building advertises.
Read the full step-by-step guideIncome tax, and the only big Japanese city that cut its own residence tax
Most employees never file a return, because the employer's December year-end adjustment settles it. What catches foreign residents everywhere in Japan is residence tax, assessed on last year's income and billed from the following June, and the non-permanent resident category that shields foreign income until it quietly expires. Nagoya adds one genuine local difference: it is the only ordinance-designated city in Japan that levies individual municipal residence tax at a reduced rate, cutting the income-based portion by five per cent since the 2012 fiscal year.
Read the full step-by-step guideEach guide has verified costs, timelines, required documents, and the non-obvious gotchas — sourced from official government pages. Last verified August 2026.
Essential Japanese phrases
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What to know before you go
File the move-in notification at the right one of sixteen ward offices within fourteen days
CriticalNagoya is divided into sixteen wards and you must register at the one covering your address within fourteen days of moving in. That registration produces the jūminhyō certificate, starts your My Number, and is the precondition for health insurance, most bank accounts and a phone contract. Employees of the automotive supply chain frequently live in one municipality and work in another — Toyota, Kariya and Anjō are separate cities, not Nagoya wards — and registering where you work rather than where you sleep is a common and costly mistake.
Renting still costs several months' rent up front, though less than Tokyo or Osaka
CriticalThe package is deposit, key money, agency fee, guarantor company fee, fire insurance and the first month. Aichi runs the Kanto-style shikikin and reikin rather than the Kansai deposit-and-deduction system, and key money is commonly one month rather than two. Three to five months' rent liquid in a Japanese account is a realistic target. Arriving without it is the single most common reason a move to Japan stalls at the last step.
Residence tax is billed a year late and follows you out of the country
CriticalJūminzei is assessed on the previous calendar year's income and collected from the following June. Your first year is nearly free of it and your second carries the full weight of the first. If you leave partway through a year you can still owe residence tax on money already spent, so settle it or appoint a tax representative before you go rather than discovering it from abroad.
Health insurance and pension enrolment are legal obligations, not options
CriticalIf your employer runs shakai hoken it is handled for you. Freelancers, part-timers and anyone between jobs enrol in National Health Insurance and the National Pension themselves at the ward office, and back-payments can be demanded. The pension carries a lump-sum withdrawal claimable within two years of leaving Japan, worth a real amount after a few years and forgotten by most people who go.
Aichi drives, and the traffic is the part newcomers underestimate
ImportantThis is the one large Japanese city where owning a car is normal rather than eccentric — the roads are wide, the plants are not on a railway line, and household car ownership is among the country's highest. Aichi recorded the highest number of road deaths of any prefecture for sixteen consecutive years from 2003 to 2018, and although deaths have since fallen sharply — 112 in 2025, the lowest since records began in 1948 — the prefecture still sits third nationally for the sheer number of injury collisions. If you drive here, drive as though nobody is going to give way, because on the hundred-metre boulevards they frequently do not.
Nagoya's reputation for being dull is largely self-inflicted and mostly wrong
Good to knowThe city ranks poorly in Japan's attractiveness surveys, a result Nagoya itself has commissioned and publicised more than once. What that reputation obscures is a genuinely distinct food culture, the country's deepest industrial base, rents materially below Tokyo and Osaka, and an hour's train ride to Kyoto or the Kiso valley. It is an unglamorous city that is very easy to live in, which is a different thing from a boring one.
Top industries & employers
Automotive & mobility
Toyota Motor, Denso, Aisin, Toyota Industries, JTEKT, Toyota Boshoku
Toyota's headquarters sit in Toyota City half an hour southeast, and the tier-one suppliers cluster around Kariya and Anjō. Aichi has led every Japanese prefecture in the value of manufactured goods shipped for more than forty consecutive years.
Aerospace
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Subaru, Shinmaywa
The Chubu region builds a large share of the Boeing 787 airframe, including the composite wings, and Mitsubishi Heavy's aerospace works sit at Komaki and Tobishima. It is the densest aerospace cluster in Japan.
Machine tools & robotics
Yamazaki Mazak, Okuma, Brother Industries, Makita
Two of the world's largest machine tool makers are headquartered within half an hour of Nagoya. Brother began here as a sewing machine repair business in 1908 and is still a Nagoya company.
Ceramics & advanced materials
Noritake, NGK Insulators, Niterra, LIXIL
Noritake, NGK Insulators, Niterra and TOTO all descend from the Morimura group, a trading house founded in Tokyo in 1876 that put its porcelain works in Nagoya in 1904 — one nineteenth-century merchant house that became four global materials companies, three of them still headquartered here.
Rail & infrastructure
JR Central, Meitetsu, Nippon Sharyo, Toyota Tsusho
JR Central runs the Tōkaidō Shinkansen and is headquartered above Nagoya Station. Its Chūō maglev to Tokyo is built from here, though JR Central abandoned the 2027 opening in March 2024 and now says 2034 at the earliest.
Trade & logistics
Nagoya Port, Toyota Tsusho, Aichi Steel, Chubu Centrair
The Port of Nagoya handles more total cargo tonnage than any other Japanese port, largely because it is where the country's cars leave from. Centrair airport sits on an artificial island 28 minutes from the centre.
Where to go in Nagoya
Nagoya Castle & the Honmaru Palace
Landmark · Naka-ku, north of the centre
The golden shachihoko roof ornaments are the city's emblem, and the palace beside the keep was rebuilt over a decade using historic joinery.
Local tip: The concrete keep has been closed to visitors since 2018 over seismic concerns and the wooden reconstruction has been stalled ever since. The Honmaru Palace next to it is the thing worth your ticket — finished in 2018 from wartime drawings and photographs, and genuinely extraordinary.
Ōsu
Neighborhood · Naka-ku, south of Sakae
Covered arcades around a temple — second-hand electronics, vintage clothing, Brazilian and Vietnamese food, and no polish whatsoever.
Local tip: This is where Nagoya is least like the surveys say it is. The Brazilian and Filipino food here exists because Aichi has the largest Brazilian community in Japan, not because it is a theme. Go on a Sunday when the flea market is out.
Sakae & Hisaya-ōdōri
Nightlife · Naka-ku, the centre
The main shopping and drinking district, split by one of the hundred-metre boulevards laid out across the burnt-out city after 1945.
Local tip: Those hundred-metre roads were built as firebreaks and are the reason Nagoya feels spacious and slightly empty. The Hisaya-ōdōri park strip was reworked in 2020 and is now where the city actually gathers in the evening, rather than the department stores.
Atsuta Jingū
Culture · Atsuta-ku, south
One of the most important shrines in Japan, home of the Kusanagi sword, in a hectare of ancient camphor forest.
Local tip: Older and more significant than the castle, and far less visited by anyone who is not local. The Miya Kishimen stand inside the grounds serves the flat regional noodle in a setting no restaurant can match — it is not a tourist trap, it is where people go after paying respects.
Higashiyama Zoo & Botanical Gardens
Nature · Chikusa-ku, east on the Higashiyama line
One of Japan's largest zoos, wrapped in a botanical garden and hill park at the end of the subway line.
Local tip: The Higashiyama Sky Tower gives the best view of the Nōbi plain and almost nobody goes up it. The surrounding Motoyama and Yagoto neighbourhoods are the nicest part of residential Nagoya and worth walking on the same trip.
Arimatsu
Hidden gemCulture · Midori-ku, 25 minutes on the Meitetsu line
A preserved Edo-period post town on the old Tōkaidō road, and the home of Arimatsu-Narumi shibori tie-dyeing since 1608.
Local tip: Selected as a national Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings in 2016 — the only one in the country designated as a textile town — and recognised as Japan Heritage in 2019, yet still barely known even to people who live in Nagoya. Merchant houses with plaster fire walls, working shibori workshops that will teach you in an afternoon, and a June festival with three-storey float puppets. Twenty-five minutes from Meitetsu Nagoya.
Emergency numbers in Nagoya
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