Nagoyaculture & etiquette

Nagoya 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.

The 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.

Jūminzei 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.

If 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.

This 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.

The 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.