🇯🇵
Spotlight: Japan
An island nation of shrines and neon, where the ancient and the future share the same street.
The country that closed itself to the world — now quietly opening its doors.
An island nation of shrines and neon, where the ancient and the future share the same street.
The country that closed itself to the world — now quietly opening its doors.
Japan does not shout. You notice it first in the small things: a train that leaves the second the sign says it will, a shop assistant who bows as you walk out, a city of thirty-seven million people where the loudest sound on a quiet street at night is a bicycle rolling past. Then you turn a corner and the neon hits you — Shinjuku at midnight, a wall of light and screens and motion — and you understand that this is a country holding two worlds in the same hand without ever dropping either one.
For most of its history, Japan kept the world at arm's length. For more than two centuries it closed its borders almost completely, and it is still a society that changes slowly, on its own terms. But something is shifting. Japan is shrinking — its population is falling and ageing faster than almost anywhere on earth — and for the first time it needs workers from outside in serious numbers. That is the quiet story at the heart of the country right now: a proud, reserved nation opening its door, not out of openness, but out of necessity.
Tokyo is not one city so much as a constellation of them. The world's largest metropolitan area, home to around thirty-seven million people, it is a place where a centuries-old shrine can sit in the shadow of a glass tower and nobody finds it strange. Shibuya and Shinjuku are the neon heart — the scramble crossing, the endless department stores, the izakaya alleys lit by paper lanterns. But Tokyo is also Asakusa, with its great Sensō-ji temple and old shopping streets, and Ueno, with its museums and park, and the quiet residential lanes of places like Yanaka that feel like a different century altogether.
It is safe, punctual, and almost aggressively orderly — and underneath the order is a city of extraordinary depth. You could live here for years and still find neighbourhoods you have never seen.
If Tokyo is Japan's head, Osaka is its stomach. The city's motto is kuidaore — "eat until you drop" — and it means it. Dotonbori, the neon canal-side strip, is one of the most joyfully gluttonous places in Asia: giant mechanical crabs, takoyaki stalls, and an endless crowd eating while they walk. Osaka is louder, warmer, and more relaxed than Tokyo, with a reputation for comedy (manzai) and a love of a good bargain.
It is also a working port city with a long history as a merchant hub, and its castle — rebuilt in concrete but ringed by a beautiful moat and park — is one of the country's most recognisable landmarks.
Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for more than a thousand years, from 794 until 1868, and it is where the country's soul is most easily found. The city holds some 1,600 Buddhist temples and hundreds of Shinto shrines, many of them set in gardens designed centuries ago. Fushimi Inari Taisha, with its tunnels of thousands of vermilion torii gates, is almost shockingly beautiful. Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, glitters above its reflecting pond. And in Gion, if you are patient and lucky, you might glimpse a geiko slipping between wooden tea houses at dusk.
Kyoto is quieter and more contemplative than its neighbours — the perfect counterweight to Tokyo's energy and Osaka's appetite.
Beyond the big three, the country keeps going: Yokohama, Japan's great port on Tokyo Bay; Nagoya, an industrial powerhouse with a proper castle; Fukuoka, a friendly, food-obsessed city on the southern island of Kyushu; and Sapporo, up in snowy Hokkaido, home of the winter snow festival.
Japanese food is one of the great cuisines of the world — precise, seasonal, and built on an almost obsessive respect for ingredients. It is also far more varied than the sushi-and-ramen shorthand suggests, and much of the best of it is cheap. In 2013, the traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, known as washoku, were added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
The art of raw fish and vinegared rice, perfected over centuries. You do not need a famous restaurant — a good conveyor-belt kaiten-zushi shop is excellent value, and a proper omakase counter is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Wheat noodles in a rich, savoury broth, topped with pork, egg, nori, and spring onion. Every region — and every cook — has an opinion. Sapporo does miso, Hakata does pork-bone tonkotsu, Tokyo does soy.
Seafood and vegetables dipped in a light batter and fried until barely crisp. Done well, it is feather-light and never greasy — a technique so exacting that tempura chefs train for years.
Grilled skewers of chicken and vegetables, served in smoky little bars called izakaya. Order a few skewers, a cold beer or sake, and stay a while. This is how Japan unwinds after work.
Osaka's comfort food. Okonomiyaki is a savoury griddled cake of batter, cabbage, and pork or seafood; takoyaki are hot, molten octopus balls. Both are street food at its best.
Stone-ground green tea whisked into a frothy bowl, traditionally served with delicate seasonal sweets. It is the taste at the centre of the Japanese tea ceremony — bitter, grassy, and deeply calming.
Japan lives by the seasons, and no season matters more than spring. When the cherry blossoms — sakura — open in late March and early April, the whole country pauses to watch. This is hanami, flower-viewing: families and colleagues spread blue tarps under the trees, eat, drink, and sit beneath a canopy of pink that lasts barely a week. The blossoms are loved precisely because they fall so quickly — a reminder, in a culture that thinks deeply about impermanence, that beautiful things do not last.
The year is marked by festivals, or matsuri, when neighbourhoods carry portable shrines through the streets, wear traditional clothing, and light the summer sky with fireworks. Temples and shrines — Shinto shrines for the gods of nature, Buddhist temples for the way of the Buddha — are everywhere, and the line between a religious site and a public park is often happily blurred. The Japanese also bathe. The onsen, a natural hot-spring bath, is one of the oldest pleasures in the country, and one of the best ways to understand how Japan separates the stresses of daily life from the calm of the body.
Highlight: If you can time a trip to the blossoms, do it. Otherwise, autumn — when the maples turn crimson — is arguably even more beautiful, and far less crowded.
Modern Japan exports more of its culture than almost any nation on earth. Anime and manga are read and watched from Manila to São Paulo. Japanese video games defined entire generations. Tokyo's fashion districts — Harajuku, Shibuya — set trends that ripple worldwide. And the country has a knack for turning the ordinary into the beloved: the mascots, the vending machines, the neat packaging, the trains that run like clockwork.
Yet the older Japan is just as alive. Sumo, the ancient sport of enormous, disciplined wrestlers, still draws full houses. Kabuki theatre still plays to packed halls. And the tea ceremony, the calligraphy, the quiet formality of a bow — these are not museum pieces; they are the language of daily life. The trick of Japan is that the new and the old do not compete. They simply coexist, each making the other richer.
Japan can feel formal and hard to read at first, but the rules are not complicated — they are about consideration. Almost everything here is designed around not causing trouble for other people, which is why the streets are clean, the trains are quiet, and the service is extraordinary. Lean into it and the country opens up quickly.
Bowing, saying sumimasen (excuse me / sorry) and arigatō gozaimasu (thank you), and handling things with care. Omotenashi — selfless hospitality — is the word for why a shopkeeper will chase you down the street to return a coin you dropped.
Trains arrive to the minute. Being late for work or a meeting is a genuine embarrassment, and the apology starts before the excuse. Buy an IC card (Suica or ICOCA) and the whole rail network opens up to you.
Convenience stores — 7-Eleven, Lawson, FamilyMart — are open 24 hours and do far more than snacks: bill payments, ATMs, parcel delivery, tickets, and surprisingly good hot meals. They are the quiet engine of daily life.
On trains, phones stay silent. Rubbish goes home with you. Queueing is orderly, tipping is not done, and shoes come off at the door. There is even a phrase for reading the mood — kūki o yomu — and doing it well is a kind of social skill.
Filipinos have been part of modern Japan for decades, but the community's journey has never been simple. Thousands arrived in the 1980s and '90s on entertainer visas, drawn by wages far higher than anything at home; by 1998 the population peaked at around 245,000. A crackdown on trafficking then pushed numbers down sharply before they recovered — and over time the community changed shape, from nightlife to families, long-term residents, and workers in hospitals, farms, and factories. In 2006, Japanese–Filipino marriages were the most frequent type of international marriage in all of Japan.
Today there are roughly 332,000 to 357,000 Filipinos living in Japan — depending on the source and the year, one of the country's largest foreign communities, and the biggest Filipino population in Asia outside the Gulf. You will feel it in Tokyo's Ueno and Shinjuku districts, in the town of Oizumi up in Gunma Prefecture, and in the churches, stores, and community associations of Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, and Fukuoka. A bilingual lifestyle magazine, community groups like FILINJ (Filipino Network Japan), and the Philippine Embassy in Tokyo (with a consulate in Osaka) all keep the community connected.
For workers, there are now two main gates. The older Technical Intern Training Programme, running since 1993, has brought hundreds of thousands of workers from across Asia — but it has also drawn heavy criticism for labour abuses and deaths, and it is being replaced in April 2027 by a new "employment for skills development" scheme. The newer Specified Skilled Worker (SSW) programme, launched in 2019 and covering 16 sectors, is the route most Filipinos now look to — with nursing care, food service, construction, agriculture, hospitality, and shipbuilding the biggest fields. Genuine long-term settlement is possible: the advanced SSW (ii) category allows a worker to stay indefinitely and bring family, with a path to permanent residency.
An honest note: the language is the real barrier, not the distance. A JLPT N4 level is the usual starting requirement, and daily life without Japanese is hard — but the demand is real and growing. Japan is facing a projected shortfall of more than 11 million workers by 2040 as its population ages, and it cannot fill those jobs from within. For Filipino workers willing to learn the language and the rules, this is one of the most stable and best-paid destinations in Asia.
Japan matters because it is proof that a country can be both fiercely itself and open to change — even when the change is forced on it. A hundred and fifty years ago it reinvented itself from a closed feudal society into an industrial power in a single generation. Today, under the quieter pressure of a shrinking population, it is reinventing itself again, this time by letting the world in.
For an OFW in Asia, Japan offers something rare: high wages, world-class safety, excellent healthcare, and a genuine, if demanding, path to a long-term future. It is not an easy country to move to. The language is hard, the culture is formal, and the work is serious. But it is a country that rewards effort with stability — and for many Filipino families, that is the whole point.
It is also, simply, one of the most beautiful and fascinating places on earth. Two weeks here will show you more contrasts than most countries manage in a lifetime.
We're building a series of country spotlights. If there is a country you would love to read about — or write about — get in touch.
This spotlight is for cultural and informational purposes only. Always verify official requirements with the relevant authorities before travelling or relocating.