Quote Originally Posted by misa.j
I wonder what kind of visa those permanent residents had when they left Japan. It is kind of a lot of work to become one, and I don't know if I could go through, hadn't I been married to my husband. He wasn't in the military, though, we met in school.
That's why it's so interesting you compare the number of permanent residents around the world. I think it isn't easy to get a permanent visa anywhere, especially without being married. That shows some kind of determination of the person to stay in the country they chose. The number of permanent residents also doesn't take into account diplomats (who only get a diplomatic visa for the length of their mission), students or business people that only stay for a few months or years. Permanent residents are people whose new home is really the country where they live, usually because they like it better than their birth country. That makes the statistics all the more interesting.

Btw, I've just got my PV for Japan last month.

Out of 874,000 Japanese living abroad, 286,000 are permanent expatriates.

South America is a bit special, as I suppose that the 95,000 Japanese living there are mostly elderly people who went there after WWII for economic reasons. It's easy to guess that from the stats. First of all, 95% of them are permanent residents. But more importantly, their number has been steadily decreasing since 1975, when they were 184,000.

There are only 490 (probably very unusual) permanent Japanese residents in Africa. Too small a number to even consider...

So we are left with 195,000 permanent residents in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. This is where it gets interesting, because only 8,660 of them have chosen to live in Asia, not just the world's largest and most populous continent, but also the one Japan belongs to. The highest number of permanent expats among that is to be found in the Philippines (1,576 people), probably some retired Japanese, or some men having married into a Filipino family.

Almost all the other permanent expats live in Western countries, apart from about 5,000 people in Mexico, Central America & Caribbean, and tiny paradise islands of Oceania.

181,000 Japanese people residing permanently the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and NZ; that's 93% of the permanent Japanese residents in the whole world if we ommit the elderly economic migrants of South America that still hold the Japanese nationality.