July 2026

What employers must do before October 2026 What it is, in short Starting October 1, 2026, Japanese employers have a specific legal duty to protect workers from harassment by customers, not just from coworkers or managers. Until now, the mandatory harassment-prevention framework covered power harassment and sexual harassment between people inside the company. A customer […]

What’s confirmed, and what’s still a plan On July 24, 2026, the government held the third meeting of its Ministerial Council on the Acceptance of Foreign Nationals and the Realization of an Orderly Coexistent Society, and confirmed it is moving ahead with a tighter set of requirements for 永住許可 (permanent residency). Some of this is

“Employer of Record” is a commercial term. It does not appear anywhere in Japanese law. That gap causes more confusion than almost anything else in this market: companies assume EOR is its own regulatory lane, when in fact Japanese law only recognizes a small number of categories for how one company can lawfully employ a

The legal guardrails for shukko (出向)”secondment” in Japan, in the government’s own words “Secondment” gets used loosely in cross-border HR conversations. Japanese law is not loose about it. Zaiseki-gata shukko (在籍型出向), or in-service secondment, is a specific legal structure with specific conditions attached, and those conditions come directly from the Employment Security Act, the Labor

Choosing an Employer of Record (EOR) is about much more than payroll, contracts, or monthly service fees. The real test of an EOR comes when something unexpected happens. Your employee has been injured. They’ve been arrested. They’re being harassed. They’ve received an urgent letter from a government office they can’t read. They don’t speak Japanese.