As of October 2024, the United States had nearly ******* Japanese citizens, making it the country with the highest number of Japanese residents outside of Japan itself. The United States counted around **** times as many Japanese citizens as second-placed *********.  Japanese immigrants in the United States Lately, there has been an increase in the migration of Japanese individuals, especially to the United States, which has *********** immigrant population worldwide. This surge in Japanese migration to the United States can largely be attributed to the substantial presence of Japanese companies with offices in the country, which ranks among the highest globally. Consequently, many Japanese nationals choose to relocate to the United States in pursuit of employment opportunities offered by these companies.  Status of immigrants in Japan The total number of foreign residents in Japan has been rising lately, with ***** having the highest number of foreign nationals registered among 47 prefectures. The main nationality of foreign residents living in Japan are people from the ********************************************* The increasing number of foreign nationals working in Japan is indicative of the growing interest in job opportunities within the country.

As of October 2024, Los Angeles had the highest number of Japanese residents among cities outside Japan, with approximately ****** residents. In the same year, the United States remained by far the country with the largest Japanese population outside Japan.

As of October 2024, approximately ***** Japanese residents lived in Düsseldorf, the second lowest number of the past decade. The western German city is known for being home to the largest Japanese community within Germany.

In 2024, approximately **** million residents of foreign nationality were registered in Japan, making up below ***** percent of the population. The total number of foreign residents increased by about ****million in the last decade. Development of immigration to Japan Except for a large minority of people of Korean descent who have lived in Japan since the first half of the twentieth century, immigration of people from other countries did not become an issue in Japan until the 1980s when the economy required more labor. A revision of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1990 allowed people of Japanese descent, so-called "nikkeijin," to enter the country and work without restrictions. The nikkeijin who entered Japan in the years that followed mainly came from Brazil and other South American countries. Chinese immigration increased as well throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. A breakdown of foreign residents by major nationalities shows that ********immigrants overtook ******* as the largest minority group in 2007. People from ******* were the strongest growing minority in the 2010s. Recent immigration reform Due to its demographic changes, Japan has a relatively low unemployment rate. As a consequence, a large share of companies report labor shortages. The temporary immigration of foreign workers is considered one of the possible solutions to this problem, next to the increasing labor market participation of women and the elderly. In 2019, the Japanese government enacted a major immigration reform. The reform allowed lower- and semi-skilled workers to enter the country and work in one of 14 different industries suffering from a lack of labor. The vast majority of participants are not allowed to bring their family members and are expected to return to their respective countries after their terms in Japan end.

As of October 2024, approximately ****** Japanese residents lived in Los Angeles, continuing the downward trend. Los Angeles had the largest Japanese population of any city outside Japan. In the same year, the United States was by far the country with the highest number of Japanese residents.

Introduction

Welcome to the Japanese General Conversation Speech Dataset — a rich, linguistically diverse corpus purpose-built to accelerate the development of Japanese speech technologies. This dataset is designed to train and fine-tune ASR systems, spoken language understanding models, and generative voice AI tailored to real-world Japanese communication.

Curated by FutureBeeAI, this 40 hours dataset offers unscripted, spontaneous two-speaker conversations across a wide array of real-life topics. It enables researchers, AI developers, and voice-first product teams to build robust, production-grade Japanese speech models that understand and respond to authentic Japanese accents and dialects.

Speech Data

The dataset comprises 40 hours of high-quality audio, featuring natural, free-flowing dialogue between native speakers of Japanese. These sessions range from informal daily talks to deeper, topic-specific discussions, ensuring variability and context richness for diverse use cases.

Topic Diversity

The dataset spans a wide variety of everyday and domain-relevant themes. This topic diversity ensures the resulting models are adaptable to broad speech contexts.

Transcription

Each audio file is paired with a human-verified, verbatim transcription available in JSON format.

These transcriptions are production-ready, enabling seamless integration into ASR model pipelines or conversational AI workflows.

Metadata

The dataset comes with granular metadata for both speakers and recordings:

Such metadata helps developers fine-tune model training and supports use-case-specific filtering or demographic analysis.

Usage and Applications

This dataset is a versatile resource for multiple Japanese speech and language AI applications:

In 2023, over 2.9 million Asian residents were registered in Japan, making it the largest share of foreign residents. That year, the second-largest group of foreign nationals living in Japan came from South America, with about 278,000 people.

As of ************, close to ************* Japanese residents were registered in San Diego. In the same year, the United States was the country with the highest number of Japanese residents by far. The statistic, which is based on the information gathered by Japanese diplomatic missions abroad, does not include descendants of Japanese emigrants (nikkeijin) who do not hold Japanese citizenship. People with multiple citizenship are counted.

As of October 2024, the number of Japanese residents in Berlin amounted to approximately ***** individuals, the highest number of the past decade. The German capital was home to the third largest Japanese community within Germany after Düsseldorf and Munich.

As of the end of 2023, approximately 892,000 people of non-Japanese nationality were residing in Japan with a permanent resident permit, representing the highest proportion of all foreign residents. The second-highest share had a visa for technical intern training.

As of October 2024, approximately ******* Japanese residents lived in Australia. The number has increased for four consecutive years, reaching the highest level in the past decade.

With approximately ** million inhabitants, Tokyo Prefecture was the largest prefecture based on population size in Japan as of 2023. The smallest prefecture in this regard was Tottori Prefecture, which in the same year counted about ******* residents. Rural depopulation Like many industrial economies, Japan is facing the problem of depopulating rural areas. While the birth rate continues to decline, many young people decide to migrate from small towns and villages to large cities like Tokyo or Osaka for higher education and employment. The population of Tokyo Prefecture has shown substantial growth over the past decades and consists largely of working age citizens. Smaller communities are trying to counteract the depopulation process with initiatives meant to invite younger workers and tourists back. Migration to Japan Japan is often described as a very homogenous society, with a low share of foreign residents. Despite the declining birthrate and many businesses experiencing a labor shortage, companies have been hesitant to employ foreign workers, in part due to the strict immigration laws. The Japanese Government has tried to ease immigration restrictions and encourage foreigners to work in Japan. The largest share of foreign workers in Japan, however, is residing in the county with a permanent residence or as the family member of a Japanese national.

As of the end of 2023, over 318,400 men and 249,400 women of non-Japanese nationality with ages between 25 and 29 were residing in Japan. This age cohort exhibited the highest number of foreign residents among all age groups.

Hamamatsu was the largest major city in Japan based on city area in 2024, with a size of close to **** thousand square kilometers. It was followed by Shizuoka, with a size of more than **** square kilometers. Overconcentration in Tokyo Economic, political, and financial activity in Japan is heavily concentrated in Tokyo. With around **** million inhabitants, the metropolitan area of Tokyo is the largest urban conglomeration in the world. Most of Japan’s largest companies have their headquarters in Tokyo, and the region attracts many young people who move there to study or work. A breakdown of the net migration flow in Japan showed that the prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba, all part of the Tokyo metropolitan area, attract the largest number of people. In contrast, the majority of prefectures, especially those located in rural parts of the country, lose a substantial part of their population every year. Demographic trend in rural regions The overconcentration of economic activity in Tokyo has an impact on the demographic situation in rural parts of the country. Japan’s population is shrinking and aging, and rural regions are particularly affected by this. Many young people leave their rural hometowns to seek better opportunities in urban parts of Japan, leaving behind an aging population. As a result, many rural communities in Japan struggle with depopulation and a notable share of municipalities are even threatened with disappearance in the coming decades.

The statistic shows the total population in Japan from 2020 to 2024, with projections up until 2030. In 2024, the total population of Japan amounted to around 123.9 million inhabitants. See the figures for the population of South Korea for comparison. Total population in Japan From steadily low fertility rates to a growing elderly population, it is no secret that Japan’s population is shrinking. Population growth rates jump around a little, but are currently following a declining trend. The post-war baby boom generation is now in the 65-and-over age group, and the percentage of the population in that category is expected to keep growing, as is indicated by a high median age and high life expectancy. Japan already has the highest percentage of its population over 65 in the world, and the aging population puts some pressure on the Japanese government to provide welfare services for more people as rising numbers leave the workforce. However, the amount of jobs opened up for the younger generations by the older generations leaving the workforce means that unemployment is kept to a minimum. Despite a jump in unemployment after the global recession hit in 2008, rates were almost back to pre-recession rates by 2013. Another factor affecting Japan is the number of emigrants to other countries. The United States absorbs a number of emigrants worldwide, so despite a stagnating birth rate, the U.S. has seen a steady rise in population.

Over the last decade, Japan’s population has aged more and more, to the point where more than a quarter of Japanese were 65 years and older in 2022. Population growth has stopped and even reversed, since it’s been in the red for several years now.

It’s getting old

With almost 30 percent of its population being elderly inhabitants, Japan is considered the “oldest” country in the world today. Japan boasts a high life expectancy, in fact, the Japanese tend to live longer than the average human worldwide. The increase of the aging population is accompanied by a decrease of the total population caused by a sinking birth rate. Japan’s fertility rate has been below the replacement rate for many decades now, mostly due to economic uncertainty and thus a decreasing number of marriages.

Are the Japanese invincible?

There is no real mystery surrounding the ripe old age of so many Japanese. Their high average age is very likely due to high healthcare standards, nutrition, and an overall high standard of living – all of which could be adopted by other industrial nations as well. But with high age comes less capacity, and Japan’s future enemy might not be an early death, but rather a struggling social network.

The majority of Japanese adhere to Shintoism, a traditional Japanese religion focusing on rituals and worship at shrines. In 2021, around 48.6 percent of the total population of Japan participated in Shinto practices. Closely behind is Buddhism, with more than 46 percent of the population adhering to its practices. Most Japanese thus practice both religions. The original ShintoShintoism adherents worship spirits or gods at shrines, often publicly, through rituals and traditions. Shintoism is deeply ingrained in the Japanese culture and way of life, but the number of followers has been decreasing over the past years, as has the number of Japanese who are adhering to any kind of religion. Tradition seems to have to make way for modern attitudes and choices – still the number of people who call themselves Shinto adherents is quite high, even if they do not actively practice it. Everything zen in BuddhismWhile Shintoism seems to become a thing of the past, the number of Buddhists, on the other hand, has been stable over the last decade, and if anything, has only slightly decreased. Japan is, in fact, among the countries with the largest Buddhist communities, right after China, of course, and Thailand. This might be due to Buddhism being able to adapt much easier to modern times and its adherents’ everyday lives, as well as a better PR machine – Buddhism is, after all, also quite popular in the Western world.

Over 821,800 people of Chinese nationality lived in Japan as of the end of 2023, marking the highest number of migrant citizens. The Vietnamese residents in the country exceeded 565,000 in the same period.

As of October 2024, the number of Japanese residents in the Houston amounted to approximately ***** people, the highest amount of the past decade. In the observed period, the size of the Japanese population in the city has been on a general upward trend, from around ***** people in 2015.

As of January 2024, more than ******* residents from China were registered in Tokyo Prefecture, accounting for the largest share of foreign nationals. The second-largest group of foreign nationals living in the prefecture were from South Korea.