Japan's happiest places for foreigners

Photo by Iba Geo

Ibaraki Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, is “infamous” for regularly finishing dead last in the annual Regional Brand Survey which rates the attractiveness of the country’s 47 prefectures.

So they decided to see how they fared with the foreign population.

Since 2019, Ibaraki has conducted a study to gauge the happiness of its residents. This year, though, for the first time the prefecture’s researchers also sifted through statistical data to determine how Ibaraki fared compared to parts of Japan.

The first Foreign Resident Happiness Index found some surprising variety in its three subcategories.

The Foreign Resident Happiness Index has three major categories, Work, Live, and Learn, with a total of 14 components between them, with the breakdown as follows:

● Work
Ease of saving money and sending money home (calculated from regional minimum wages and consumer price indexes)
Foreign worker/total workforce ratio
Percentage of companies employing foreign workers
Ratio of foreign workers in specialized/technical fields to total foreign population
Disappearance rate of foreign workers
● Live
Foreign/native Japanese resident ratio
Availability of foreign resident consultation centers
Local student English proficiency level
Percentage of municipalities with for-adults Japanese language schools
Percentage of medical institutions caring for foreign patients
● Learn
Foreign student/total student enrollment ratio for childhood education
Ratio of students requiring Japanese-as-a-second-language support to number of support staff members
Percentage of high schools with admissions quotas or special transfer systems for foreign students
Ratio of study abroad students to total student body

The researchers then squeezed all of that data to come up with a numerical happiness index for each of Japan’s prefectures.

Tokyo came out on top, by a wide margin (no surprises here), but Ibaraki finished in a very respectable fourth place.

1. Tokyo (happiness index 4.03)
2. Mie (1.87)
3. Aichi (1.82)
4. Ibaraki (1.79)
5. Shizuoka (1.73)
6. Tochigi (1.38)
7. Hyogo (1.37)
8. Kyoto (1.34)
9. Osaka (1.31)
10. Gifu (1.24)

Tokyo also finished in first among all three of the subcategories, Work, Live, and Learn, but there was a lot of variety in the other top prefectures for each.

● Work
1. Tokyo (1.43)
2. Aichi (1.16)
3. Gunma (0.85)
● Live
1. Tokyo (1.45)
2. Fukui (0.88)
3. Shizuoka (0.83)
● Learn
1. Tokyo (1.15)
2. Kyoto (0.64)
3. Gifu (0.63)

As for Ibaraki, it was pretty consistent across the three subcategories, finishing sixth for both Work and Live and fifth for Live.

Hitachi Seaside Park in Ibaraki

As with any “best places to live” sort of study, it’s important to keep in mind that while the index aims to give a broad, overall picture of life for the foreign resident communities in different parts of Japan, individual happiness can vary greatly.

The Learn category, for example, is largely focused on pre-college education, which might not be of any concern for you if you’re an adult living in Japan with no kids of your own.

Likewise, you might not have any need for a dedicated foreign resident help desk in your town if you’re already used to navigating daily life issues in Japanese.

Perhaps most importantly, the study’s heavy use of percentages and ratios in its evaluations may inflate the ease of finding professional or educational opportunities if the high proportion of foreign workers/students is occurring in a prefecture that doesn’t have a particularly large total number of companies/schools.

Still, it’s nice to see Ibaraki taking a wide-ranging interest in the wellbeing of its foreign residents, and the prefecture says it plans to further examine the individual-category results to look for areas in which there’s room for improvement in addressing their needs.

Source: Ibaraki Prefecture, NHK News Web, Nihon Keizai Shimbun

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