When people ask me how I ended up running a hospitality company in Tokyo as a foreigner, the honest answer is: paperwork, then more paperwork, then a visa. Specifically, the Business Manager Visa — the residence status that lets a non-Japanese national actually live in Japan while managing a company here, including a short-term rental business.
Every foreign investor I talk to gets the property search part figured out reasonably fast — agents, listings, even negotiating price isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the phone call that comes after: “Congratulations, now how are you paying for it?”
Financing is where a lot of otherwise-solid deals for foreign buyers in Japan quietly die. Not because the numbers don’t work, but because the loan never materializes on the terms the buyer assumed going in.