On April 1, the Act for Partial Amendment of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act became law. Under this act, residence statuses for foreign residents have been reorganized, leading to several important changes, one of which we will focus on in this column: the replacement of the former "investor/business manager" status with the new "business manager" category.

Until now, for a foreign national to qualify for investor/business manager status, he or she had to be engaged in the management and operation of a company that had been invested in by either by a foreign national or foreign corporation. This meant that a foreign manager of a purely Japanese-owned company would not have qualified and would have instead had to obtain either "specialist in humanities/international services" or "engineer" status. (Also worth noting is that under the new act, these two categories have been consolidated into a new "engineer/specialist in humanities/international services" status.)

By removing the requirement that a business be connected to foreign investment, the new law addresses the anomaly whereby a manager of a foreigner-owned firm and another of a Japanese-owned firm qualified for different visas even though they may have been engaged in the same type of activities.