Nagasaki Fifth, Kawaguchi Fourth in 2025 Ranking of Japanese Resident Outflows
- Nagasaki City ranks fifth, Kawaguchi City in Saitama ranks fourth.
- Data is based on Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2025 population statistics.
- Outmigration highlights challenges in regional development and population decline.
- The article analyzes population shifts and their impact on local futures.
- The top three has not yet been disclosed, generating public interest.
Toyo Keizai's ranking of Japanese municipalities by net outflow of *Japanese* residents in 2025, built on the Ministry of Internal Affairs' resident registry migration report, puts Nagasaki fifth and Kawaguchi, Saitama, fourth. Both qualifiers matter for anyone buying property in Japan.
Most municipal population figures combine Japanese and foreign residents. Split them, and cities that look stable often show Japanese residents leaving while foreign residents arrive. Kawaguchi is the textbook case: a commuter city on Tokyo's northern edge whose resident mix has turned over across two decades. Headline stability hides a shift in who rents, at what price point, and what the local tax base looks like. A three-bedroom unit aimed at Japanese families and a compact rental aimed at foreign workers are different businesses in the same city.
Nagasaki is the other pattern — a prefectural capital losing 25-to-34-year-olds to Fukuoka and Kansai as shipbuilding contracts. Those are the people who would have bought homes and paid property tax for the next twenty years.
Practical steps: read Japanese and foreign resident counts separately on city statistics pages; track the 20-39 age bracket rather than total population; ask about liquidity before yield, because a regional unit that takes a year to sell breaks any return calculation; and if foreign tenants sustain your target area, select the unit by that tenant's standards, not a Japanese family's.
