The Tokyo area welcomed more new foreign residents than Japanese ones last year

Though the population of Japan has been in decline for quite some time now, the population of Japan’s capital continues to grow. And it’s not just Tokyo, either, as the city and the three prefectures that border it, Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba, saw an increase to their collective number of residents last year.

According to the just-released results of a study by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the total population of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, and Chiba grew to 36,754,193 during 2019, a 0.37-percent increase over the previous year. Out of those new residents, 67,301 were Japanese citizens, but the bigger increase came from the 68,161 foreigners who started calling those parts of Japan their home.

In relative terms, the Japanese population of the “Tokyo metropolitan area” (as the survey described the city and its prefectural neighbors) was up just 0.19 percent, while its foreign population grew 6.23 percent, a rate more than 32 times faster. This marks the first time for the foreign population to increase faster than the Japanese one for the area since the ministry first began separating such demographic data in 2012.

The foreign population increased in Tokyo and all three of the prefectures individually as well. The largest gain was in Yokohama, two cities south of Tokyo, which welcomed 6,501 new foreign residents, likely due to having educational and economic opportunities of its own, as well as being within commutable distance to offices and schools in Tokyo (the recent addition of a life-size Gundam to the Yokohama harbor front probably didn’t hurt the city’s attractiveness either).