Over 15 years of self-managing 9 rental properties here in Japan, I’ve personally screened something like 340 tenant applications. I’ve turned down roughly 1 in 6 of them, and every single rejection had a specific, documented reason behind it, never a gut feeling I couldn’t defend. The first time I got this wrong was back when I only owned 2 units, and it cost me a nine-month standoff with a tenant I never should have approved in the first place. Screening tenants feels like it should be simple: check the income, check the ID, pick the nicest applicant. But if you run it that loosely, you’ll eventually get burned by a discrimination complaint, a dispute with your ward office, or just a genuinely bad tenant you could have caught earlier. Here’s the actual system I use now, built from two decades of renting to strangers and a couple of expensive mistakes early on.
Why Screening in Japan Isn’t Just a Gut Check
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Japan doesn’t have a single sweeping fair-housing law like some countries, but most municipalities now actively discourage landlords from rejecting applicants over nationality, disability, or family status, and several ward offices publish guidance landlords are expected to follow. My own ward’s housing division audit checklist runs 12 items long, and rejecting someone based on nationality sits at the very top of the complaints they investigate. On top of that, since around 2015 nearly every one of my 9 units has required a rental guarantor company (hoshou gaisha) instead of a personal guarantor, which changes the whole screening process. The guarantor company runs its own credit check, so my job shifted from being judge and jury to being a careful reviewer of the documents I’m actually allowed to ask for.
The Documents I Actually Request
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For every applicant I ask for three things: an income certificate or the latest gensen choshuhyo (withholding tax statement), a copy of photo ID, and the completed guarantor company application form. That’s it. I deliberately don’t ask for a family register (koseki), because it can surface information that has nothing to do with whether someone will pay rent on time, and asking for it opens you up to exactly the kind of complaint I’m trying to avoid.
The Guarantor Company Check: My First Real Filter
The guarantor company fee usually runs about 50% of one month’s rent, paid by the tenant, and in exchange the company runs a credit and employment check I’d have no legal standing to run myself. On a typical 90,000 yen monthly rent, that guarantor fee comes out to about 45,000 yen upfront, on top of the usual security deposit, so tenants notice it, but it’s still cheaper than most personal guarantors would ever agree to backstop. If the guarantor company approves the applicant, I already know their income is stable enough. I still apply my own rule on top of that: I want verified income at 3 times the monthly rent, or 2.5 times for my smaller studio units where utilities are already low. That extra layer has saved me from two near-misses where the guarantor company approved someone whose income was technically enough but whose other debt made the math tight.
Questions I Deliberately Never Ask
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I’ve learned to keep the application conversation narrow. There’s a real temptation, especially when you meet an applicant in person, to ask friendly questions that are actually screening questions in disguise. I don’t ask about:
- Nationality or country of origin
- Marital status or whether children are planned
- Religion or religious practice
- Disability status or medical history
- Family composition beyond who will actually live in the unit
None of that predicts whether rent gets paid on the 27th of the month, which is what my lease actually requires. If I catch myself curious about any of it, that’s a sign I should redirect the conversation back to income and move-in timeline.
My Actual Screening Checklist
Every application goes through the same five steps before I make a decision, in this order:
- Guarantor company pre-approval received
- Verified income at 3x monthly rent, or 2.5x for studio units
- Employment history of at least 1 year at the current job, or 2 years of tax returns if self-employed
- Photo ID matches the name on the application and the guarantor form
- Previous landlord reference, when one is available
Only after all five clear do I schedule a short move-in walkthrough. By that point it’s really just logistics, not evaluation, because the paperwork already told me what I needed to know.
What I Do When Something Looks Off
A flag doesn’t mean an automatic rejection in my process. When an applicant is self-employed and their income looks irregular month to month, I ask for 2 years of tax filings instead of a single pay stub, and I extend my usual 3-business-day review to about 5 business days so I can actually read through them. Out of my last 340 applications, that extra step changed my decision in roughly 8 cases, a few approvals I would have wrongly rejected, and a couple of rejections where the fuller picture showed a pattern I wouldn’t have caught otherwise. One tenant renewal three years ago is the clearest example: her freelance photography income looked erratic on paper, but two years of tax returns showed steady growth, and she’s still renting from me today, on time, every month. The extra couple of days costs me nothing, and it protects me from both bad tenants and bad decisions.
That’s the exact process I run across all 9 of my properties, and it’s the one I’d hand to any landlord just starting out: verify income and employment through documents you’re actually entitled to ask for, let the guarantor company do the credit work, and keep your curiosity away from anything that isn’t about paying rent on time.
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