Living in Gunma as a Foreigner (2026): Oizumi, Rent & Community

Maybe a staffing agency has already told you which factory near Ota or Isesaki you will report to. Maybe your family has lived in Oizumi for two decades and you just want the official version of what you already know. Or maybe you are still comparing prefectures, pulled in by some of the cheapest rent anywhere in the Kanto region. Gunma, a landlocked prefecture in northern Kanto just beyond the commuter reach of Tokyo, holds all three of those stories at once, and the honest answer to "what will daily life here actually be like?" depends entirely on which one is yours. This is the prefecture-level orientation to read first: the numbers, the towns, the rent, the communities and the multilingual help you will lean on, whether you get to pick your city or you have already been assigned one.

Gunma's foreign residents at a glance

Gunma sits at the northern edge of the Kanto plain, wrapped around the prefectural capital of Maebashi and the transport hub of Takasaki, with its industrial towns spread across the flat southeast. The prefecture was home to 87,299 foreign residents as of 30 June 2025, the 12th-highest count of Japan's 47 prefectures. On the prefecture's own resident-registry series the number is a little higher and more recent: 87,544 people, about 4.6% of the population, as of 31 December 2025 — a record, up 6,148 (7.6%) in a single year. Those two figures come from different systems and dates (immigration statistics versus the resident registry), so they differ slightly rather than contradict. Nationally, Japan passed four million foreign residents (4,125,395) for the first time at the end of 2025.

What sets Gunma apart is not its size but how settled its foreign population is. Across the prefecture, 21,840 people hold Permanent Resident status — the 10th-highest count in Japan — and another 11,170 hold Long-Term Resident (teijusha) status, as of 30 June 2025. Together that is roughly 33,000 people, about 37.8% of all foreign residents, on the two statuses that mark out people who have put down roots rather than come for a fixed-term job. That share is strikingly high, and it is the thread that ties the whole prefecture together.

In practice Gunma stacks three very different groups on top of one another:

• A settled Japanese-Brazilian (nikkei) core. Brazilians (13,382), Peruvians (4,728) and smaller Bolivian, Paraguayan and Argentine communities together number roughly 19,000 as of 31 December 2025, most of them families who have lived here for decades.
• A fast-growing worker base led by Vietnam. Vietnamese residents (16,363) are now the single largest nationality, having overtaken Brazilians during the early 2020s, concentrated in technical-intern and specified-skilled factory and farm work.
• Surging newcomer communities. Indonesians jumped 25.3% in a year to 8,061, Nepalis 19.6% to 7,234 and Myanmar nationals 22.7% to 3,993 (year to 31 December 2025), a sign of how quickly the prefecture is diversifying.

The Tomo belt: where foreigners actually live

Gunma's foreign residents are not spread evenly. They cluster in the Tomo (eastern) belt in the flat southeast of the prefecture — Ota, Isesaki, Oizumi, Tatebayashi and the surrounding towns — where the car and machinery factories are. The table below shows the main municipalities on the prefecture's resident-registry figures as of 31 December 2025.

Municipality	Foreign residents	Share of population	Note
Isesaki	17,320	8.2%	Most in the prefecture
Ota	16,695	7.5%	SUBARU company town
Maebashi (capital)	11,686	3.6%	Biggest yearly rise (+1,333)
Oizumi (town)	9,011	21.8%	Highest share in Japan's top tier
Takasaki	8,176	2.2%	Shinkansen transport hub
Tatebayashi	4,461	6.1%	Eastern industrial belt

The pattern is clear from the shares: four of the densest municipalities — Oizumi (21.8%), Isesaki (8.2%), Ota (7.5%) and Tatebayashi (6.1%) — are all in the Tomo belt, joined by smaller towns such as Chiyoda (6.3%), Oura (5.6%) and Itakura (6.0%). The capital, Maebashi, and the transport hub, Takasaki, have far lower shares (3.6% and 2.2%) but are growing quickly; Maebashi added 1,333 foreign residents in the year to 31 December 2025, the largest increase in the prefecture. A few places outside the industrial belt post high shares for a different reason: the hot-spring resort town of Kusatsu is 11.8% foreign (hospitality work) and the highland-vegetable villages of Showa (10.5%) and Tsumagoi (4.4%) draw farm labour. If you are being placed by an employer, the odds are high that your address will be somewhere in that southeastern belt.

Oizumi: Japan's Brazilian town

To understand Gunma's foreign community, start with one town. Oizumi, in the far southeast next to Ota, is 21.8% foreign — about one resident in five — with 9,011 foreign residents out of 41,267 as of 31 December 2025, among the highest shares of any municipality in Japan. And unlike a factory town of transient workers, it is overwhelmingly Brazilian and overwhelmingly settled. Brazilians alone are 4,791 people, or 51.97% of the town's foreign residents, as of 31 May 2026 — a clear majority — followed by Peruvians (1,068), Nepalis (676), Indonesians (657), Vietnamese (529) and Bolivians (190). Counting Brazil, Peru and Bolivia together, Japanese-descended South Americans make up about two-thirds of the town's foreign population.

The residence-status breakdown is what makes Oizumi special. In the town's own count, 35.4% of foreign residents hold Permanent Resident status and another 30.5% hold Long-Term Resident status — with spouses of Japanese nationals, roughly 72% are on settlement-type statuses (as of 30 April 2025), while technical interns and specified skilled workers together are only about 12%. This is not a guest-worker town; it is a multigenerational community. The roots go back to a 1990 revision of the immigration law that opened factory work to people of Japanese descent, after which carmakers and their suppliers in the Tomo belt recruited Japanese-Brazilian and Japanese-Peruvian workers, who then stayed and raised families here.

Day to day, that history is visible on the street: Portuguese-language signage, Brazilian grocery stores and restaurants, and multilingual town services. Multiple Brazilian schools cluster across Oizumi, Ota and Isesaki, so families with children face a real choice between a Japanese public school and a home-country curriculum — a decision covered in detail, alongside the long-term-resident-to-permanent-resident path, in our Gunma foreign-family guide.

How much you'll pay in rent

Rent is Gunma's single biggest practical advantage. It is cheap even by regional standards, and for family-sized flats it is dramatically cheaper than the Tokyo or Saitama commuter belt an hour to the south. The figures below are SUUMO market averages as of 10 July 2026.

Area	One-room	1K / 1DK	2LDK / 3DK	3LDK / 4K+
Maebashi	¥35,000	¥38,000	¥58,000	¥69,000
Takasaki	¥44,000	¥48,000	¥65,000	¥80,000
Isesaki	¥34,000	¥35,000	¥52,000	¥60,000
Ota	¥50,000	¥51,000	¥53,000	¥64,000
Tatebayashi	¥31,000	¥43,000	¥61,000	¥66,000
Oura district (near Oizumi)	—	¥35,000	¥51,000	¥67,000

A single person's 1K apartment averages only about ¥35,000 in Isesaki or the Oura district (which stands in for Oizumi, whose own figure SUUMO does not list separately), ¥38,000 in Maebashi and ¥48,000 in Takasaki, as of 10 July 2026. For families the gap is even wider: a family-sized 3LDK or 4K runs roughly ¥60,000 to ¥80,000 across the prefecture — close to half what the same flat costs in the capital region, and one of the main reasons nikkei families settle here for the long term rather than commuting into Tokyo. Rent this low changes the maths of raising a family in Japan. Before you sign, though, it is worth having someone sanity-check the contract, the guarantor requirement and the neighbourhood; you can ask a local resident for a gut check on LO-PAL first.

Vietnamese workers, SUBARU and the factory economy

If the nikkei community is the settled half of Gunma's story, the manufacturing labour force is the fast-growing other half. The prefecture counted 56,938 foreign workers as of 31 October 2024, up 13.1% in a year, and the industry split tells you exactly where they are: manufacturing employs 20,632 of them (36.2%) and the dispatch-and-contracting service sector another 18,167 (31.9%) — together about two-thirds of all foreign workers. SUBARU, headquartered in Ota, sits at the top of an automotive, machinery and food-processing cluster that pulls workers into the Tomo belt, very often through staffing agencies that place them on factory lines.

Gunma's standout feature shows up in the work-status data: 38.2% of foreign workers (21,767) are on status-based residence — permanent residents, long-term residents and spouses — more than the technical-intern (21.9%) or professional-and-technical (22.6%) categories (as of 31 October 2024). In plain terms, the backbone of the workforce is settled nikkei residents doing dispatch factory work, not short-term trainees. Among the newer specified-skilled workers, the biggest fields are food-and-drink manufacturing (2,029), industrial-product manufacturing (1,262) and agriculture (814), the last reflecting the cabbage and highland-vegetable farms around Tsumagoi.

Two practical points follow. First, much of the Tomo belt has sparse rail service, so a car is effectively a necessity for commuting and daily life — budget for a licence and car insurance. Second, whether you get to choose your city depends on your status. Technical interns, and from its planned April 2027 launch the Employment for Skill Development (育成就労) programme that is set to replace the technical-intern system, generally live where the accepting company or supervising organisation places them, often in a dormitory. Specified skilled workers can change employers within the same field, which gives some geographic mobility, but in practice you live near the job. Immigration rules in this area are changing, so confirm the latest details through official sources; our specified-skilled-worker guide and the Gunma technical-intern and skilled-worker guide cover dorm life, wages, transfer rights and sending money home.

Multilingual help, healthcare and immigration

You do not have to navigate Gunma in Japanese alone. Two consultation desks matter most:

• The Gunma Foreign Residents One-Stop Consultation Centre, on the first floor of the prefectural government's Showa annex in Maebashi, advises in English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Nepali plus plain Japanese, with machine translation covering 83 languages, weekdays 9:00–17:00 (027-289-8275). It also runs free legal consultations on set days.
• The Oizumi Multicultural Community Centre is the Portuguese-speaking hub for the southeast, offering multilingual medical consultation and a Portuguese-language information newsletter, GARAPA (0276-62-6066).

For families, Gunma is unusually generous on two fronts. Child medical care is free — inpatient and outpatient, with no household income limit and no payment at the counter — through the end of the fiscal year a child turns 18, and every one of the prefecture's 35 municipalities has offered the same high-school-age coverage since October 2023, which is more generous than many prefectures that stop at junior high. On childcare, the prefecture reported zero children on official daycare waiting lists as of 1 April 2025 (down from 12 a year earlier). Public schools provide Japanese-language support for foreign children through the prefecture's “Harmony” programme run by the Gunma board of education.

For visa procedures, Gunma is served by the Takasaki Branch of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Services Bureau, at 26-5 Takamatsu-cho in Takasaki, which covers five prefectures — Gunma, Tochigi, Saitama, Niigata and Nagano (027-328-1154). To understand how insurance, clinics and hospitals fit together, start with our guide to health insurance for foreigners in Japan.

Which Gunma guide is right for you

Gunma is really several places at once, so your next step depends on your situation:

• Families and long-term residents, especially the nikkei Brazilian and Peruvian community, will find schools, daycare, child allowances, health insurance and the route from Long-Term Resident to Permanent Resident laid out in the Gunma foreign-family guide.
• Factory and skilled workers — technical interns, specified skilled workers and anyone watching the 2027 育成就労 transition — should read the Gunma technical-intern and skilled-worker guide, which covers dorm life, wages and deductions, driving licences and remittances.

Wherever you land, the basics are the same: register your address at the town hall, open a bank account and sort the essentials in your first weeks, get your rental contract and guarantor situation right before you sign, and find free or low-cost Japanese classes nearby. If you are still choosing a prefecture, weigh Gunma against the best prefectures for foreigners, the cheapest places to live and the best cities, or compare it with fellow manufacturing-and-nikkei prefecture Aichi; the where-to-live pillar guide ties them all together. And when a listing, a contract clause or a city choice leaves you unsure, on LO-PAL you can ask a local Japanese resident your specific question.

Frequently asked questions

How many foreigners live in Gunma?

As of 30 June 2025 there were 87,299 foreign residents, the 12th-largest foreign population of any prefecture, and on the prefecture's own count 87,544, about 4.6% of the population, as of 31 December 2025. The largest nationality is now Vietnamese (16,363), which overtook Brazilian (13,382) during the early 2020s.

Where is Oizumi and why is it called Japan's Brazilian town?

Oizumi is a small town in southeastern Gunma, next to Ota. It is 21.8% foreign as of 31 December 2025, and Brazilians alone make up 51.97% of its foreign residents (as of 31 May 2026), with Japanese-descended South Americans about two-thirds. Roughly 72% of foreign residents are on settlement-type statuses such as Permanent or Long-Term Resident (as of 30 April 2025), making it a multigenerational community rather than a transient one.

Is Gunma cheap to live in?

Yes — it is one of the cheapest parts of the Kanto region. As of 10 July 2026, a 1K apartment averages about ¥35,000 in Isesaki or the Oura district and ¥38,000 in Maebashi, and a family 3LDK or 4K runs roughly ¥60,000 to ¥80,000, close to half what a comparable family flat costs in the Tokyo or Saitama commuter belt.

Do I get to choose which city I live in?

It depends on your status. Technical interns and, from its planned April 2027 start, Employment for Skill Development (育成就労) workers usually live where their employer places them, often in a dormitory. Specified skilled workers have some mobility within their field. Permanent and long-term residents, spouses and dependents, engineers/specialists and students can live wherever they like. Rules are changing ahead of 2027, so confirm current details with official sources.

Can I get help in my language in Gunma?

Yes. The Gunma Foreign Residents One-Stop Consultation Centre in Maebashi advises in six languages plus plain Japanese, with machine translation for 83 languages (027-289-8275), and the Oizumi Multicultural Community Centre serves the Portuguese-speaking southeast (0276-62-6066).

Which immigration office handles Gunma?

The Takasaki Branch of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Services Bureau, at 26-5 Takamatsu-cho, Takasaki, which covers Gunma, Tochigi, Saitama, Niigata and Nagano (027-328-1154).