Living in Kanagawa as a Foreigner (2026): Yokohama, Rent & Real Life

Whether Kanagawa was your own pick or simply the address on a job offer, the practical questions are identical: which city, how much is rent, where will you find your people, and how bad is the commute into Tokyo. Kanagawa is Japan's fourth-largest prefecture for foreign residents, and for most newcomers the phrase "living in Kanagawa" really means living in Yokohama or Kawasaki - two cities that share a border and a train map but feel very different day to day.

This is a prefecture-level orientation you can use even after you have already been assigned somewhere: the numbers, the neighbourhoods, the rent, the communities, the support desks and the immigration office you will actually deal with. Moving with children? Hand yourself over to the dedicated Kanagawa foreign family guide. Still choosing between prefectures? Start one level up with our best prefectures for foreigners in Japan ranking, or compare against living in Tokyo and living in Osaka.

Kanagawa at a glance: who lives here, and why

Two official systems count foreign residents in Japan, and they almost never produce the same figure, so it helps to keep them apart. The Immigration Services Agency's residence-status statistics (在留外国人統計) count people by visa; each municipality's Basic Resident Register (住民基本台帳, 住基) counts whoever is registered as living there on a set day. Neither is wrong - they just answer different questions.

On the residence-status count, Kanagawa had 306,363 foreign residents as of 30 June 2025, the 4th-highest of any prefecture. The visa mix is what makes Kanagawa a work-and-settle prefecture rather than a student town: 41,737 people on the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities (技人国) status - 3rd nationwide, 98,625 permanent residents (also 3rd) and 29,532 on the Dependent (家族滞在) status, 4th nationwide, alongside 20,727 students, 20,244 Specified Skilled Workers and 19,659 technical interns (same source, same date). The single largest nationality on this count is Chinese, at 84,236.

The municipal registry tells a similar story with slightly newer, larger numbers. Kanagawa's registered foreign population was 309,815 as of 1 January 2026, up from 284,889 a year earlier - an 8.7% rise; that 284,889 figure was itself up 9.5% the previous year and equal to about 3.1% of the prefecture's people, spanning 179 nationalities. By nationality the registry breaks down as Chinese 27.4%, Vietnamese 14.0%, Filipino 8.9%, Korean 8.7% and Nepali 6.3%, a broad mix rather than one dominant group.

Yokohama, Kawasaki and Sagamihara: where foreigners actually live

Three cities hold most of the prefecture's foreign residents, and they are not interchangeable.

Yokohama (18 wards) registered 137,812 foreign residents as of 31 December 2025. They concentrate in the older, central wards: Naka-ku leads with 19,665, of whom 10,265 are Chinese - the ward that contains Yokohama Chinatown, followed by Tsurumi (18,370), Minami (14,554) and Kanagawa-ku (10,828, home to the prefectural citizens' centre where the main consultation desk sits). One ward breaks the pattern entirely: in Midori-ku the largest foreign group is Indian (1,534), not Chinese.

Kawasaki (7 wards) registered 61,597 foreign residents as of 31 December 2025, weighted heavily toward the industrial south: Kawasaki-ku alone holds 21,679, while the northern, more residential wards such as Nakahara (7,930, the Musashi-Kosugi high-rise district) draw families who want an easy Tokyo commute.

Sagamihara, the prefecture's third designated city, registered 22,138 foreign residents as of 1 January 2026, with a noticeably different mix - Vietnamese residents nearly match Chinese - reflecting more manufacturing and training-route work. We keep the focus below on Yokohama and Kawasaki, where the great majority of newcomers land.

What you'll pay: Yokohama vs Kawasaki rent

Rent is the number that decides most moves. The averages below are the market figures SUUMO published for each ward (page updated 10 July 2026); a 1K/1DK is a single-room flat, a 2LDK a small family apartment.

Ward (city)	1K / 1DK	2LDK / 3K
Totsuka (Yokohama)	¥66,000	¥103,000
Minami (Yokohama)	¥72,000	¥122,000
Tsurumi (Yokohama)	¥76,000	¥125,000
Naka (Yokohama, Chinatown)	¥79,000	¥174,000
Nishi (Yokohama, Minato Mirai)	¥78,000	¥190,000
Asao (Kawasaki)	¥65,000	¥107,000
Tama (Kawasaki)	¥66,000	¥114,000
Kawasaki-ku (Kawasaki)	¥78,000	¥128,000
Nakahara (Kawasaki, Musashi-Kosugi)	¥81,000	¥146,000

Two patterns matter. First, the wards nearest the waterfront and Minato Mirai - Nishi and Naka in Yokohama, Nakahara in Kawasaki - carry the top rents, up to ¥190,000 for a 2LDK in Nishi, while quieter wards like Totsuka, Tama and Asao are markedly cheaper, from about ¥65,000 for a single room. Across Yokohama a 1K averages roughly ¥66,000 to ¥79,000, and across Kawasaki ¥65,000 to ¥81,000. Second, even the priciest single-room rents here sit below the top of central Tokyo, which is exactly why so many people live in Kanagawa and commute in. Before you sign anything, read how deposits, key money and guarantor rules work - see our guides to the Japanese rental contract and the reasons foreigners get rejected for apartments - and you can ask a local resident for a gut check on LO-PAL before you commit.

Communities: Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Okinawa and more

Kanagawa's foreign communities are among the oldest in Japan, and they are geographic - you can walk into them.

Yokohama Chinatown (Yamashita-cho, Naka-ku) is the anchor: about 0.2 square kilometres packed with roughly 620 shops, including 226 Chinese restaurants, in a district that grew from the 1859 opening of Yokohama port. It is backed by a real resident population, the 10,265 Chinese nationals in Naka-ku noted above.

Kawasaki's Sakuramoto, in Kawasaki-ku, is a historic Zainichi Korean neighbourhood formed by people who came to the coastal factories from the early twentieth century; today it is a multicultural-coexistence district anchored by the Kawasaki Fureai-kan, a community centre opened in 1988 to bring foreign and Japanese residents together. Citywide, Kawasaki counts 7,359 Korean residents, a higher share than Yokohama, reflecting that history.

Tsurumi-ku in Yokohama is two communities at once: a long-standing South American population - 1,226 Brazilians, 425 Peruvians and smaller Bolivian and Argentine groups - and a "Little Okinawa" built by families who moved from Okinawa for factory work. The Yokohama-Tsurumi Okinawa kenjinkai (prefectural association) is more than 100 years old; because Okinawans are Japanese nationals they do not appear in foreign-resident statistics, so this community shows up in its shops and associations rather than in the numbers.

Commuting to Tokyo from Kanagawa

The reason Kanagawa's rent looks like a bargain is geography: Yokohama and Kawasaki sit on the main arteries into central Tokyo. The JR Tokaido and Keihin-Tohoku lines and the private Tokyu Toyoko line all run north through the prefecture, Kawasaki is the first stop across the border from Tokyo, and Shin-Yokohama puts you on the Shinkansen. In practice a large share of the office workers on the Engineer/Specialist status live in Kanagawa precisely so they can trade a slightly longer train ride for cheaper rent and more room.

For a single person the maths is modest, but for a couple or a young family it is decisive: the same budget that buys a cramped single room near the centre of Tokyo will cover a family-sized 2LDK in Totsuka, Tama or Asao, as the rent table above shows. The practical rule for Kanagawa is that your ward choice is really a commute-versus-rent-and-space trade - the waterfront and Musashi-Kosugi cost more but put you minutes from the office, while the outer wards ask for a longer ride in exchange for a bigger home. Weigh it before you commit to an address, and if you want to sanity-check the trade against actually living in the capital, compare this guide with living in Tokyo as a foreigner and our wider best cities for foreigners comparison.

Getting set up: multilingual desks, medical interpreters and immigration

Kanagawa has one of the country's denser networks of multilingual support, and you do not need Japanese to use it.

• Prefecture-wide: the Multilingual Support Centre Kanagawa handles living, work and school questions in 11 languages plus "easy Japanese" (TEL 045-316-2770), based at the Kanagawa Kenmin Centre in Yokohama's Kanagawa-ku.
• Yokohama city: the Yokohama multicultural one-stop consultation centre covers 12 languages (TEL 045-222-1209).
• Kawasaki city: the Kawasaki International Center desk answers in 11 languages (TEL 044-455-8811).
• Medical interpreting: the NPO MIC Kanagawa dispatches medical interpreters in 13 languages to a network of 72 partner medical institutions, for ¥3,000 plus tax per two-hour visit - invaluable for anything beyond a routine cold. For how the hospital system itself works, see our guide to Japan's medical system.

For visas and residence cards, the office that handles Kanagawa is the Yokohama District Branch of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Services Bureau, at 10-7 Torihama-cho, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, which covers the whole prefecture (with a sub-office in Asao-ku, Kawasaki). The rest of your first-month admin - resident registration, the My Number card, a bank account and health insurance - follows the same playbook everywhere; our first-year settling checklist, the Yokohama My Number walkthrough, the bank-account checklist, the national health insurance guide and a list of free Japanese classes cover each step.

Which part of Kanagawa fits your situation

How much say you have over your address depends on your visa. People on the Engineer/Specialist in Humanities status, spouses and dependents, students and permanent or long-term residents choose freely where they live - if that is you, the only questions are rent, commute and community, and you can move house without immigration involvement (though changing your visa category is a separate process; see changing your visa status). Specified Skilled Workers (特定技能) can change employers within the same field, which gives some geographic freedom but in practice means living near the job; our Specified Skilled Worker guide explains the field rules.

If you are here on a training route, your city is usually chosen for you: technical interns generally live in employer- or supervising-organisation-provided housing near the workplace. This matters now because the Employment for Skill Development (育成就労) system is scheduled to begin in 2027 and replace the current Technical Intern Training programme, adding limited transfer rights. Rules like these change, so confirm the current position with the Immigration Services Agency or your supervising organisation before you rely on it.

Families are the other big group Kanagawa serves well. Its 29,532 Dependent-status residents concentrate in Yokohama and Kawasaki, both of which reported zero children on daycare waiting lists as of 1 April 2025 (Kawasaki for a fifth straight year, though 1,265 children were "on hold" for a specific nursery). Schools, daycare points, child-medical subsidies and the spouse and permanent-residence routes get their own treatment in the Kanagawa foreign family guide. Wherever you land, if you have a specific question about a ward, a landlord or a school, you can ask a local Japanese resident directly on LO-PAL.

Frequently asked questions

How many foreign residents does Kanagawa have?

On the residence-status count Kanagawa had 306,363 foreign residents as of 30 June 2025 (4th nationwide); the municipal registry put it at 309,815 as of 1 January 2026. Yokohama holds 137,812 of them and Kawasaki 61,597 (registry, end-2025).

Is Kanagawa cheaper than Tokyo for rent?

At the top end, generally yes. Single-room flats average about ¥66,000 to ¥79,000 across Yokohama wards and ¥65,000 to ¥81,000 across Kawasaki (SUUMO, updated 10 July 2026), below central-Tokyo peaks, which is why the prefecture works as a commuter belt. Waterfront wards such as Nishi and Nakahara are the pricey exceptions.

Where are Kanagawa's main foreign communities?

Yokohama Chinatown in Naka-ku (about 620 shops; 10,265 Chinese residents in the ward), the historic Zainichi Korean area around Sakuramoto in Kawasaki-ku (7,359 Korean residents citywide), and Tsurumi-ku, which blends a South American community with a century-old "Little Okinawa".

What multilingual help can I get without Japanese?

The Multilingual Support Centre Kanagawa answers in 11 languages, Yokohama's city desk in 12 and Kawasaki's in 11; for hospitals, MIC Kanagawa sends interpreters in 13 languages to 72 partner institutions for ¥3,000 per two-hour visit.

Which immigration office handles Kanagawa?

The Yokohama District Branch of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Services Bureau, at 10-7 Torihama-cho, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, covers the whole prefecture, with a sub-office in Asao-ku, Kawasaki.