Housing for the technical intern trainees you take on, in a vacant house in Toyama.

When you take trainees on through a supervising organization (the supervised type), the process runs like this. The host company chooses a supervising organization. Under its guidance, a training plan is drawn up for each trainee and filed with the Organization for Technical Intern Training (OTIT) for approval. Once approved, the entry and residence procedures are done at the regional immigration services bureau. The trainees arrive, take the post-arrival training, and the training proper begins. Companies in Toyama Prefecture file with OTIT's Toyama branch (in Toyama City, covering Toyama, Ishikawa and Fukui). Companies in Hida are covered by the Nagoya office.

If you are thinking about it now, there is one deadline. The Technical Intern Training Program becomes the Employment for Skill Development system on 1 April 2027. Stage 1 training plans can be filed until 31 March 2027, but entry as a Stage 1 trainee is in principle allowed only until 30 June 2027. An application filed in March may not make it in time, so OTIT's notice on training plans asks for applications by February 2027. After 1 April 2027, the only people who can newly start technical intern training are those whose plan was filed by 31 March and who can start by 30 June. Intake after that goes through Employment for Skill Development, whose plan applications have been accepted in advance since 1 September 2026.

The housing has to be ready by the time of this application. Under the operational guidelines for the Technical Intern Training Program, the accommodation must in principle be secured by contract when the plan is filed; only where there are special difficulties may you apply by showing the floor plan of the specific house you intend to secure. The floor plan has to show how each bedroom's area was worked out, so you need a house whose bedrooms can be measured first. To apply by February 2027, the house has to be chosen before then, and in Toyama any viewing and renovation after New Year meets the snow season.

What we take on is the housing part: the search, measuring the bedrooms and planning the room allocation at the viewing, the renovation, and arranging the contract, whether the company leases the house or buys it. Choosing the supervising organization, selecting trainees and preparing the application documents are for the host company and the supervising organization; we are not involved. The bedroom areas we measure at the viewing are passed straight to whoever draws the floor plan.

Accommodation for technical intern trainees is provided by the host company (the implementing organization) or the supervising organization. What it must satisfy is set out under "securing accommodation" in the operational guidelines for the Technical Intern Training Program. One precondition: it must be a "building" that meets the Building Standards Act. A prefab or a warehouse cannot be used as sleeping quarters.

On top of that, there are four rules for bedrooms. Bedroom area must be at least 4.5 ㎡ per person, excluding alcoves, closets and other space the trainees cannot actually use. There must be storage where each person can keep their belongings. There must be a window with a daylight opening of at least one-seventh of the room's floor area. And there must be heating, cooling and the other equipment daily life needs. These four points go into the application for approval of the training plan, on the floor plan of the accommodation and in the "Statement on trainee remuneration, accommodation and deductions" (Reference Form 1-16).

Storage means "something with enough capacity for personal belongings, lockable, and not removable". If each person has a lockable room, the storage itself need not lock. For shared bedrooms, a lockable locker or wardrobe per person; for single rooms, the door lock is enough. Simply dividing a closet by the number of people, handing out storage boxes, or using the trainee's own suitcase does not count as storage. Furniture without a lock gets a padlock or similar, and anything not built in is fixed to the building with a security wire or the like.

A Toyama detached house suits these rules because it has the rooms and the floor area. Toyama's average floor area per dwelling is 138.77 ㎡, the largest in Japan. In a house where tatami rooms run in a row, replacing the sliding partitions with walls is enough to make separate bedrooms. But total floor area does not tell you how many people can live there. What counts is bedroom area, minus closets and alcoves. The next section shows how to count it.

Beyond the bedrooms there are other items to check. The house must not be near workplaces that handle fire hazards or give off harmful gas or dust, very noisy places, or places at risk of avalanches, landslides or flooding. There must be fire-fighting equipment that is inspected. People who sleep at different hours must have separate bedrooms. A toilet, washroom, laundry and bath must be available. Shared areas must be kept clean. Living in the employer's own house, or in company housing or an apartment, is in principle not an "attached dormitory" under the Labour Standards Act (when unsure, ask the Labour Standards Inspection Office). We fill these in on the Reference Form 1-16 checklist together with the supervising organization's officer.

The operational guidelines say how the floor plan must be drawn. Mark the part used as a bedroom with a thick frame or hatching to show "which part is used", and write the basis of the area — the length of each side, or the calculation — on the plan. Use measured square metres, not tatami counts. Closets and alcoves stay outside the frame.

The counting is multiplication. A bedroom for two needs at least 9 ㎡ after closets and alcoves are taken out; for three, at least 13.5 ㎡; for four, at least 18 ㎡. The window's daylight opening must be at least one-seventh of the room, so a 9 ㎡ bedroom needs a window of about 1.29 ㎡ or more and a 13.5 ㎡ bedroom about 1.93 ㎡ or more. Storage for each person, heating in each room.

An example. A two-storey detached house with three rooms that can serve as bedrooms. Two people in each room makes six. Each bedroom at least 9 ㎡, each window at least 1.29 ㎡, lockable storage for six, heating in three rooms. Bedrooms upstairs bring in the stairway rule, but with fewer than 15 occupants one stairway to the outside is enough (two sections on). Make the same house single rooms and it holds three. Shared or single is decided by the rule that foreign staff get the same treatment as Japanese staff in company housing (next section) and by the working hours. Where the workplace runs day and night shifts, we plan the rooms so that people who sleep at different times do not share a bedroom.

At the viewing we measure each bedroom without its closets and alcoves, and tell you how many people the house qualifies for, both with shared bedrooms and with single rooms. Once the contract is signed and the renovation done, we hand over a drawing with the area of each bedroom. It serves as a draft for the floor plan attached to the application.

A company hosting Specified Skilled Workers is obliged to provide "support in securing suitable housing". It takes one of three forms: helping the worker sign a lease and acting as guarantor (or arranging a rent guarantee company and acting as emergency contact), the company renting a house and providing it to the worker, or the company providing housing it owns.

In every form the living room must be at least 7.5 ㎡ per person. In a shared room, the whole room's area divided by the number of residents must be 7.5 ㎡ or more. Technical intern training counts the "bedroom"; Specified Skilled Workers count the "living room". The same house is measured in different rooms.

There is one exception. When someone switching from Technical Intern Training (No. 2, etc.) to Specific Skilled Worker (i) wants to stay in the company housing they already have, the "7.5 ㎡ or more per person" rule is not required. That means a house set up for technical interns can simply carry on being used as Specific Skilled Worker housing. If you plan to use the same house for three or five years, we check the rooms against both standards from the start.

One more rule that is easy to miss. If you provide company housing to Japanese employees, foreign employees must get equivalent housing of equivalent size. Single rooms for Japanese staff and shared rooms for foreign staff is not allowed. Before deciding the room allocation, check how your company houses its Japanese staff.

Put the 4.5 ㎡ for technical intern trainees and the 7.5 ㎡ for Specified Skilled Workers side by side in one house, and a house with three bedrooms looks like this: six trainees in shared rooms; for Specified Skilled Workers, six if each room is at least 15 ㎡ (two per room), otherwise three in single rooms.

Side by side, the housing rules of the three systems look like this.

The accommodation schedule is counted back from the date of entry and arrival. The order is this. The headcount and arrival date are fixed. The house is secured and the bedrooms measured. The application for approval of the training plan is filed (with the floor plan and Reference Form 1-16). Approval is granted, the residence-status procedure follows, and the trainees enter Japan. They take the post-arrival training. The training starts and they live in the accommodation. If the house comes after the application, there is no floor plan to submit. So the house comes before the application.

Three points about the post-arrival training. Its length is at least one-sixth of the total planned hours of Technical Intern Training (i); for those who completed at least 160 hours of classroom pre-arrival training within the previous six months, at least one-twelfth. The trainees cannot be put to work during it. In the supervising-organization type, the supervising organization runs the training and must have a facility to run it in.

This is where the accommodation comes in. The "accommodation" checklist on Reference Form 1-16 covers the accommodation used during the post-arrival training as well. Whether the trainees stay at the supervising organization's facility during the training and move to the company's housing afterwards, or live in the company's housing from the start and commute to the training, both places are checked against the same requirements. Which form to use is decided at the outset between the supervising organization and the host company. If they live in the company's housing from the training onwards, the house must be ready on the day of entry. If they move after the training, the deadline is the first day of training.

What we ask first: the headcount, the arrival date, the workplace, the working hours (day and night shifts?), where the trainees will stay during the training, and whether the company or the supervising organization will sign the contract. From that, the number and size of bedrooms and the commute (bicycle or shuttle) set the conditions for the search.

In Toyama, winter is layered on top of this. For an arrival between December and February, the renovation must be finished before the snow settles, and snow removal booked in autumn. Opening up a vacant house for works in winter makes the schedule harder to predict, by the margin of roof snow and freezing. For a spring arrival, the renovation can run through the winter and people can move in as the snow melts.

Renovation puts insulation and plumbing first, then adds storage and heating for each bedroom and residential smoke alarms. Because we hold both a real estate brokerage licence and a construction licence, you deal with the same people through searching, repairing and contracting. When the start date is already fixed, that alone is what makes it fast.