Learn Japanese within Japan, Student Visa?

Hi everyone,

I am an Australian guy, 23 years old and luckily my job allows me to work remotely, including overseas.

I would really love to learn Japanese and my friend suggested that I try getting a student visa to live in Japan and learn whilst living within the country, of course I would be able to support myself financially with no issues.

Is this something that is quite easy to achieve and if so could someone help me out with some useful information?

Thanks in advance

In your case a working holiday visa would be an equally good option as a student visa.

http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/w_holiday/index.html

Depends on how much time and money you have to devote to language study. There has been a huge boom in Japanese language schools recently so you would have lots of choices, but to get a student visa it would need to be a rather full-fledged course, so you would have to devote a decent amount of time to your studies. With a working holiday visa there would be no such requirement.

It seems that lately, embassies have stopped granting WH visas to people whose main purpose is to study, and are now telling them to get student visas instead.

To get a student visa, you need to be a nearly full time student. Look for schools offering intensive courses and ask them about the procedure. It will take some time to get the visa ( a few months).
While at school you need to be attending every day, as ic you accumulate too many skipped days your visa can be revoked.

It also depends on how much Japanese you want to study. If you go with a student visa, I think you need to study at least a year or maybe longer. The school will make you pay for the entire time upfront. At least I think this is what happened at the school I attended (Naganuma school in Shibuya).
It you are interested in learning Japanese to a N1 or N2 level that will suit you. Consider that for a student from a non- kanji background you will need about 1.5 years of full time study for N2 and 2 years for N1. (I am sure there are genius out there who managed in less, but there are also many people out there who needed longer, so just take it at a general idea. )

Also it is very hard to change schools once you have your student visa.

If you don't want to sign up for such a long time or so intensive study, coming with a tourist visa is an option. You can sty 3 months, for some countries even extendable to 6 , or leaving temporarily to Korea/Taiwan is also an option. You can't do that endlessly but at least once should be no problem at all. Probably by then you have also understood better if life and studying in Japan is what you'd like to do and you could eventually apply for a real student visa.

Enjoy your life in Japan!