Spouse visa but working abroad

My situation is a little complicated so I wondered if anyone could offer some advice. My wife is a Japanese citizen, but she currently lives in Japan and I live in Canada. I've been spending a lot of my time in Japan using a tourist visa but we decided that I would move to Japan more permanently and get a spouse visa.

I currently work in Canada and I'm going to keep this job after I move to Japan. I'm running a website for a company and there is no requirement to go into the office. I do this from home and there are no problems with me continuing to do this from outside Canada. This company has no presence in Japan, it's just a Canadian company and I'm working on my laptop.

I've found some information on income tax liabilities, but what I haven't been able to find is anything about pension payments. I understand that anyone who is a resident in Japan and has a job earning above a particular income has to pay pension contributions. I've been told this can be a fairly large amount of money (maybe 30,000 yen a month or so) and as I'm already paying pension payments/tax in Canada this is a bit of a problem. I wondered if anyone knew if there is any way to avoid making these payments in my situation, or even just some general advice on what we should do would be helpful as we're quite confused about the whole thing.

We could of course just not get a spouse visa, but it seems like long-term that will cause problems and I probably want to be in Japan at least 9 months of the year so a tourist visa doesn't really work. Alternatively if these liabilities for moving to Japan are too much we will likely just decide not to live in Japan and move to another country, but we're trying to work out just how much of a burden this is going to be financially to stay in Japan before we make that decision as ideally we'd like to stay in Japan. Many thanks for anyone who can help!

You wrote:
I'm already paying pension payments/tax in Canada this is a bit of a problem.

How would you make those pension payments on the income from Canada once you were resident in Japan?

For instance, would you be receiving a salary as a bona fide employee of the Canadian company, the salary paid in Canada into your Canadian bank account, with pension money withheld from the paycheck by the company and directly paid to the Canadian pension programme on your behalf?

Or some other arrangement?



Here's a link to what seems to be the relevant treaty:

http://www.treaty-accord.gc.ca/text-texte.aspx?lang=eng&id=105059

Happy reading!

The following is just as far as I know. There isn't much stipulations in the laws (either immigration or taxes) for remote working yet.

As far as the immigration rules are concerned, since you will be on "spouse of Japanese national" status, you are free to work (or not work) in Japan, so that is fine.

As far as the tax laws are concerned, after you've been in Japan for cumulative 5 years of the the most recent 10 years (I believe this is the threshold, seeing from our "kakutei shinkoku" - tax filing papers), there will come a point when you will need to declare all worldwide income to the Japanese tax authorities, pay taxes based on that in Japan, with any double taxation to be settled (if there is some tax agreement between Japan and Canada).

Before that time, your income derived outside Japan will be taxable in Japan only to the extent it is sent to Japan. Based on that amount (if you sent any to Japan), your resident taxes, health insurance premium will be determined.

Before that happens - since your income derived from your activities in Japan will be zero, if your wife is a "salaried worker," can you be covered by her social security schemes? Meaning, being her dependent in terms of health insurance (you need to be either part of national health insurance or the employer's scheme too) and pension, for the first year?

In any case, this might be better discussed with tax attorneys.

Many thanks for the replies, I'll take a look at this.